10 Ways The Marvel Cinematic Universe Proves That Dreams Do Come True

6. Marvel's Revolutionary Ideas Are All There

Since its inception, the MCU has been unfairly criticised for being a homogenous environment where every film and every character must conform to a set amount of tropes, with the overriding one being a supposed insistence on uncharacteristic humour. People do forget, however, that humour and complexity are not mutually-exclusive; you can have a witty film that isn't afraid to approach big ideas, just like you can have one that operates under the delusion that it is complex, when in reality it just happens to be pretentious. Ultimately, nuance doesn't have to be shouted through a megaphone to resonate with an audience and, if it is forced, it becomes self-defeating in a remarkably ironic fashion.

All of Marvel's films deal with complex thematic elements, but the subtlety in which they do so can and often does elude certain segments of the audience. I'm not going to try and argue that The Avengers and Thor offer vital contributions to the copious amounts of academic discourse surrounding the denizens of the Marvel Universe, but that doesn't mean that they lack any meaningful messages entirely. Marvel has always been a channel for allegorical depictions of real life issues and events, and by no means is that lost in the company's foremost onscreen adaptations. Heck, in the case of Civil War, it actually transcends the black and white nature of the graphic novel it was based on.

A lot of this is hidden beneath a thin veneer of well-timed humour and character interaction, but the MCU is by no means a childish diversion away from Marvel's original acclaimed properties. Rather, the balance it strikes between fun and serious is what differentiates it from the competition so successfully.