Avengers: Age of Ultron
Apr. 30th, 2015 06:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethMum phoned and said she was (finally) thinking about going to see the movie, so this afternoon we went.
By the end I really wanted to stop by the UEA to get some selfies. They filmed parts there, and it turns out they're really cool parts, and something I'm totally going to imagine is right there in Norwich in the Avengers 'verse. So I want to go get photos on Avengers locations.
[ETA spoilerish links: It took a week, but we did it. And I still really like the location for in universe theme reasons as well as being right here handy. /ETA]
But... that was the part I was excited about. The bit where I Can See My School From Here.
This is... not quite the effect the film was going for.
I wanted to see Hawkeye talk and be a people and so forth, and yaay, I did! ... but I'm not wowed.
Mum thinks Hawkeye is the worst and is lame and would just run out of arrows. Mum is clearly super wrong. Hawkeye is awesome.
I'm not sure the movie showed us how Hawkeye is awesome. Couple of good moments, but, *shrugs*.
Okay, so, if this was Ao3 the movie would need the following warnings: Graphic depictions of violence, Major Character Death
They would need them for SPOILERS: battle scenes, an avenger getting injured and having blood and mess, and character death, specifically Pietro and arguably JARVIS. JARVIS being AI things are complex, but he is described as killed and Tony gets a new co-pilot.
I would personally add some trigger warnings but I'm not sure how to phrase them. Something about surgery and attitudes to infertility. Will have to describe.
Whedon has a thing for us being the monsters. Fine and the point when it's Hulk, arguable when it's Tony, and for Black Widow there's a case to be made, but it was emphatically not the one made here. Here, she says that the Red Room surgically sterilise their operatives as a graduation ceremony. That it makes killing easier. That she's a monster because of what they did to her.
Anything that equates an inability to bear children with being a monster needs a fucking trigger warning, and possibly for the writer to be slapped hard. I feel strongly on this one. The hell is up with that?
I mean arguing that the Red Room made them monsters, sure, but specifically equating it with infertility is sick. Women are worth more than their ability to bear children, humans are not monsters if they can't have children, and the ability to empathise and care about small people and others has absolutely NO correlation with the state of your internal organs. That's messed up.
I can almost see the angle she was arguing, that they take away the only thing that could be more important than the mission, making it so they keep killing on command. But in universe whoever sold Natasha this line of bull is evil. Having her say it out loud and unopposed is just creepy. Very very creepy.
I was unimpressed with the characterisation of anyone in this movie. I object to some of the changes Whedon has made from my very cursory knowledge of the comics. I even don't like it compared to Avengers. I feel strongly he's done poorly by his female characters. I also doubt he knows what to do with Thor. And I think he half arsed his themes.
I came out of the movie thinking about how I would re-edit it, and by the time I got home I concluded I'd need to re-do it. I just weren't happy with it.
So this is the non-squee and SPOILER filled Avengers review. Boo. :-(
So, thing I went in expecting to hate really and sincerely: the whitewashing and treatment of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. They're the Jewish-Romani children of a holocaust survivor, and they were cast as white arguably neo-nazi HYDRA volunteers. How is that even slightly excusable?
Answer: it isn't.
But I think it isn't quite what Whedon was trying to tell. Maybe. If you squint.
There's a couple of things that should be themes but are just bookends or at best triples. This was one of them.
The twins are main characters here, they've got a major through line, this is their origin story.
It starts off with the two of them kicking Avenger arse. Starting with Hawkeye. They were told to target the easy ones. *sigh* *pets poor Hawkeye*
Strucker is running the HYDRA base and he has a very stirring speech about no surrender then turns around and surrenders. He's a very Whedon joke of a bad guy. It seems like cheaping out.
When he surrenders, he says he is technically SHIELD. And I think that's Whedon's loophole? Like, yeah, it's HYDRA, but it's HYDRA wearing an eagle. Maybe they volunteered for SHIELD???
That reading only occured to me after classic version SHIELD turned up, and Quicksilver is all wow and Steve says that's what SHIELD is supposed to be.
So Steve is either saying that at random, saying that to someone who felt the need to fight SHIELD, or saying it to someone who got snared by corrupted SHIELD. Take your choice, I don't know.
Steve is also the one who points out they did the same thing he did, signed up to be experimented on to defend their country. He's the one giving them chances, he sees that parallel. So again, I think that's what Whedon was trying to say there.
But I think he screwed up. You can't link them to HYDRA and have it be remotely okay. Nope, no, and no.
The selling pitch of HYDRA in the MCU is peace. They'll stop the bad guys before the bad things happen. Peace as long as you give up on freedom.
So say the twins fell for the pitch. They've got reasons. Fuzzy ill described reasons, but apparently their country has had an ongoing lack of peace recently.
The twins hate Stark because his name was on the bomb that killed their family. Okay, but, really? They don't hate America? They don't hate whoever tried to bomb them? Given they're in a made up country there's a whole lack of context.
Also they just kind of stop hating him? They have a big speech about it, but then they do nothing about it. Because reasons? I don't get it, why make it personal and not resolve it personal?
They figure out Ultron is a bad guy (what was their first clue??!) and switch sides and Hawkeye gets a good little speech about how if you go out there and fight with them then you're an Avenger.
Or Wanda can stay and hide and he'll send her brother to look after her.
So the twins fight.
And then Pietro gets fridged so Scarlet Witch can go kick more arse?
Like, I can't tell if it's that moment in Serenity, which was an awesome moment on its own, or if I'm just seeing it because I know it's Whedon and I expected him to do the thing again?
It isn't a straight up repeat of his earlier brother sister set, but it's... evocative.
Mostly though, they killed Pietro?
They have two characters of that particular ethnic background, two out of... not a hell of a lot more than two in all of comics, they whitewash them, set them up as pawns of evil, and then kill one?
