What's The Best Moment In The Marvel Movies?

My wife and I recently got done with a massive rewatch of all twenty-seven Marvel movies. Every single one, including stinkers like Iron Man 2. We've also, over the past year, watched all of the TV shows. I feel, shall we say, eminently qualified to speak about them.

The big takeaway from what pop culture refers to as the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is that it's one of the most exceptional achievements in modern moviemaking. If you disagree, that's fine, but you have to find another me twenty-seven interconnected movies that all work individually and as part of a whole, that collectively made $25 billion at the box office, and also provided at least one moment that quite literally had audiences worldwide jump out of their seats and start cheering. Go ahead. I'll wait.

The MCU is full of Moments, with a capital M. Touchstones that fans watch again and again, which define the characters and the movies. I got thinking about which one is the best. Which part out of twenty-seven movies and multiple TV shows is the single most impactful and important Moment?

It's not the one you're thinking of right now. I promise.

Here's the thing. The greatest Moment in MCU history isn’t a big battle. It isn’t a hugely emotional, cathartic reveal. It isn’t the first words of a much-anticipated character, or the last words of one checking out for good. No, the greatest Moment in MCU history is this one:

Maybe we should zoom out a little first.

The MCU is full of milestones. “I am Iron Man.” “I’m Here to Talk to You About the Avengers Initiative”. The culmination of everything with Endgame. And one of the most low-key, least-thought-about moments is the creation of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Marvel are know for impeccable casting—can you imagine anyone, literally anyone else, as Tony Stark or T'Challa or Cap?—but nobody mentions their crew choices. Their track record of getting the right people is just outstanding—regardless of whether they’re in front of the camera, or behind it.

And with TWS, they made not one but two of the best decisions in movie history, ever. They asked Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely to write the script, and they hired Joe and Anthony Russo to direct.

Neither of these hires made waves at the time; Markus and McFeely were mostly known for their Chronicles of Narnia scripts, and the Russos had a resume of (checks notes) Pieces, Welcome to Collinwood, and You, Me and Dupree. All decent films, but we are not talking the A-team here. Except they were the A-team, the right people for the right moment, and they proved it with the very first scene of their very first Marvel movie.

Things would be different now. We just didn’t know it yet.

Think about how the MCU movies that came before started out. Tony Stark got blown up less than two minutes into Iron Man—a movie in which he was already in a war zone. Thor had that CGI-heavy battle with the frost giants. Hulk put us slap-bang into the gamma radiation experiment. Avengers had Loki showing up in a blast of tesseract energy. Even Iron Man 2 plunged us deep into the depths of Whiplash’s psyche. They were, for lack of a better term, superhero movies.

TWS, though? A slow fade-in to a lone jogger in the predawn light, the Washington Monument in the background. It’s peaceful. Tranquil. And this isn’t a fake-out. There are no alien spaceships or sorcerers supreme waiting for their cue offscreen. The only disruptive thing that happens here, the only thing that clues you into this being a superhero movie, is the sudden appearance of Cap sprinting past the jogging Sam. And the uttering of that line, the one that would come to mean so much as the MCU progressed. Come on, you know what it is.

At the time, it didn’t really mean much. We had no idea. But the Russos did. McFeely and Markus did. They were playing the long game, and they saw what it would take for the MCU to succeed: that the characters would need to become human, no matter how outlandish their powers were. That we would need to know they had lives between missions, that other things concerned them beyond just the world ending.

After you thwart a Chitauri invasion, you gotta get some schwarma. And after you commit to an interconnected movie universe, you have to make the audience believe that their favourite characters have lives between each film. The Russos and their writers got that, even if no-one else did.

So: “On your left.” A line which leads to a simple conversation between two men—who, before they speak, don’t even know each other as soldiers. Just fellow runners. For nearly three minutes, Cap and Sam are the only people onscreen (save a couple of extras in the background).

And Sam doesn’t treat Cap like a superhero; he knows who the man is of course, and has just seen how powerful he is, but it doesn’t faze him. Because like him, Cap is a soldier away from his war. They both have that in common.

