My guess is the Ant-Man/Falcon fight, as they tend to be leaning on scenes that grow the Big Picture.  That or the Peggy/Howard/Hank scene in the beginning.

Excising South Korea removes the how behind Vision’s creation, and more importantly, removes the turning point for Wanda and Pietro.

“Disjointed” is an absurd statement. AoU is about as coherent a movie as possible with 10 main characters.

As I mentioned in the IM2 comments, both IM2 and AoU had the difficult position of being A. sequel to a surprise hit and B. having to do heavy lifting in a worldbuilding burst. And I think audiences resent B, in as much as so many sequel-bait failures over the years have trained us to be annoyed at at thing that’s…

Whedon does two things very well:

Lee Pace’s Ronan doesn’t get much chance to shine, but man do I love his quiet, bewildered delivery of “What are you doing?” when Peter starts singing to him. It’s like what’s happening is so completely divorced from every aspect of his life up until this moment he’s totally incapable of responding to it.

Not to be a stickler, but he did not look Rumbelow in the eye. Rumbelow was behind him, and he kept his gaze ahead, still looking at his screen.

Joe was the perfect distillation of the guy who never learned how to read the room because he never had to.

They definitely took that idea and used it to drive the action in a way that was fun.

“MCU-bad” is still, like, a B-.

Yeah, the other cops weren’t even, “Hey, this is wrong.” Just, like, “Oh, man, this looks bad, we should bail.”

The final season, in particular, plays a lot better on rewatch, because all the “flash sideways”, in knowing what it actually is, becomes a lot more emotionally resonant. If anything, the biggest mistake the show made in the last season was holding back the revelation of that until literally the last moment, which…

I thought I was prepared.

In that grades— especially this kind of letter grade— come from academia. Thus by saying the grades keep it from becoming academic: ironic.

That’s downright ironic.

Oh, it’s some serious “I didn’t realize you could do this with eggplant” business.

Of course, I always read Cap in that scene as going, “Oh, I moved it. I’ll just... act like nothing happened and walk away.  That way no one will feel bad.”

Right, but at that point The Avengers was at least the long-term vision, and they knew that it couldn’t work without a solid Thor first.

True.  I mean, he had a bunch of shields for Cap to peruse.  I just think it’s funny that that was the one a bit to the side, like, “Oh, that old thing-- rarest, most incredible metal on earth.  I almost forgot I brought it.”

Oh, very true. I mean, I think this movie is as good of Thor movie as you could hope to get made in 2011. It’s very much “proof of concept”. But your point is why so many *CUs have failed, because it’s the delicate balance of serving vegetables and getting people to go, “oooh, fire roasted Brussel sprouts,…