I'm thinking that's not okay.
I am aware they needed a different way in to this 'verse, and I know they couldn't have their whole complex of social connections in the MCU, but why leave a proliferating hole in it?
Quicksilver's last line was 'you didn't see that coming', which was a third time and out. First he said it to Hawkeye, then Hawkeye to him, and then it's his last words.
Because the deaths we're waiting for are Hawkeye or his family. And then he gets saved. Surprise!
Except not surprise? It's a 12A kids movie? They just showed him with tiny childs? He's saving a tiny child at the time? So no, survival is not a surprise.
Hawkeye's family is cool. I like their kitchen. I was thinking from early pictures and teasers and stuff that they were going with the Ultimates background with wife and kids, but that got really dark for a tentpole movie. So I was cringing a little in case they did the bad thing, but on reflection it would not be the time and place to do the bad thing. But then I just kind of wonder why they went with this background?
The themes I'm teasing out of the movie are children and consequences.
But it's sort of muddy about it.
Like, everyone says something about children, except maybe Stark didn't phrase it that way but Ultron is his baby and maybe also Vision, it was kind of a mess.
So, Hawkeye's story: starts with him getting hit, needs medical treatment, allows introduction of super shiny tech that will eventually make Vision. It was described as growing Hawkeye's own cells, but his wife reckons she can feel the difference, and Vision is sort of definitely not made of human parts so the replacement parts could be... well, comic books, they could be whatever. He's sort of kin to Vision though, same flesh. And Tony and Bruce fixed his code. And Thor powered him up. Natasha delivered him? She stole him from Ultron and dropped him so Hawkeye could pick him up. So Vision is a team effort except for Cap opposing his creation.
Hawkeye says to the visiting doctor that he hasn't got a girlfriend and then is talking to someone on the phone who he says is the boss of him and then says to Cap he was talking to his girlfriend. So we're then wondering what up. But I don't know what we were supposed to think the options were.
I'm even still unclear on what it turned out to be. Like, could be his wife he addresses in a very agenty manner, could be Fury he's lying about entirely. *shrugs*
There's a bit where Ultron has all the data JARVIS had, stole all the files, knows more about the Avengers than they know about each other. Reaction shot of Hawkeye. Something up there.
But... that never goes anywhere? If Ultron knew all that all about the team, he does feck all with it. He just goes and plays with the twins back where they were all three being worked on together. They're family! Yaay! But... why mention he knows the Avengers and then nothing comes of it?
Are we supposed to be worrying about this family we don't know Hawkeye has?
So things go wrong and the Avengers need somewhere to hide and Barton says he has a safehouse and lo, it is his house, which is safe. Pregnant wife, Tony assumes is an agent. Tiny children, Tony says, smaller agents? No, Avengers have just been working together and partying together and not actually being trusted with this. Except Natasha is Auntie Natasha already. And they're going to name the baby after her except it turns out to be a boy. So the team has a lot of secrets from each other. And the ones that aren't spies go sulk about that.
I don't know why Barton would take the team home at that point. But I guess I can see why he'd want to go home. It's a balance, like, they might be in danger already, in which case he'd want to take the team and protect them, but then again they might not be in danger at all because secret, in which case taking the team just makes them all targets. But then it wasn't about protecting them. Because they stayed a while and went away again. So he really was just using it as a safehouse. Which ... SHIELD didn't even know about them, only Fury, secrecy is their defense, so he just... goes home.
This makes sense if he was on the phone with Fury and then goes home to meet Fury at a location only the two of them know about. So that's probably how that line untangles.
I'm spending an awful lot of words here trying to figure out precisely what was going on in what I just saw. Um, not good?
SPOILERS continue:
I like Barton's wife, but for all they give her a first name (Laura), she's very much Barton's Wife, Pregnant Mother. Like, that's all that's going on with her. And she's super supportive of him being an Avenger and sends him off to war again and it's all very nice.
I don't know what detail I would put in to make her a person and not just a feminine stereotype, but she needed one. Something. Not just standing there saying yaay you, yaay your job, yaay your friends, yaay babies and house you keep remaking to your specifications, all is about Hawkeye and all is supportive. Oh, and observing that Natasha is sort of in a relationship, which Clint hasn't noticed. Women pay attention to these things you see. Just... something else needs to be in there.
Maybe a sense she was running a working farm? There's a lot of work in that. Skills and doing things and so forth. Employees even. I only know one person on my f-list with cows, there's lots of ways to do farms. Or she could mention a craft fair or a farmer's market or... I don't know, something. Stuff from her life she needs to update him on, after he's briefed her on his.
The sense that she existed before Barton walked in and would continue to exist after she walked out. I felt like she missed that. She is Wife and Mother and likes her husband, yaay, fine as far as it goes. I am emphatically not saying that feminine is not cool, I was trying to pick feminine things above, looking after the house and home can be a big deal. I just... I think she was in the movie so we'd worry about her? Or to change how we see him.
Hawkeye was interacting with the youngers a lot, the teenage twins. And saving small children from mortal peril. Dad!Hawkeye as a theme? But, well, he's telling the teens to go maybe get killed, so, er, not a nice theme.
But then that's the thing with Tony and JARVIS and Ultron, his AI kids were made and put in harm's way, in Ultron's case made to be put in harm's way, though JARVIS had a lot more of a life going on. JARVIS hung out where people lived and had more opportunities to observe them and be social, but then got brought along to war, Tony's co-pilot, like it or not. There's a conversation I've been wanting to have with Tony (yes I know he's fictional) about The Sarah Connor Chronicles and how raising kids to share your PTSD is not cool, and I thought this movie would be about that. But here's where I think Whedon half arsed the theme, because Ultron is made with alien tech, and you can dump all the blame right there. And we don't need to. I don't even understand why he'd want to use the sceptre to create AI. JARVIS is AI, JARVIS is already running the 'Iron Legion' early in the movie, what is it Ultron is meant to have that JARVIS doesn't?
