Agent Carter premiere and the Ant-Man trailer

If you’re an MCU fan, a superhero series fan, or just happened to be watching TV last night, then you probably saw the Agent Carter 2-hour premiere. In my case, I’m a Marvel fan, I also love M.C.U., but I didn’t exactly love their first series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I was looking forward to Agent Carter because it is a series set in the 40’s, with a character not well known to M.C.U. exclusive fans (we have to admit that the Marvel Cinematic Universe brought a new wave of fans who are not comic book fans, and have only heard of Spider-man and the X-men before watching these movies).

Agent Carter is a fun 40-style series that has vintage cars, funny clothing, forced accents, and a lot of action as Peggy Carter goes beyond the duties of her desk to help uncover evil plots and stop bad guys. Agent Carter is seen for the first time in Captain America: The First Avenger. She is then seen in the Marvel One-Shot Agent Carter, and finally makes a cameo as her old self in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. So for those of us who’ve been following the movies, we know a bit about who she is and her personality. Now it’s time to see her in action.

I have to be honest. As much as I was waiting for this series premiere, I fell asleep during the second part, mainly because I was tired. What I can comment on, which is what remained on my mind after a long good sleep is that, although Carter is a somewhat likable character portrayed by a good actress, the first episode also gave much screen time to a character we’ve seen in other MCU films: Howard Stark, who is Tony Stark (Iron Man)’s father. We’ve seen Howard in video recordings shown in the Iron Man films, and then in Captain America: The First Avenger. My complaint with this character is that the writers, instead of trying to create a new character, decided to copy Tony Stark into the 40’s, possibly even trying to make him seem as twice the womanizer, twice the troublemaker and twice as reckless as his son. The only problem was that the choice of actor for this role isn’t twice as much as Robert Downey Jr. The scenes with Howard Stark seemed like any average actor reading lines that were taken off any Iron Man film.

Although it’s exciting to see so many characters in this series (such as Dr. Vanko, Stark, Carter, and Chris Evans’ cameo as Captain America in a flashback scene), the film tries to rely too much on the heat from the movies to provide a fun, enjoyable story. Same thing happened with the premiere of Agents of SHIELD. Hopefully the series will gain enough momentum to actually act as a standalone series (the idea is to appeal to new audiences and not limit themselves to hardcore fans only). But for now, it is of the same level and quality of Agents of SHIELD, but without Clark Gregg.

The best part of this premiere is that we got to see a sneak peak at Marvel’s upcoming Ant-Man. No comment on this one, see it for yourself.