Every heart bleeds true under Red, fight and BOOM.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: our family keeps up with the Marvel Cinematic Universe line of comic-book screen adaptation and transmutation products! Yes, we’ve even watched the ones that show up at the low end of every “Every MCU Movie and TV Show, Ranked” listicle whose criteria change whenever new interns update it. Someone needs to sort those with an “Every MCU Ranking Listicle, Ranked” listicle, but it won’t be me. Between the Marvel Zombies that give every release an A only because they have the “Marvel” cattle-brand stamped on them, and the four-hour YouTube anti-“woke” tantrum-throwers who think hate-watching is a wise use of their limited lifespans, I’d never get more than halfway through most of the contenders without developing listicular cancer.
I was perhaps a tad less cranky than the pro critics who groused about the MCU’s 35th film, Captain America: Brave New World, and the curious decision to devote Anthony Mackie’s first solo Marvel marquee to sewing up dangling threads from previous works. I can’t say it’d go in the top half of my own MCU rankings, but it got some things right, though part of the plan involved pleasing Disney’s superiors by forcing the MCU to diverge into a completely different political backdrop, quainter than our own reality.
If the stakes were catastrophic enough, the training techniques were sufficiently intensive, and the world were just that unforgiving, who’s to say preteens couldn’t be accelerated to maturity and transmogrified into hardened soldiers like today’s eighteen-year-old American military volunteers?
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 