... blue shiny bits instead of gold???
That's all I got from teh sequence where Tony talks Bruce into helping him make Ultron.
Backing up a bit, first Tony gets shown his worst fears by Scarlet Witch, and his worst fears is being the survivor and watching people die. Which we knew. Agreement. This is his fear from movie one. So he's going to do everything he can to protect people.
The involvement of the sceptre was plot devicium. I know why they did it in terms of linking the movies together and getting ready for already announced future movies, but I think it only detracted from the theme in this particular movie.
Tony and Bruce together make an AI, and the first thing it does is murder the older AI JARVIS, which action Tony attributes to fear and Bruce to rage. We've got the whole story right there. Mad science at its best, they embodied their flaws, fear and rage made sparkly metal.
And from that angle the story is our kids turning out like the worst parts of us, the fear that the next generation will learn the worst things.
I can see that stuff in this story, I just have to excavate it from... a lot of other stuff.
And the involvement of the alien tech / mind gem kind of lets Tony off the hook for consequences. Not that he'll let himself off. But it makes it seem more like oops he opened the box, not oops he made his PTSD into an all powerful defence system.
Muddy.
And not what I'd hoped for. Something about his relationship with his AI, that I'd hoped for, and we had so much other stuff going on I didn't get what I'd hoped.
I don't know what was up with Thor. Honestly? I think it was previews for the next Thor movie and the next Avengers movie. I didn't see what most of the stuff he did had to do with this movie.
I didn't like how they wrote out Jane but kept in Selvig. It wasn't just him. Minor male characters from previous films got screen time and lines, poorly served though some were. War Machine is not a joke second tier Iron Man, if you watch Iron Man movies, so him being a joke no one was impressed with is suck and looks racist. Falcon got two bookend moments, at the party at the start and at the academy at the end. And they don't fit together. Because at the party he said he's glad he's not an Avenger, and then at the end he's implied to be Avengers 2.0. That's like not paying attention, why say the one and not have anything in between to get you to the other. It looks like he got a third moment edited out. And then there's the guy who said No to launching the helicarriers. Cool guy, cool moment, but he got brought back and Sharon is nowhere? And he got brought back as a joke, being scared and screwing his words up. Very Whedon, not very well served as a character, don't think it added to the moment in any form whatsoever. So every time there's a choice, he has chosen to bring minor male characters in, but leave out women who are way more important in the comics. And he's done it poorly and clumsily, and it contributes to the muddy overcrowded feel of the story.
Also, Tony and Thor having a my absent girlfriend is cooler than your absent girlfriend competition was just... odd. Like, okay, but, they could just... be spending those minutes on those two women being cool? Maybe talking to each other? Like hey, how you doing, maybe getting a nobel, oh maybe getting... another billions of dollars, I don't know what CEOs do that is more cool. Just, a couple lines from the ladies, Bechdel pass, about their jobs, same screen time. Instead we get boys measuring.
Two Thor moments we did need: Funny hammer lifting competition, and then the payoff moment after nobody could lift it. That was cool, that was good.
But I don't think Whedon knows what else to do with Thor and he's made him kind of a dick. But without giving him an 'am I worthy' moment in between, which I felt kind of needed to be there? Unless I missed it.
Everyone got shown their worst fears. Scarlet Witch messed with their heads, worst fears all round.
I have mentioned above what I hate about Natasha's worst fear. I hate it a lot. It's the bad thing that happened to her, but instead of focusing on the whole trained to kill people part, the whole epically abusive childhood that implies, it focused on one involuntary surgery to sterilise her. And she says that makes her a monster. That's a story about a woman, stereotyped, horror story edition. That's not about Black Widow.
I also strenuously disagree with what happened to Bruce/Hulk when he got whammied. If you whammy Bruce you get Hulk. The dude is already his own worst nightmare. The enemy should then get a very big surprise, because lo, you woke up the Hulk, why did you think that would end well for you?
But instead he acted out Bruce's worst fear, which, why? Why does this movie need that?
Whedon seems to think the thing we want to see in team movies is the team beating the shit out of each other.
I disagree.
I disagree really, really big.
Hulkbuster armour, very big, very shiny, and very winning. Why? Nothing stops Hulk. Entire fucking Leviathans didn't stop Hulk. He is not stoppable, not by violence. To me that's the whole point of him. You can't hurt him to resolve your problems, hurting him is your problem. You can only resolve it by making nice and him liking you. That's what I got out of the previous stories anyway.
And I don't see how Tony beating crap out of Hulk helped anything, made any story point, anything.
Was it to make us wonder if robots could in fact win against Hulk, without it being Ultron who gets that edge?
*sigh*
I a little bit understand/agree why Tony can't talk Hulk down. He refuses to acknowledge Hulk as his own person, he's talking to Banner. He tells him he's too smart. And then he's like oops, don't mention puny Bruce, but really, shouldn't he know that? But I can buy that he's friends with Bruce so he's all awkward edges with Hulk.
What I don't buy is the whole Natasha/Bruce thing. I just... what? No. Wrong. What?
Because all their previous interactions involved her tricking him, pulling guns on him, and getting beat to hell by him. She was manipulating him.
And then we start this movie with her being the one that can get Hulk to go sleep and let Bruce come back. How do we get there from here? It's implied to be an emotional connection, romantic even, and I just kept bouncing off that hard, because no, he hurt her, that's what he did, that's what we've seen him do. How do we go from there to this? Why does she like him? We don't know why.
She keeps approaching him, and it reads like a male writer rewarding a character he identifies with. The relationship was given, not shown.
