Avengers: Age of Ultron
Apr. 25th, 2015 10:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
schneefinkIt's pretty much exactly like Avengers, except on a larger scale. Entertaining, but only as long as I don't think about it. Actually I liked it less than Avengers even when watching it for the first time, because it had some wtf moments that interrupted the experience.
Things I liked:
- Hawkeye. I really liked Clint here. They had some trouble showing why the team needs him from a fighting perspective, but they lampshaded it well. His family was great. (How often does he get to see them, if he works in NYC and they live on the farm? Every weekend? Or does he have a private helicopter to fly home in the evenings?) I remembered the scene with the team standing in his living room from the trailer and I think there was a fight scene right after, so the whole time the team was at the farm I was afraid they'd get attacked there, but fortunately no, and nothing happened to his family.
Clint & Natasha were great together, how close they were. Aunt Natasha, and Clint so worried about her but doing his job anyway. (I bet Coulson was "Uncle Phil.")
I want Clint mentoring Wanda in the future.
- The Scarlet Witch <3 A lot of that is from the comics, and a lot of that is from her sons, I know that, but still. I'm actually not completely happy with what they did with Wanda, and Pietro, more below, but I was really happy to see the (future) Scarlet Witch. (Why did she not have curly hair? Why just remove one of her trademark looks for no reason?)
- Other cameos. Yay Maria Hill, and Sam and Rhodey! Scared-but-brave computer guy from CA:WS! I was disappointed we didn't see Pepper and Jane. Maria was completely right with her "testosterone" comment, there was too much of it.
- There were very funny moments, many of them lines that I already forgot. Like Steve accidentally saying "language" and everyone making fun of him for it because he's the one who swears the most, and Clint had a few.
Things I didn't like:
- Sokovia. A fictional Eastern European country about which we only know that they are "fighting a war", they don't like the Avengers, and years ago (probably over ten) the country was attacked with Stark weapons. That's nothing! Eastern Europe is huge, and you can't just replace one country with another. Kosovo and Slovakia have very different histories! I guess they were thinking of the Balkan, but there you also have very different events that shaped these countries.
I would mind it less if the country is only there as a geographical background, but the history of Sokovia plays a large part in "explaining" the motivation of the Maximoff siblings to volunteer for experimentation by Hydra scientists. Steve compares them to himself, "yeah, who would volunteer to be experimented on by German scientists to fight for their country", I liked that but even from what little we know we can guess that the circumstances were a little different.
From what Pietro said a large part of their motivation is revenge against Stark, iirc he doesn't even mention defending his people. And against Stark because they were attacked with Stark weapons. That's stupid! Anyone (pretty much) could buy Stark weapons back then. We have no idea who attacked them. If it was the US that would explain a bit more, or the US seen as leading force in an international force, but we don't know, and it still seems very short-sighted. The experiments must have been very grueling: we saw them being held captive, we know that all the others died. And still they stayed loyal just because of their thirst for revenge? Even after Stark stopped producing weapons, they just hated the Avengers instead? It makes them look naïve, narrow-minded, and frankly, not very smart.
It also doesn't quite fit with Wanda being so horrified at Ultron's plans. Didn't she ever check what Strucker and the other Hydra people were planning to do? Was she completely okay with project Insight?
Another interesting aspect that is never explored is the role of Hydra in Sokovia. They had a big building and an even bigger underground complex, no way the people didn't know about it. You have to transport things like the remains of the alien flying killerwhalesnake somehow, that's not invisible! Did everyone think the building belonged to SHIELD before CA:WS? Is that another reason why the Sokovians hate the Americans? But then why would the Maximoffs go to them?? The Maximoffs must have known Strucker wasn't affiliated with Stark, and later SHIELD probably. Did the Sokovians know about Hydra all the time, but not about the SHIELD connection?
This is not only the country where they've set the biggest fights of the movie, whose civilian population's rescue is one of the main goals in the end, it's also where Pietro and Wanda come from. Their change of loyalties is an important point in the movie – or it should be, but because there is so little context it loses a lot of its impact. It's extremely hard to evaluate them without knowing where they come from. Sure there can be different headcanons, but that's not the same. It wouldn't have been hard to include this info in canon and I'm very disappointed they didn't do that, especially because I'm really interested in the Maximoff siblings.
