For years now, we’ve been enjoying Screen Junkies’ sarcastic takes on the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, among others. Now, for their 300th Honest Trailer, the gang has put together one mega video that skewers the MCU as a whole. The video, which is nearly 10 minutes long, pulls together the repetitive threads on which the MCU is built: daddy issues, science geniuses, quipsters, and trains.
And while we’re all fans of the MCU, let’s be real: there’s no shortage of cliches and recycled plot mechanics. Marvel knows how to make an entertaining movie, but there is a formula at work. As the trailer describes it, the MCU is “a TV series made of movies about comic books where magic is actually science … but science is basically magic”. The trailer then breaks down the typical MCU protagonist: “a loner with no pets, no biological siblings, and whose only friends are their co-workers”, which is accurate. After all, it took over 20 films for an Avenger to finally get a cat … that’s not even a cat.
After all, it’s hard to cover new ground when you’re essentially jamming out one origin story after the next. As HT tells it, the journey starts with a “motivating Uncle Ben situation” and follows up with a new haircut, some rock solid ab work, and declaring their hero name out loud.
The trailer then pivots to make fun of the MCU’s less than stellar villain line-up, something that has always been the franchise’s weak spot, where most of the bad guys are either “just like the hero, but eeeevil!” or a “faceless horde” or monsters and aliens. The trailer singles out the strongest villains (Killmonger, Alexander Pierce, Ego the Living Planet, and Hela) but laments that they are killed off within a single film.
But the real villain of the MCU is, unsurprisingly, fathers and father figures. From Obadiah Stane to Ego to the mistakes of King T’Chaka and Odin, dads have been messing up the Avengers since the dawn of the franchise, including the daddy of all villains, Thanos. Other hallmarks of the MCU include “sexless romance” and “bloodless violence”, which is par for the course for the PG-13 audience.
The one area where I disagree with HT is when they reference the MCU’s “lifeless soundtracks with more dad rock than you can shake a pair of middle-aged screenwriters at.” As a dad rock fan, I am all in on these soundtracks. Bring on the 70s rock! There’s also some fun meta humor commenting on not only the massive franchise, but all the commentary and YouTube videos have cropped up in response. Let’s just say we um, relate.
(via Screen Junkies, image: Marvel)
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