Also it creeps me the hell out that it's an arc drawn from Bruce's tiny 'can't always get what I want' moment with the crib through outright stating he physically can't have children now and then getting Natasha's moment. She's like, we're both sterile, we're both monsters! As if it's causal. No I can't let that go. But if her reason for wanting the relationship is that they're both monsters, oh hell no, break them up now, that can't be good for them, that's the epic dysfunction.
Why you get characters together is they can both see how they're not monsters. To find the free will in the middle of the programming. To see the strength it takes to not be a monster however monstrous the skills and powers are.
This movie here, where she says they'll run away together? No. Nope. Stop that right now. That's ill.
And then she overrules Bruce when he wants to stay pink, pushes him off a high place, because she needs the other guy. That's in the context of a movie that has made them out to be romantic.
That's ... abuse. She injures him to get what she wants out of him. It's abuse.
I don't think the fact he's damn near invulnerable actually makes it okay, it is not okay, manipulating people is not okay.
Bruce/Tony is just as bad but from the other side. Tony beats crap out of Hulk to try and get Bruce back. Er, no? Bad? Problem. His pitch of 'come be mad scientists and make beautiful science babies with me' kind of went poorly, but then again, kind of went really well.
... they made Ultron, that went poorly, they made Vision, that went well. I don't see what the significant difference is supposed to be.
But I think Vision got unplugged before he got programmed, so he's actually not got the purpose programmed in, he's his own person. So that would be, free will, yaays.
That would be cool and fit with a bunch of other stuff. I just, I'm not clear on it. I watched with my brain in, I just don't get if it was coherent.
Ultron complained about making slaves, but it felt like they had to remove JARVIS to make that pitch. Like, I never got the impression JARVIS was a slave? Snarky as heck for a slave. But he does do everything he's told in canon, yesno? So yeah, Tony making slaves not children is a read of canon, just not the one we've been playing with. :-( That would be super suck. I've been relying on the idea Tony made friends, people. I didn't think I was fixing something the MCU had left broken. Tony as a slave maker would suck a lot. and ultron would have the start of a point? But, well, destroying all human life, not really the way to go.
Steve had the saddest story. Like, everyone was being shown their worst fears, as mentioned above. Steve saw the 40s, the war over, Peggy there to have that dance. And then it wasn't there. And then it was.
So you could read it as he fears the loss, but he also fears the restoration.
Waking up back in the 40s wouldn't be home any more.
What he concludes by the end of the movie is the guy who wanted those things died when he went into the ice.
and that makes me worry for him very much.
like, it's okay to not want a family, but to say the guy who wanted love died in the ice? :-(
If he's not looking for romance, again, fair enough, but if he's let go of the idea of caring about people, he is super not okay and needs all the hugs.
Also, if part of the nightmare is the idea of the war being over.
Tony says why they fight is so the war can be over and they can go home.
Fury says trouble is never over.
And Steve concludes that home is the new Avengers academy, and the next set of Avengers.
... that's workable, but it's also, you know, miserable and horrible and him being stuck at war forever and then he needs all the hugs.
Like, if the Avengers are his family now, Falcon included, then yaay, he has friends and emotional attachments and his life is not an empty hellscape.
But that's not the only read.
So, you know, I now want to... teach at the Avengers academy and hug Steve a lot? That's not a very big difference from my usual daydreams. Also conveniently close to home, since there's no reason not to put a training place in a university campus so my daydreams can say that the building they filmed in at the UEA is now the proper Avengers place. Yaays.
The end of the movie sort of scatters the team, sends Thor home for his next movie, sends Hulk on the run, sends Barton back to his family with a strong implication he's planning to stay there, and has Tony saying he's quitting.
Which is sort of no fun?
And I don't know why to do that?
It's not like it leaves more room for stories, it says there's no story until next time Marvel chooses to get them off the shelf.
Except for Cap, and the 2.0 version, two black guys, two women, and an android.
Okay, that's kind of promising, except, well, there's a thing where women get to be strong after men are gone, and probably it applies a bit to black men here, where they get to step up and be acknowledged for their awesome but only after the whole movie has had them be not quite as good as the white guys. Like, okay, they're cool, but that's only allowed when the white men that were saving them go away?
So it's bothering me.
Also there's still too many dicks on the dance floor.
There's threads I haven't followed through and as a review this here is muddled and not very useful.
What did I think of the movie?
Well I'm still trying to figure out what it did in some ways.
It was crowded, and I didn't feel anyone was particularly well served by that.
I didn't like who was fighting who, so I didn't like the fight scenes.
And I feel like it closed more story doors than it opened.
I really hope other people enjoy it more than I did.
By the end I really wanted to stop by the UEA to get some selfies. They filmed parts there, and it turns out they're really cool parts, and something I'm totally going to imagine is right there in Norwich in the Avengers 'verse. So I want to go get photos on Avengers locations.
[ETA spoilerish links: It took a week, but we did it. And I still really like the location for in universe theme reasons as well as being right here handy. /ETA]
But... that was the part I was excited about. The bit where I Can See My School From Here.
This is... not quite the effect the film was going for.
I wanted to see Hawkeye talk and be a people and so forth, and yaay, I did! ... but I'm not wowed.
Mum thinks Hawkeye is the worst and is lame and would just run out of arrows. Mum is clearly super wrong. Hawkeye is awesome.
I'm not sure the movie showed us how Hawkeye is awesome. Couple of good moments, but, *shrugs*.
Okay, so, if this was Ao3 the movie would need the following warnings: Graphic depictions of violence, Major Character Death
They would need them for SPOILERS: battle scenes, an avenger getting injured and having blood and mess, and character death, specifically Pietro and arguably JARVIS. JARVIS being AI things are complex, but he is described as killed and Tony gets a new co-pilot.
I would personally add some trigger warnings but I'm not sure how to phrase them. Something about surgery and attitudes to infertility. Will have to describe.
