Although individual essays by writers like Jason Dittmer, Tanner Mirrlees and Karen Randell have explored domestic- and foreign-policy stances as embodied by specific Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) entries and characters, Terence McSweeney has a sound claim to have pulled together the first monograph fully focussing on the imposing position this mega-franchise has taken as the global leader of crisis-control fictional fantasies. McSweeney plots the series’ overall approach to harnessing spectacular action to a “redemptive violence” (58) discourse both in terms of the series’ debts outside the superhero “genre,” and as something which is implemented throughout the whole Marvel Studios/Marvel Television portfolio. With 2018 signifying a full decade of production (and the tail end of “Phase Three” of an intricately planned campaign of releases), McSweeney recognizes subtler shades in the franchise denoting a more stratified take on the superhero as American monomyth (one of his favoured concepts), as the expressive possibilities and different audience configurations offered by Netflix streaming become allied with the need to present a universe that is inclusive as well as narratively unified. However, the MCU is now a huge textual beast, and, as I well know, reconciling reach and breadth with depth is always going to be a challenge for authors working on the quickly evolving area.

As such, McSweeney's structural choices do raise issues. The problems with the approach (some writing, generally a half-chapter, on every film release up until 2016) emerge distinctly with the Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) chapter. At a trim eleven pages, it feels brief for that, and essentially has a single note: that the depiction of the Second World War therein is not tethered to the record of the conflict and its effects, but shaped to “erase and misremember [its] unpalatable aspects,” thus rendering it a version of the mythic American war film (101). This does not seem to release very much meaning beyond that which the film wears on its own surface, to the extent that devoting even this space to the film feels ineffectively economic. A hurried feel, as if priorities lay with authentically meatier analyses later in the book, is most evident in this chapter. It is unavoidable to note that this edition is marred by errors, minor but quite frequent, and it is to be hoped that these will be cleared up in future editions. They range from missing or extra words to spelling and release dates; almost never are they of factual or analytical substance, but they do not help to promote the volume.

Although the proportions of the book's coverage seem aimed more at claiming completeness than at a natural ebb and flow of theme and engagement, the volume sees McSweeney on top form at pulling out edifying textual details, something that is not as easy as it may seem when considering the MCU's punishingly movable feast. Although properly backed with appropriate scholarship, his facility to mine the popular layers of promotional journalism (things like principal actors or producers’ interviews), as well as the lightweight end of the critical press on the MCU, is impressive; he enhances many points with incisive references that instruct how these discourses work, almost fictively, in conjunction with main textual events. McSweeney similarly exhibits incision in the uncovering of patterns across the body of film work, drawing particular meaning from the development of characters like the Hulk, who have been slightly unsung in rival critical commentaries. Such moments help McSweeney to articulate a persuasive bigger picture.

The uniqueness of the MCU format and production and release strategy is never in doubt, but neither are those elements the main concern for the author, and he tends to leave that to the more detailed dissection offered by other recent works. Instead, McSweeney successfully constructs an address to a reader who could be easily imagined as the undergraduate seeking a nuanced treatment of questions of national ideology, embedded in a demonstration of how a distinctive Hollywood format processes the same. Thus McSweeney convinces us that, despite speaking in a very American language of violence and myth, the MCU transcends those borders to matter to the global audience (although his coda about international superhero films, while well intentioned and not without relevance for the future of Disney/Marvel Studio, is too compressed to avoid feeling somewhat like an apology for the singular focus of the rest of the book). The student (though this is not to suggest that only an undergraduate audience would find much of interest here) of post-9/11 American popular culture will no doubt see some familiar ideas reinforced in the book, but also a level of depth to their deployment that establishes many of McSweeney's analyses (particularly those centring on various Iron Man and Hulk appearances, and on Captain America: Civil War (2016)) as fresh and important.