Sam is the kind of character who probably doesn’t put people on a pedestal anyway, but it says a lot about him that he views himself as an equal to Steve in some ways. They have both fought. Sam might have done it in Afghanistan, and Steve might have tangled with Nazis and space gods, but war is war. So he’s not intimidated by the man who has just soundly beaten him in a foot race. Why would he be?

That’s important, because Sam is us. An ordinary guy, just trying to keep fit. Yes, he has access to a flying exoskeleton, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. As the audience, we can immediately relate to Sam, and since Sam absolutely refuses to act starstruck in the face of a literal legend, so do we. Anthony Mackie’s performance is the ultimate way of making Cap seem human. He turns Cap into Steve.

We all like to think we’d be cool if we met our heroes—that we’d establish a connection with them effortlessly, and that they’d come away delighted at having met us. Sam lets us live that, at least for a few moments. They talk about running, the business of soldiering, mattresses, music, and history. It’s a completely natural, beautifully-written exchange, and it’s helped along by the instant chemistry between Mackie and Evans.

Neither of them posture or preen, or come off as forced—well, maybe with the jokes, but we’ll talk about those in a minute. They’re just two soldiers, shooting the breeze. The key moment, really, comes along when Sam tells Steve about Marvin Gaye and the Trouble Man soundtrack (a brilliant choice, by the way—I can see Steve being befuddled by the Stones, Led Zep or Pink Floyd, but he would absolutely get Marvin). And Steve…

Steve pulls out a notepad and writes it down.

We already know that Steve’s key personality trait is that he will always do the right thing, no matter how hard it is. This little moment within a moment shows another. Steve has been through unimaginable trauma. He’s lost the love of his life, who is still alive but with a broken mind. Everything he knew is seventy years in the past. All his friends are gone. Most of us—even most other heroes—would descend into a black pit of despair.

Not Steve. Steve has a notepad full of things that he needs to check out: the moon landing, the Berlin wall, Thai food (!), Rocky, Nirvana, Star Wars/Trek, and now, of course, Marvin Gaye. He’s happy to be in a place where the Internet exists, there’s no polio, and very few foods are now served boiled.

Is he comfortable? No. But unlike so many other MCU characters, Steve has never wasted time worrying about what he can’t change. He’s the polar opposite of Tony Stark, or even Black Widow—a woman desperate to erase the events of her past.

I don’t want to descend into hyperbole, but Steve is a beacon of mental health here. He shows us that it’s possible to go through dark times, and come out the other side intact. This, more than anything else, makes him human. I suspect I’m not the only person who wondered what else I’d tell Steve to check out, given the chance. What would be on my list.

Can you imagine introducing Steve to rap music? Or the NBA? How about the stories being told by women and writers of colour in the book world—things which absolutely didn’t exist when Steve went into the ice? Imagine Steve in a pride parade—wouldn’t he just be delighted to march there? Delighted that it existed in the first place?

One of the criticisms of this particular scene is that the jokes don’t land. I have (don’t look so surprised) a dissenting opinion on this. Yeah, the jokes are bad—Sam’s “Did you take it?” line is pretty excruciating, and Natasha’s fossil jibe is only funny in a cringey way. But the thing is, I think they still work. I think they’re meant to make you roll your eyes a little.

Maybe I’m reaching here; maybe Marcus and McFeely just got cocky. But I struggle to believe that a duo who can write a screenplay as assured and competent as TWS would settle for not one but two terrible jokes in the very first scene.

I think it’s more likely that they’re leaning into the eye-rolling. In real life, people make dumb jokes all the time. Why would Sam (who is, at that point, an audience surrogate anyway) be any different? And yeah, Natasha’s Smithsonian/fossil thing sounds like a line she practiced on the way over…but isn’t that exactly something Natasha would do? Everything she does is so calculated. She’s always working an angle. I don’t see why something as small as a dumb joke would be any different. So yeah: the jokes get a pass from me. They work, for lack of a better description, because they’re not meant to make us laugh.