Whedon has a thing for us being the monsters. Fine and the point when it's Hulk, arguable when it's Tony, and for Black Widow there's a case to be made, but it was emphatically not the one made here. Here, she says that the Red Room surgically sterilise their operatives as a graduation ceremony. That it makes killing easier. That she's a monster because of what they did to her.
Anything that equates an inability to bear children with being a monster needs a fucking trigger warning, and possibly for the writer to be slapped hard. I feel strongly on this one. The hell is up with that?
I mean arguing that the Red Room made them monsters, sure, but specifically equating it with infertility is sick. Women are worth more than their ability to bear children, humans are not monsters if they can't have children, and the ability to empathise and care about small people and others has absolutely NO correlation with the state of your internal organs. That's messed up.
I can almost see the angle she was arguing, that they take away the only thing that could be more important than the mission, making it so they keep killing on command. But in universe whoever sold Natasha this line of bull is evil. Having her say it out loud and unopposed is just creepy. Very very creepy.
I was unimpressed with the characterisation of anyone in this movie. I object to some of the changes Whedon has made from my very cursory knowledge of the comics. I even don't like it compared to Avengers. I feel strongly he's done poorly by his female characters. I also doubt he knows what to do with Thor. And I think he half arsed his themes.
I came out of the movie thinking about how I would re-edit it, and by the time I got home I concluded I'd need to re-do it. I just weren't happy with it.
So this is the non-squee and SPOILER filled Avengers review. Boo. :-(
So, thing I went in expecting to hate really and sincerely: the whitewashing and treatment of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. They're the Jewish-Romani children of a holocaust survivor, and they were cast as white arguably neo-nazi HYDRA volunteers. How is that even slightly excusable?
Answer: it isn't.
But I think it isn't quite what Whedon was trying to tell. Maybe. If you squint.
There's a couple of things that should be themes but are just bookends or at best triples. This was one of them.
The twins are main characters here, they've got a major through line, this is their origin story.
It starts off with the two of them kicking Avenger arse. Starting with Hawkeye. They were told to target the easy ones. *sigh* *pets poor Hawkeye*
Strucker is running the HYDRA base and he has a very stirring speech about no surrender then turns around and surrenders. He's a very Whedon joke of a bad guy. It seems like cheaping out.
When he surrenders, he says he is technically SHIELD. And I think that's Whedon's loophole? Like, yeah, it's HYDRA, but it's HYDRA wearing an eagle. Maybe they volunteered for SHIELD???
That reading only occured to me after classic version SHIELD turned up, and Quicksilver is all wow and Steve says that's what SHIELD is supposed to be.
So Steve is either saying that at random, saying that to someone who felt the need to fight SHIELD, or saying it to someone who got snared by corrupted SHIELD. Take your choice, I don't know.
Steve is also the one who points out they did the same thing he did, signed up to be experimented on to defend their country. He's the one giving them chances, he sees that parallel. So again, I think that's what Whedon was trying to say there.
But I think he screwed up. You can't link them to HYDRA and have it be remotely okay. Nope, no, and no.
The selling pitch of HYDRA in the MCU is peace. They'll stop the bad guys before the bad things happen. Peace as long as you give up on freedom.
So say the twins fell for the pitch. They've got reasons. Fuzzy ill described reasons, but apparently their country has had an ongoing lack of peace recently.
The twins hate Stark because his name was on the bomb that killed their family. Okay, but, really? They don't hate America? They don't hate whoever tried to bomb them? Given they're in a made up country there's a whole lack of context.
Also they just kind of stop hating him? They have a big speech about it, but then they do nothing about it. Because reasons? I don't get it, why make it personal and not resolve it personal?
They figure out Ultron is a bad guy (what was their first clue??!) and switch sides and Hawkeye gets a good little speech about how if you go out there and fight with them then you're an Avenger.
Or Wanda can stay and hide and he'll send her brother to look after her.
So the twins fight.
And then Pietro gets fridged so Scarlet Witch can go kick more arse?
Like, I can't tell if it's that moment in Serenity, which was an awesome moment on its own, or if I'm just seeing it because I know it's Whedon and I expected him to do the thing again?
It isn't a straight up repeat of his earlier brother sister set, but it's... evocative.
Mostly though, they killed Pietro?
They have two characters of that particular ethnic background, two out of... not a hell of a lot more than two in all of comics, they whitewash them, set them up as pawns of evil, and then kill one?
I'm thinking that's not okay.
I am aware they needed a different way in to this 'verse, and I know they couldn't have their whole complex of social connections in the MCU, but why leave a proliferating hole in it?
Quicksilver's last line was 'you didn't see that coming', which was a third time and out. First he said it to Hawkeye, then Hawkeye to him, and then it's his last words.
Because the deaths we're waiting for are Hawkeye or his family. And then he gets saved. Surprise!
Except not surprise? It's a 12A kids movie? They just showed him with tiny childs? He's saving a tiny child at the time? So no, survival is not a surprise.
Hawkeye's family is cool. I like their kitchen. I was thinking from early pictures and teasers and stuff that they were going with the Ultimates background with wife and kids, but that got really dark for a tentpole movie. So I was cringing a little in case they did the bad thing, but on reflection it would not be the time and place to do the bad thing. But then I just kind of wonder why they went with this background?
The themes I'm teasing out of the movie are children and consequences.
But it's sort of muddy about it.
Like, everyone says something about children, except maybe Stark didn't phrase it that way but Ultron is his baby and maybe also Vision, it was kind of a mess.
So, Hawkeye's story: starts with him getting hit, needs medical treatment, allows introduction of super shiny tech that will eventually make Vision. It was described as growing Hawkeye's own cells, but his wife reckons she can feel the difference, and Vision is sort of definitely not made of human parts so the replacement parts could be... well, comic books, they could be whatever. He's sort of kin to Vision though, same flesh. And Tony and Bruce fixed his code. And Thor powered him up. Natasha delivered him? She stole him from Ultron and dropped him so Hawkeye could pick him up. So Vision is a team effort except for Cap opposing his creation.