- The lack of real discussion/exploration/resolution of the idea of what Tony was trying to do. There are some arguments, some fighting, and then it's solved by Thor having a vision, deus ex machina. It could have been interesting, but they avoided it completely. There were some hints, like Tony saying "what if we aren't strong enough next time" – and it makes complete sense that this comes from Tony given his history and what he saw when Wanda influenced him – but the answer is pretty much "we will be if we're together", which, no.
Related to that, too much idealism. Steve almost dies hanging from a rock to save one woman, that is a nice idea but if he had fallen down (Thor would probably have caught him but it's not certain) how many others would have died because of it? His extremely idealistic "no civilian left behind" attitude seems naïve, especially for a soldier from WWII. And Natasha suggesting that they die when the city blows up also seems extremely unnecessary. I'm usually all for no unnecessary cynicism and no good of the many calculations in movies just for the sake of it and trying to follow ideals, but this was a bit much. Also remember that just one movie ago Steve was willing to sacrifice quite a lot of SHIELD agents to fight Hydra – granted many of them may not be strictly speaking civilians, but many weren't soldiers. But in general I like how important it is to them to avoid civilian casualties.
- Off-screen character development. Tony blew up all his suits at the end of Iron Man 3 – maybe I'm remembering this incorrectly, but didn't he also imply that he wasn't going to build so many anymore? No sign of that.
Natasha, who two movies ago said "love is for children", suddenly has a huge crush on Banner and really wants to date him? LK said for him she had enough character development in CA:WS that he can buy that, but I can't. (Turns out we interpreted Natasha at the end of that movie differently, which happens and explains our different reactions here.) I also didn't see enough for me to buy why Natasha is so impressed by Bruce. I would have completely believed that she was trying to manipulate Bruce if Steve hadn't shown up to "confirm" that she's sincere.
Sam Wilson, who at his first appearance says he's happy helping Steve chase down leads on Bucky but that Avenging is Steve's thing, is suddenly an Avengers recruit? Completely out of the blue, no explanation. Same with Rhodey, who was with the military.
- Ultron's mouth moving. This sounds so trivial, but for at least half the movie every time we saw Ultron I was distracted by the way his mouth moved, like a human mouth. Metal doesn't work like that!!
And I don't think it was necessary. It made Ultron seem more human, yes, but… why? Basically Ultron was Tony Stark's attempt to build an AI with the ideas from (mind gem inside) the scepter, perverted by the scepter and become independent and self-aware, and educated by the Internet. (Also interesting that he's presented as Stark's, but didn't Bruce help? I mostly liked the Tony&Bruce scenes, even if not necessarily Bruce in them.) But we get surprisingly little insight into what he actually wants to do. His actions don't match what he eventually says he wants. Him being not quite sane – in pain, as Vision says – fits, but it makes it very hard to figure him out. He also has a very human sense of humor, based on Tony's, which is interesting since he really seems to hate his origin, but at times I found that disconcerting. I didn't think he was a compelling villain.
- Logistics. Starting from "how the heck did they get an alien killerwhalesnake into that castle without anyone noticing it went missing" (probably via Hydra inside SHIELD, but still), to "seriously, they didn't search the underground complex?!", to "they missed this entire underground complex?!", to "suddenly there's a Helicarrier, where did that come from." (Fury you really should have told them about that sooner so they could plan!!) Also "where the heck did Ultron get all the energy and materials from this quickly, and build this stupid flying city because no way did that exist beforehand."
Actually the whole "Ultron makes a city fly into the sky to later let it crash and wipe out humanity like with a meteor" plan. WTF. That makes literally no sense. All it gave us was dramatic civilian evacuation drama and some extra special effects. A prime example of "looks cool, but don't think about it."
