Ranking Marvel’s Phase 2

2)  Guardians of the Galaxy – I still don’t know how Marvel got away with this movie.  It’s just so utterly bizarre on its surface: basically Star Wars starring Indiana Jones, an Orion Slave Girl, a raccoon, an Ent and Dave Bautista.  It’s based on a comic that next to nobody read and even fewer people knew about.  It bucked Marvel’s game plan of making every new movie a direct sequel, prequel or midquel to every other Marvel movie by divorcing it entirely from the MCU’s terrestrial canon.  Sure, it’ll catch up with everybody in Infinity War, but that’s still three years away (four if they enter the scene in Part II).

And yet, despite everything going against it, it was damned close to being the best blockbuster – and best movie – of last year.  It was easily the most confident, idiosyncratic and original movie to come out in all of 2014 and somehow made wrestler petting a raccoon who was crying over his splintered friend the most emotional scene that I saw in theaters in years.  Of all the movies that followed, it came the closest to touching on what made The Avengers so amazing to begin with.