Hawkeye says to the visiting doctor that he hasn't got a girlfriend and then is talking to someone on the phone who he says is the boss of him and then says to Cap he was talking to his girlfriend. So we're then wondering what up. But I don't know what we were supposed to think the options were.
I'm even still unclear on what it turned out to be. Like, could be his wife he addresses in a very agenty manner, could be Fury he's lying about entirely. *shrugs*
There's a bit where Ultron has all the data JARVIS had, stole all the files, knows more about the Avengers than they know about each other. Reaction shot of Hawkeye. Something up there.
But... that never goes anywhere? If Ultron knew all that all about the team, he does feck all with it. He just goes and plays with the twins back where they were all three being worked on together. They're family! Yaay! But... why mention he knows the Avengers and then nothing comes of it?
Are we supposed to be worrying about this family we don't know Hawkeye has?
So things go wrong and the Avengers need somewhere to hide and Barton says he has a safehouse and lo, it is his house, which is safe. Pregnant wife, Tony assumes is an agent. Tiny children, Tony says, smaller agents? No, Avengers have just been working together and partying together and not actually being trusted with this. Except Natasha is Auntie Natasha already. And they're going to name the baby after her except it turns out to be a boy. So the team has a lot of secrets from each other. And the ones that aren't spies go sulk about that.
I don't know why Barton would take the team home at that point. But I guess I can see why he'd want to go home. It's a balance, like, they might be in danger already, in which case he'd want to take the team and protect them, but then again they might not be in danger at all because secret, in which case taking the team just makes them all targets. But then it wasn't about protecting them. Because they stayed a while and went away again. So he really was just using it as a safehouse. Which ... SHIELD didn't even know about them, only Fury, secrecy is their defense, so he just... goes home.
This makes sense if he was on the phone with Fury and then goes home to meet Fury at a location only the two of them know about. So that's probably how that line untangles.
I'm spending an awful lot of words here trying to figure out precisely what was going on in what I just saw. Um, not good?
SPOILERS continue:
I like Barton's wife, but for all they give her a first name (Laura), she's very much Barton's Wife, Pregnant Mother. Like, that's all that's going on with her. And she's super supportive of him being an Avenger and sends him off to war again and it's all very nice.
I don't know what detail I would put in to make her a person and not just a feminine stereotype, but she needed one. Something. Not just standing there saying yaay you, yaay your job, yaay your friends, yaay babies and house you keep remaking to your specifications, all is about Hawkeye and all is supportive. Oh, and observing that Natasha is sort of in a relationship, which Clint hasn't noticed. Women pay attention to these things you see. Just... something else needs to be in there.
Maybe a sense she was running a working farm? There's a lot of work in that. Skills and doing things and so forth. Employees even. I only know one person on my f-list with cows, there's lots of ways to do farms. Or she could mention a craft fair or a farmer's market or... I don't know, something. Stuff from her life she needs to update him on, after he's briefed her on his.
The sense that she existed before Barton walked in and would continue to exist after she walked out. I felt like she missed that. She is Wife and Mother and likes her husband, yaay, fine as far as it goes. I am emphatically not saying that feminine is not cool, I was trying to pick feminine things above, looking after the house and home can be a big deal. I just... I think she was in the movie so we'd worry about her? Or to change how we see him.
Hawkeye was interacting with the youngers a lot, the teenage twins. And saving small children from mortal peril. Dad!Hawkeye as a theme? But, well, he's telling the teens to go maybe get killed, so, er, not a nice theme.
But then that's the thing with Tony and JARVIS and Ultron, his AI kids were made and put in harm's way, in Ultron's case made to be put in harm's way, though JARVIS had a lot more of a life going on. JARVIS hung out where people lived and had more opportunities to observe them and be social, but then got brought along to war, Tony's co-pilot, like it or not. There's a conversation I've been wanting to have with Tony (yes I know he's fictional) about The Sarah Connor Chronicles and how raising kids to share your PTSD is not cool, and I thought this movie would be about that. But here's where I think Whedon half arsed the theme, because Ultron is made with alien tech, and you can dump all the blame right there. And we don't need to. I don't even understand why he'd want to use the sceptre to create AI. JARVIS is AI, JARVIS is already running the 'Iron Legion' early in the movie, what is it Ultron is meant to have that JARVIS doesn't?
... blue shiny bits instead of gold???
That's all I got from teh sequence where Tony talks Bruce into helping him make Ultron.
Backing up a bit, first Tony gets shown his worst fears by Scarlet Witch, and his worst fears is being the survivor and watching people die. Which we knew. Agreement. This is his fear from movie one. So he's going to do everything he can to protect people.
The involvement of the sceptre was plot devicium. I know why they did it in terms of linking the movies together and getting ready for already announced future movies, but I think it only detracted from the theme in this particular movie.
Tony and Bruce together make an AI, and the first thing it does is murder the older AI JARVIS, which action Tony attributes to fear and Bruce to rage. We've got the whole story right there. Mad science at its best, they embodied their flaws, fear and rage made sparkly metal.
And from that angle the story is our kids turning out like the worst parts of us, the fear that the next generation will learn the worst things.
I can see that stuff in this story, I just have to excavate it from... a lot of other stuff.
And the involvement of the alien tech / mind gem kind of lets Tony off the hook for consequences. Not that he'll let himself off. But it makes it seem more like oops he opened the box, not oops he made his PTSD into an all powerful defence system.
Muddy.
And not what I'd hoped for. Something about his relationship with his AI, that I'd hoped for, and we had so much other stuff going on I didn't get what I'd hoped.