- Natasha's extremely stupid infertility paragraph. I'm pretty sure what she meant to convey is that she's become monstrous because of everything the Red Room did to her, but with what she talked about right before it sounds like she sees herself as a monster because the Red Room made her infertile, which makes it easier for her to kill. Wtf? (I also disagree with the notion that the parent-child bond is stronger than any other and therefore the only (or most dangerous by far) thing that could overcome the Red Room programming, but I can see how people would believe that.)
Things I'm ambivalent about:
- Intra-team fights. I thought the Iron Man vs. Hulk fight was way more dramatic than necessary: the only thing it needed to establish was that Hulk was a danger to civilians (when under mind-control) so that Banner is convinced again that he's dangerous. Because of that Banner turns away from Natasha, tries not to engage in the fight against Ultron until she forces him to (because the Hulk was desperately needed), and later flees the scene. The drawn-out fight with a lot of drama and property damage wasn't necessary, at times it didn't seem very realistic, and it only made me feel overly sorry for the Hulk. (We didn't even get a good look at how Banner currently relates to the Hulk, which would have been very interesting to know.)
The other, around Vision's future body, mostly masked the fact that they didn't have a solution to the argument.
- In general they did a good job pretending that all team members are equally important in a fight. Steve having a magnet thingy for his shield makes a lot of sense! But they just aren't, and it would be interesting to explore that.
- The new healing device. It should have huge implications for the whole 'verse going forward, but I'm always skeptical that they'll remember it. In general the MCU is moving further and further away from this world, technologically and also politically (Sokovia, Wakanda…) I was told there are also many developments in Agents of Shield, like the appearance of a (dead) Kree and that they can sort of resurrect people, among others. It'll be interesting how they plan to tie in Agents of Shield to the movies, if there'll be a point where it'll be difficult for people to understand what's happening in the movies if they haven't seen the series.
- Vision. So Vision is basically a mix of some aspects of Jarvis (what Tony could download before Pietro cut the connection) and the mind gem, as fused by Thor's lightning, in the body Ultron (made someone) build for himself, educated by the Internet. His origin story and Ultron's are pretty much the same. We have no idea what the mind gem really does, how strong it is, how much of its own will it has… at least enough to corrupt/wake up Ultron. And it's an Infinity Gem, a sibling artifact to the Tesseract. (I thought the mind gem was blue, but apparently it's yellow? The mind gem in Vision, the Tesseract in Asgard, the aether, and the one in Guardians of the Galaxy…) He seems benign, as in "humans are doomed but kinda interesting", but I don't trust him. He can pick up Thor's hammer, meaning he is "worthy", but that seems extremely far-fetched, and I almost didn't buy it even as I saw it on the screen. A shortcut with waaay too flimsy reasoning.
- I thought it was interesting that this Quicksilver is a lot less powerful than Quicksilver in the X-Men movie. I liked him and Wanda (yay siblings! I have a weakness for siblings), not counting their weak background and characterization, but I'm fine with him dying, also because I would not be surprised at all if he doesn't stay dead. Wanda tends to do stupid things when she loses someone she loves.
Stories I would like to read:
- All the Wanda stories. Wanda & Pietro stories. I can't wait to find out all the different versions of the missing backstory that fanfic authors create. Hopefully some of them manage to make their actions make more sense.
Wanda as an Avenger trainee. Clint as Wanda's mentor. Natasha as Wanda's mentor. Wanda grieving over Pietro. Wanda finding out what her power can do.
- Clint and his family, and Aunt Natasha. Domestic fic, with occasional Avenging in between.
And then there were other things that I don't feel like writing about now. To sum up, on the surface entertaining, some interesting elements, but overall I wasn't impressed and I don't think it's a very good movie. I think this is the first time I walked out of an MCU movie so dissatisfied. (And the next one is Ant-Man...)
Things I liked:
- Hawkeye. I really liked Clint here. They had some trouble showing why the team needs him from a fighting perspective, but they lampshaded it well. His family was great. (How often does he get to see them, if he works in NYC and they live on the farm? Every weekend? Or does he have a private helicopter to fly home in the evenings?) I remembered the scene with the team standing in his living room from the trailer and I think there was a fight scene right after, so the whole time the team was at the farm I was afraid they'd get attacked there, but fortunately no, and nothing happened to his family.
