Captain America: The First Avenger

A few weeks ago I saw The Avengers – the type of guilty-pleasure comic book film full of explosions and fancy costumes that I can’t help but adore. However, I – rather ridiculously in hindsight – had never seen any of the previous individual Avengers films. How, I have no idea, after all, they’ve been everywhere for the past few years! This one stood alone successfully, and my lack of previous knowledge didn’t make the film hard to understand or completely inaccessible, but I came away wanting to watch the rest of the films to hopefully put this one into its correct context.

This posed a dilemma as I had no idea what order to watch them in… If I’m watching them all, then I want to do it properly! A Google search led me to comic book fan forums, with people debating, quite heatedly, the correct order. The debate was generally either the order in which the films were made versus chronologically within the Marvel universe. Cue massive confusion! Wading through the comic book jargon wasn’t a walk in the park for a non-comic book nerd, and even a “helpful” epic Marvel timeline took me round and round in circles.

I’ve settled on (after giving up with the Googling and forums and passionate fan opinions) Captain America, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, and then Thor. I’ve no idea what to expect, but thought it was worth a try. And yesterday I started on my Avengers Journey with Captain America.