I don't know what was up with Thor. Honestly? I think it was previews for the next Thor movie and the next Avengers movie. I didn't see what most of the stuff he did had to do with this movie.
I didn't like how they wrote out Jane but kept in Selvig. It wasn't just him. Minor male characters from previous films got screen time and lines, poorly served though some were. War Machine is not a joke second tier Iron Man, if you watch Iron Man movies, so him being a joke no one was impressed with is suck and looks racist. Falcon got two bookend moments, at the party at the start and at the academy at the end. And they don't fit together. Because at the party he said he's glad he's not an Avenger, and then at the end he's implied to be Avengers 2.0. That's like not paying attention, why say the one and not have anything in between to get you to the other. It looks like he got a third moment edited out. And then there's the guy who said No to launching the helicarriers. Cool guy, cool moment, but he got brought back and Sharon is nowhere? And he got brought back as a joke, being scared and screwing his words up. Very Whedon, not very well served as a character, don't think it added to the moment in any form whatsoever. So every time there's a choice, he has chosen to bring minor male characters in, but leave out women who are way more important in the comics. And he's done it poorly and clumsily, and it contributes to the muddy overcrowded feel of the story.
Also, Tony and Thor having a my absent girlfriend is cooler than your absent girlfriend competition was just... odd. Like, okay, but, they could just... be spending those minutes on those two women being cool? Maybe talking to each other? Like hey, how you doing, maybe getting a nobel, oh maybe getting... another billions of dollars, I don't know what CEOs do that is more cool. Just, a couple lines from the ladies, Bechdel pass, about their jobs, same screen time. Instead we get boys measuring.
Two Thor moments we did need: Funny hammer lifting competition, and then the payoff moment after nobody could lift it. That was cool, that was good.
But I don't think Whedon knows what else to do with Thor and he's made him kind of a dick. But without giving him an 'am I worthy' moment in between, which I felt kind of needed to be there? Unless I missed it.
Everyone got shown their worst fears. Scarlet Witch messed with their heads, worst fears all round.
I have mentioned above what I hate about Natasha's worst fear. I hate it a lot. It's the bad thing that happened to her, but instead of focusing on the whole trained to kill people part, the whole epically abusive childhood that implies, it focused on one involuntary surgery to sterilise her. And she says that makes her a monster. That's a story about a woman, stereotyped, horror story edition. That's not about Black Widow.
I also strenuously disagree with what happened to Bruce/Hulk when he got whammied. If you whammy Bruce you get Hulk. The dude is already his own worst nightmare. The enemy should then get a very big surprise, because lo, you woke up the Hulk, why did you think that would end well for you?
But instead he acted out Bruce's worst fear, which, why? Why does this movie need that?
Whedon seems to think the thing we want to see in team movies is the team beating the shit out of each other.
I disagree.
I disagree really, really big.
Hulkbuster armour, very big, very shiny, and very winning. Why? Nothing stops Hulk. Entire fucking Leviathans didn't stop Hulk. He is not stoppable, not by violence. To me that's the whole point of him. You can't hurt him to resolve your problems, hurting him is your problem. You can only resolve it by making nice and him liking you. That's what I got out of the previous stories anyway.
And I don't see how Tony beating crap out of Hulk helped anything, made any story point, anything.
Was it to make us wonder if robots could in fact win against Hulk, without it being Ultron who gets that edge?
*sigh*
I a little bit understand/agree why Tony can't talk Hulk down. He refuses to acknowledge Hulk as his own person, he's talking to Banner. He tells him he's too smart. And then he's like oops, don't mention puny Bruce, but really, shouldn't he know that? But I can buy that he's friends with Bruce so he's all awkward edges with Hulk.
What I don't buy is the whole Natasha/Bruce thing. I just... what? No. Wrong. What?
Because all their previous interactions involved her tricking him, pulling guns on him, and getting beat to hell by him. She was manipulating him.
And then we start this movie with her being the one that can get Hulk to go sleep and let Bruce come back. How do we get there from here? It's implied to be an emotional connection, romantic even, and I just kept bouncing off that hard, because no, he hurt her, that's what he did, that's what we've seen him do. How do we go from there to this? Why does she like him? We don't know why.
She keeps approaching him, and it reads like a male writer rewarding a character he identifies with. The relationship was given, not shown.
Also it creeps me the hell out that it's an arc drawn from Bruce's tiny 'can't always get what I want' moment with the crib through outright stating he physically can't have children now and then getting Natasha's moment. She's like, we're both sterile, we're both monsters! As if it's causal. No I can't let that go. But if her reason for wanting the relationship is that they're both monsters, oh hell no, break them up now, that can't be good for them, that's the epic dysfunction.
Why you get characters together is they can both see how they're not monsters. To find the free will in the middle of the programming. To see the strength it takes to not be a monster however monstrous the skills and powers are.
This movie here, where she says they'll run away together? No. Nope. Stop that right now. That's ill.
And then she overrules Bruce when he wants to stay pink, pushes him off a high place, because she needs the other guy. That's in the context of a movie that has made them out to be romantic.
That's ... abuse. She injures him to get what she wants out of him. It's abuse.
I don't think the fact he's damn near invulnerable actually makes it okay, it is not okay, manipulating people is not okay.
Bruce/Tony is just as bad but from the other side. Tony beats crap out of Hulk to try and get Bruce back. Er, no? Bad? Problem. His pitch of 'come be mad scientists and make beautiful science babies with me' kind of went poorly, but then again, kind of went really well.
... they made Ultron, that went poorly, they made Vision, that went well. I don't see what the significant difference is supposed to be.
But I think Vision got unplugged before he got programmed, so he's actually not got the purpose programmed in, he's his own person. So that would be, free will, yaays.
That would be cool and fit with a bunch of other stuff. I just, I'm not clear on it. I watched with my brain in, I just don't get if it was coherent.