Clint & Natasha were great together, how close they were. Aunt Natasha, and Clint so worried about her but doing his job anyway. (I bet Coulson was "Uncle Phil.")
I want Clint mentoring Wanda in the future.
- The Scarlet Witch <3 A lot of that is from the comics, and a lot of that is from her sons, I know that, but still. I'm actually not completely happy with what they did with Wanda, and Pietro, more below, but I was really happy to see the (future) Scarlet Witch. (Why did she not have curly hair? Why just remove one of her trademark looks for no reason?)
- Other cameos. Yay Maria Hill, and Sam and Rhodey! Scared-but-brave computer guy from CA:WS! I was disappointed we didn't see Pepper and Jane. Maria was completely right with her "testosterone" comment, there was too much of it.
- There were very funny moments, many of them lines that I already forgot. Like Steve accidentally saying "language" and everyone making fun of him for it because he's the one who swears the most, and Clint had a few.
Things I didn't like:
- Sokovia. A fictional Eastern European country about which we only know that they are "fighting a war", they don't like the Avengers, and years ago (probably over ten) the country was attacked with Stark weapons. That's nothing! Eastern Europe is huge, and you can't just replace one country with another. Kosovo and Slovakia have very different histories! I guess they were thinking of the Balkan, but there you also have very different events that shaped these countries.
I would mind it less if the country is only there as a geographical background, but the history of Sokovia plays a large part in "explaining" the motivation of the Maximoff siblings to volunteer for experimentation by Hydra scientists. Steve compares them to himself, "yeah, who would volunteer to be experimented on by German scientists to fight for their country", I liked that but even from what little we know we can guess that the circumstances were a little different.
From what Pietro said a large part of their motivation is revenge against Stark, iirc he doesn't even mention defending his people. And against Stark because they were attacked with Stark weapons. That's stupid! Anyone (pretty much) could buy Stark weapons back then. We have no idea who attacked them. If it was the US that would explain a bit more, or the US seen as leading force in an international force, but we don't know, and it still seems very short-sighted. The experiments must have been very grueling: we saw them being held captive, we know that all the others died. And still they stayed loyal just because of their thirst for revenge? Even after Stark stopped producing weapons, they just hated the Avengers instead? It makes them look naïve, narrow-minded, and frankly, not very smart.
It also doesn't quite fit with Wanda being so horrified at Ultron's plans. Didn't she ever check what Strucker and the other Hydra people were planning to do? Was she completely okay with project Insight?
Another interesting aspect that is never explored is the role of Hydra in Sokovia. They had a big building and an even bigger underground complex, no way the people didn't know about it. You have to transport things like the remains of the alien flying killerwhalesnake somehow, that's not invisible! Did everyone think the building belonged to SHIELD before CA:WS? Is that another reason why the Sokovians hate the Americans? But then why would the Maximoffs go to them?? The Maximoffs must have known Strucker wasn't affiliated with Stark, and later SHIELD probably. Did the Sokovians know about Hydra all the time, but not about the SHIELD connection?
This is not only the country where they've set the biggest fights of the movie, whose civilian population's rescue is one of the main goals in the end, it's also where Pietro and Wanda come from. Their change of loyalties is an important point in the movie – or it should be, but because there is so little context it loses a lot of its impact. It's extremely hard to evaluate them without knowing where they come from. Sure there can be different headcanons, but that's not the same. It wouldn't have been hard to include this info in canon and I'm very disappointed they didn't do that, especially because I'm really interested in the Maximoff siblings.
- The lack of real discussion/exploration/resolution of the idea of what Tony was trying to do. There are some arguments, some fighting, and then it's solved by Thor having a vision, deus ex machina. It could have been interesting, but they avoided it completely. There were some hints, like Tony saying "what if we aren't strong enough next time" – and it makes complete sense that this comes from Tony given his history and what he saw when Wanda influenced him – but the answer is pretty much "we will be if we're together", which, no.