No moment, in the entire MCU cannon, does so much heavy lifting with so little. And no scene was more important than this one. By the time it was done, Sam and Cap’s relationship had been codified: equals, in temperament and outlook if not ability. And by the way, it’s admirable how restrained the Russos are from using the phrase “On your left” in future movies. It only appears in exactly two more moments: when Steve wakes up in the hospital at the end of TWS, and when the portals appear in Endgame. The Russos knew what they had, and how powerful it could be. They refused to rob it of its power by reusing it endlessly.

What do you think Zack Snyder would have done with it, if the DC movies had ever had a similar moment? The words would be on T-shirts. There’d be a big annual fan event/trailer release day called On Your Left. Stars would be contractually bound to say it once a movie. But in the MCU, the words still hit hard and deep nearly twenty movies later, because you don’t hear them unless you really need to. That counts for something.

When Natasha pulls up to the curb, in a very slick Corvette Stringray, we’re almost disappointed. Our human moment is over; time to be a superhero again. But even after Steve is whisked away to skydive without a parachute and beat up a boat full of evil Frenchmen, we know things have changed.

You could argue that Steve and Sam are the most important relationship in the entire MCU; more important than Steve and Bucky, or Gamora and Thanos, or Tony and Peter. From the very first moment, their bond is unbreakable—they would die for each other, even when they didn’t know each other all that well. As Sam tells Fury later in the movie, “I do what he does, just slower.”

It’s a bond based on mutual respect, shared goals, and deep friendship. When Steve loses Sam to Thanos’s snap, it almost destroys him, and we know why. We feel his pain. And when he passes Sam the shield, as an old man who finally got the life he wanted, it feels right. The shield couldn’t have gone to Bucky, who has always occupied a moral grey area. And Peter Parker might be the new face of the MCU, but Sam becoming the new Cap proved that both he and Steve fought for something bigger than themselves: an ideal that could be passed down between heroes, something explored in the comics but not in the movies up to that point.

Remember, when it happened, Peter had yet to pick up Tony’s mantle, and even when that happened he wasn’t considered the new Iron Man. His identity as Spider-Man was far more set-in-stone—can you imagine him actually adopting Tony’s suits and lifestyle? I can’t, as much as the MCU tried to push things in that direction.

But with Sam, shrugging off the Falcon and becoming Captain America felt like a natural progression. Why? Because we met him when he was just a discharged soldier, trying to cope with coming home.

It must be said that I didn’t really enjoy The Falcon and the Winter Soldier series. It was just a little too serious and po-faced, and although John Walker was a great villain, Karli Morgenthau and the Flag Smashers were a giant barrel of meh. Its attempt to unpack the racial politics of the MCU, and America, was terrific, and occasionally riveting, as well as long overdue. But it still feels like the clumsy cousin to the smooth Loki, or the balls-out insanity of WandaVision.

I think Sam can be an excellent Captain America, but he needs another shot at it. I think he’ll get it, too. The MCU has never lost sight of what’s important, and there is no Avenger more important than Captain America.

“Can’t run everywhere,” Sam tells Steve, as he climbs into that Stingray. As with every line in this scene, there was a deeper meaning, even if this one was more obvious than most. You can’t always have big fights, CGI explosions, or zinging one liners—even though this one is kinda-sorta a zinging one-liner itself. Sometimes, you need to take it slow. Sometimes, you need to focus on the little things: the human conversations we all have, even if one of you is an enhanced, space-God-fighting supersoldier.

Nick Fury’s Avenger Initiative completely changed the world of the MCU…but On Your Left changed the characters in that world, and the way we perceived them, and it will live on long after the Avengers have been consigned to movie history. It’s a moment that takes place without Steve’s ever-present shield—one of the few times in the entire MCU where he’s seen without it. It’s a moment that gave us new insights into war, trauma, superheroes, soldiers, mental health, friendship, respect, Marvin Gaye, and the characters we love, all in a three minute conversation.

It’s a moment that might never be topped.

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