Top Five Final Battles: Marvel Comic Universe

The more Marvel movies come along, the more the format can start to feel formulaic.  As such, it’s important for the films to find a way to stand apart from each other while still fitting into the Marvel mold.  I’ve already looked at one way the films do that, by playing with different genres.  Today, I’m looking specifically at the final battles, the big blow-outs at the end of the movie where it all goes down (spoilers, of course.)

The Avengers

The first team-up movie, and everyone gets a turn to shine during the climactic battle with the Chetauri.  Tons of cool stuff, laughs, heroic moments, and my personal favorite:  Avenger tag-teams.  After the team’s growing pains earlier in the film, it’s so satisfying to see them all together in the end and kick some serious alien butt.

Thor:  The Dark World

Despite my love of Thor, in looking at the Phase Two films, The Dark World wouldn’t top many of my lists.  However, I really love how the final battle uses the Convergence (and Jane and Erik’s manipulation of it) to do all kinds of crazy wibbly-wobbly physics things.  It’s so much fun to watch Thor and Malekith battle across realms, blinking out of one planet and showing up on another.  I especially love Thor getting transported into a London tube station and Mjolnir flitting through several worlds trying to get back to Thor.

Captain America:  The Winter Soldier

This is a nice team effort with a lot going on.  There are some different moving parts to it – Sam’s aerial badassery, Natasha and Sharon both kicking some butt inside SHIELD, and Maria coordinating everything.  But of course, it comes down to the emotional fight between Cap and Bucky, with Steve desperate to complete the mission but at the same time trying to figure out how he could bring his friend back to him.

Guardians of the Galaxy

Not so much the dance-off-ness of it all, but this is another one where I like the cooperation and the different elements to it (you sense the theme?  I like teamwork, okay?)  Enlisting both the Ravagers and Nova Corps for help is cool – I love the image of the Nova Corps ships blocking Ronan’s – and onboard Ronan’s ship, you have great scenes like Gamora’s fight with Nebula, Drax’s dubious mastery of the term “metaphor,” and, of course, the lengths Groot goes to to protect his fellow Guardians.  Awesome!

Ant-Man

The film does a great job throughout using Scott’s powers to make his training, fights, and missions really visually interesting, and in particularly does a bang-up job with the final fight between Scott and Yellow Jacket.  I love, love, love the miniaturized fight and how the camera pulls back to show the actual ridiculous scale of the seemingly-epic things (like Cassie’s toy train “going off the rails”) happening during the battle.