Related to that, too much idealism. Steve almost dies hanging from a rock to save one woman, that is a nice idea but if he had fallen down (Thor would probably have caught him but it's not certain) how many others would have died because of it? His extremely idealistic "no civilian left behind" attitude seems naïve, especially for a soldier from WWII. And Natasha suggesting that they die when the city blows up also seems extremely unnecessary. I'm usually all for no unnecessary cynicism and no good of the many calculations in movies just for the sake of it and trying to follow ideals, but this was a bit much. Also remember that just one movie ago Steve was willing to sacrifice quite a lot of SHIELD agents to fight Hydra – granted many of them may not be strictly speaking civilians, but many weren't soldiers. But in general I like how important it is to them to avoid civilian casualties.
- Off-screen character development. Tony blew up all his suits at the end of Iron Man 3 – maybe I'm remembering this incorrectly, but didn't he also imply that he wasn't going to build so many anymore? No sign of that.
Natasha, who two movies ago said "love is for children", suddenly has a huge crush on Banner and really wants to date him? LK said for him she had enough character development in CA:WS that he can buy that, but I can't. (Turns out we interpreted Natasha at the end of that movie differently, which happens and explains our different reactions here.) I also didn't see enough for me to buy why Natasha is so impressed by Bruce. I would have completely believed that she was trying to manipulate Bruce if Steve hadn't shown up to "confirm" that she's sincere.
Sam Wilson, who at his first appearance says he's happy helping Steve chase down leads on Bucky but that Avenging is Steve's thing, is suddenly an Avengers recruit? Completely out of the blue, no explanation. Same with Rhodey, who was with the military.
- Ultron's mouth moving. This sounds so trivial, but for at least half the movie every time we saw Ultron I was distracted by the way his mouth moved, like a human mouth. Metal doesn't work like that!!
And I don't think it was necessary. It made Ultron seem more human, yes, but… why? Basically Ultron was Tony Stark's attempt to build an AI with the ideas from (mind gem inside) the scepter, perverted by the scepter and become independent and self-aware, and educated by the Internet. (Also interesting that he's presented as Stark's, but didn't Bruce help? I mostly liked the Tony&Bruce scenes, even if not necessarily Bruce in them.) But we get surprisingly little insight into what he actually wants to do. His actions don't match what he eventually says he wants. Him being not quite sane – in pain, as Vision says – fits, but it makes it very hard to figure him out. He also has a very human sense of humor, based on Tony's, which is interesting since he really seems to hate his origin, but at times I found that disconcerting. I didn't think he was a compelling villain.
- Logistics. Starting from "how the heck did they get an alien killerwhalesnake into that castle without anyone noticing it went missing" (probably via Hydra inside SHIELD, but still), to "seriously, they didn't search the underground complex?!", to "they missed this entire underground complex?!", to "suddenly there's a Helicarrier, where did that come from." (Fury you really should have told them about that sooner so they could plan!!) Also "where the heck did Ultron get all the energy and materials from this quickly, and build this stupid flying city because no way did that exist beforehand."
Actually the whole "Ultron makes a city fly into the sky to later let it crash and wipe out humanity like with a meteor" plan. WTF. That makes literally no sense. All it gave us was dramatic civilian evacuation drama and some extra special effects. A prime example of "looks cool, but don't think about it."
- Natasha's extremely stupid infertility paragraph. I'm pretty sure what she meant to convey is that she's become monstrous because of everything the Red Room did to her, but with what she talked about right before it sounds like she sees herself as a monster because the Red Room made her infertile, which makes it easier for her to kill. Wtf? (I also disagree with the notion that the parent-child bond is stronger than any other and therefore the only (or most dangerous by far) thing that could overcome the Red Room programming, but I can see how people would believe that.)