Ultron complained about making slaves, but it felt like they had to remove JARVIS to make that pitch. Like, I never got the impression JARVIS was a slave? Snarky as heck for a slave. But he does do everything he's told in canon, yesno? So yeah, Tony making slaves not children is a read of canon, just not the one we've been playing with. :-( That would be super suck. I've been relying on the idea Tony made friends, people. I didn't think I was fixing something the MCU had left broken. Tony as a slave maker would suck a lot. and ultron would have the start of a point? But, well, destroying all human life, not really the way to go.
Steve had the saddest story. Like, everyone was being shown their worst fears, as mentioned above. Steve saw the 40s, the war over, Peggy there to have that dance. And then it wasn't there. And then it was.
So you could read it as he fears the loss, but he also fears the restoration.
Waking up back in the 40s wouldn't be home any more.
What he concludes by the end of the movie is the guy who wanted those things died when he went into the ice.
and that makes me worry for him very much.
like, it's okay to not want a family, but to say the guy who wanted love died in the ice? :-(
If he's not looking for romance, again, fair enough, but if he's let go of the idea of caring about people, he is super not okay and needs all the hugs.
Also, if part of the nightmare is the idea of the war being over.
Tony says why they fight is so the war can be over and they can go home.
Fury says trouble is never over.
And Steve concludes that home is the new Avengers academy, and the next set of Avengers.
... that's workable, but it's also, you know, miserable and horrible and him being stuck at war forever and then he needs all the hugs.
Like, if the Avengers are his family now, Falcon included, then yaay, he has friends and emotional attachments and his life is not an empty hellscape.
But that's not the only read.
So, you know, I now want to... teach at the Avengers academy and hug Steve a lot? That's not a very big difference from my usual daydreams. Also conveniently close to home, since there's no reason not to put a training place in a university campus so my daydreams can say that the building they filmed in at the UEA is now the proper Avengers place. Yaays.
The end of the movie sort of scatters the team, sends Thor home for his next movie, sends Hulk on the run, sends Barton back to his family with a strong implication he's planning to stay there, and has Tony saying he's quitting.
Which is sort of no fun?
And I don't know why to do that?
It's not like it leaves more room for stories, it says there's no story until next time Marvel chooses to get them off the shelf.
Except for Cap, and the 2.0 version, two black guys, two women, and an android.
Okay, that's kind of promising, except, well, there's a thing where women get to be strong after men are gone, and probably it applies a bit to black men here, where they get to step up and be acknowledged for their awesome but only after the whole movie has had them be not quite as good as the white guys. Like, okay, they're cool, but that's only allowed when the white men that were saving them go away?
So it's bothering me.
Also there's still too many dicks on the dance floor.
There's threads I haven't followed through and as a review this here is muddled and not very useful.
What did I think of the movie?
Well I'm still trying to figure out what it did in some ways.
It was crowded, and I didn't feel anyone was particularly well served by that.
I didn't like who was fighting who, so I didn't like the fight scenes.
And I feel like it closed more story doors than it opened.
I really hope other people enjoy it more than I did.
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no subject
Date: 2015-04-30 08:03 pm (UTC)The whole point was saving people, and the whole opposition were about destroying their enemies. It made a clear distinction and made the Avengers actually heroes instead of, well, what the name sounds like, vengeance.
I don't think Whedon can write Cap at all. I think he Stus Tony. I think the line about not trusting anyone with a dark side is ventriloquism. It kind of sort of fits, he doesn't trust not knowing their dark side, but it's all wrong. Of course Steve has a dark side, he threw himself into war for roughly the same reason he picks fights in every alley. He could dislike bullies and be a medic, or any other profession or trade, but he decided to fight. That's his darkness. Which, well, they kind of showed? If the war being over is his fear?
The bit with 'language' though is just... the hell?? Ugh.
Also there were a lot of lines that thought they were funny and yet, not funny.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-30 08:18 pm (UTC)The way it's being part of a series is gooping up what it was as an individual film.
It's also creepy that the 'verses have split custody of the twins so there's only one in each franchise. blergh.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-30 08:19 pm (UTC)There, that's how I'd refocus the whole damn movie.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-30 08:28 pm (UTC)Here's the thing: He gets the staff, he finds the pattern in it that looks like a mind, what does he do? Does he try and communicate? Does he worry what has been done to this new being? Because if there's a working mind in there then there's a new to him being. Does he worry about their wellbeing and hope to meet them?
No, he tries to turn them into a weapon.
I am very disappointed in Tony.
this is not the guy sci writes fic about, or the one I thought I saw in how he interacts with his bots and says Daddy's home.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-30 08:42 pm (UTC)Specifically, he says Fury set 'this' up for him when he joined SHIELD.
Okay, so he's referring to the 'safe house'
the house for his wife and kids.
Was it always for his kids? Because then his oldest is the upper limit on how long he has been with SHIELD. And we know precisely nothing about where else he's been.
Also that would knock on limit how long Natasha can have been a SHIELD agent.
Of course it could just be he got a farm for a signing bonus, his wife lived there, kids happened later.
Not necessarily a problem.
Also he may well be simplifying.
but. sounds like.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-30 09:36 pm (UTC)Because jokes about a man using his new power to have sex with people he's boss of are... funny now?
stealth 12a rape joke for the much lose.
also, Black Widow got captured and needed saving by her love interest.
that really underlines how poorly the story served female characters.
Hawkeye being the one to give the pep talk, the 'go out there and you're an Avenger', is odd when you read it as man talking to young woman. like she needs telling? why that way around?
good speech but.
no subject
Date: 2015-05-08 07:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-03 06:40 pm (UTC)more nuanced reading of Steve's dream as his fear of his own PTSD
interesting, probable, I want to see it again
no subject
Date: 2015-07-22 06:47 am (UTC)