Things I'm ambivalent about:
- Intra-team fights. I thought the Iron Man vs. Hulk fight was way more dramatic than necessary: the only thing it needed to establish was that Hulk was a danger to civilians (when under mind-control) so that Banner is convinced again that he's dangerous. Because of that Banner turns away from Natasha, tries not to engage in the fight against Ultron until she forces him to (because the Hulk was desperately needed), and later flees the scene. The drawn-out fight with a lot of drama and property damage wasn't necessary, at times it didn't seem very realistic, and it only made me feel overly sorry for the Hulk. (We didn't even get a good look at how Banner currently relates to the Hulk, which would have been very interesting to know.)
The other, around Vision's future body, mostly masked the fact that they didn't have a solution to the argument.
- In general they did a good job pretending that all team members are equally important in a fight. Steve having a magnet thingy for his shield makes a lot of sense! But they just aren't, and it would be interesting to explore that.
- The new healing device. It should have huge implications for the whole 'verse going forward, but I'm always skeptical that they'll remember it. In general the MCU is moving further and further away from this world, technologically and also politically (Sokovia, Wakanda…) I was told there are also many developments in Agents of Shield, like the appearance of a (dead) Kree and that they can sort of resurrect people, among others. It'll be interesting how they plan to tie in Agents of Shield to the movies, if there'll be a point where it'll be difficult for people to understand what's happening in the movies if they haven't seen the series.
- Vision. So Vision is basically a mix of some aspects of Jarvis (what Tony could download before Pietro cut the connection) and the mind gem, as fused by Thor's lightning, in the body Ultron (made someone) build for himself, educated by the Internet. His origin story and Ultron's are pretty much the same. We have no idea what the mind gem really does, how strong it is, how much of its own will it has… at least enough to corrupt/wake up Ultron. And it's an Infinity Gem, a sibling artifact to the Tesseract. (I thought the mind gem was blue, but apparently it's yellow? The mind gem in Vision, the Tesseract in Asgard, the aether, and the one in Guardians of the Galaxy…) He seems benign, as in "humans are doomed but kinda interesting", but I don't trust him. He can pick up Thor's hammer, meaning he is "worthy", but that seems extremely far-fetched, and I almost didn't buy it even as I saw it on the screen. A shortcut with waaay too flimsy reasoning.
- I thought it was interesting that this Quicksilver is a lot less powerful than Quicksilver in the X-Men movie. I liked him and Wanda (yay siblings! I have a weakness for siblings), not counting their weak background and characterization, but I'm fine with him dying, also because I would not be surprised at all if he doesn't stay dead. Wanda tends to do stupid things when she loses someone she loves.
Stories I would like to read:
- All the Wanda stories. Wanda & Pietro stories. I can't wait to find out all the different versions of the missing backstory that fanfic authors create. Hopefully some of them manage to make their actions make more sense.
Wanda as an Avenger trainee. Clint as Wanda's mentor. Natasha as Wanda's mentor. Wanda grieving over Pietro. Wanda finding out what her power can do.
- Clint and his family, and Aunt Natasha. Domestic fic, with occasional Avenging in between.
And then there were other things that I don't feel like writing about now. To sum up, on the surface entertaining, some interesting elements, but overall I wasn't impressed and I don't think it's a very good movie. I think this is the first time I walked out of an MCU movie so dissatisfied. (And the next one is Ant-Man...)
no subject
Date: 2015-04-26 12:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-26 11:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-26 08:47 am (UTC)-J
no subject
Date: 2015-04-26 11:42 am (UTC)I'm surprised by what most people who didn't like it complain about. Many complain about Natasha, about Natasha/Bruce, about Clint's family, about some of the tasteless jokes, about the lack of Bucky (that I don't understand), a few complain about Ultron and the Vision.
But I've only seen people praise the characterization of the twins, sometimes even specifically their backstory, and I just don't get it. At all. They made up a country because they couldn't be bothered to use a real one, because these countries are all the same haha they didn't see a need to give it a history, but somehow this nonexisting history is supposed to explain the twins' motivations. But all the fans whose reactions I've read don't seem to care, I find this baffling.
(When I told LB he just said "It's an American movie, isn't it? Do you really think they care about Eastern European countries?" but still.)
no subject
Date: 2015-04-27 03:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-27 03:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-27 08:27 pm (UTC)