beccaelizabeth: my Watcher tattoo in blue, plus Be in red Buffy style font (Default)
[personal profile] beccaelizabeth
I've seen some pretty ridiculous commentary on the new Marvel trailer.

Mostly I've seen complaints that if you're going to do a film about how [issue] divides the eternal friendship of Captain America and Iron Man then it helps if you have, first, shown that they're friends.

That's kind of fair, it only gets ridiculous when people are turning it into deep psychological readings of Tony Stark that somehow leave out one of his most loyal friends and then say he's the one that doesn't know what friendship is.

Thing is, it's also reading in the wrong mode. It's reading the films with a TV hat on.

And yeah, okay, we've been watching these since 2008, we've got a bunch of 'episodes' here, we've got a feeling like we're on the 7th season of something epic.

But they are not television.

On television, if you want to break up an epic friendship, you devote a bunch of episodes to that friendship.

In a movie, you have one scene at a party (show they have fun together), one scene of working together (in our genres, show they save each other's lives), and one guy say 'we're friends'.

That's how they set up Rhodey. I mean, in Iron Man, he hung out with Tony getting drunk, then he turned up to save him in the desert, and then we know that when they have a falling out, that's serious, that's one of Tony's best friends having a falling out right there.

So when the movie says Cap and Iron Man are friends? Just look at how Age of Ultron set that up. They had a save each other's lives day at the office. They had a party, social together. Then when Cap makes sad frown faces at Tony, it's because they're friends, and Tony did a thing that was against that.

So when the next movie has them have a falling out? They're probably going to start with scenes of them working together, maybe have a social bit, and then boom, big argue.

And because that's a movie, we're supposed to extrapolate from those two scenes.

Because a TV series will show you a hundred days in the life, but a movie will show you the most important day in their lives, and whatever came before that, we have to fill in quickly in the establishing bit at the start of the movie.



The thing with comic book movies is we're so used to having decades of canon to draw on we bring the wrong toolkit and then complain the movie didn't do the thing. The movie did the thing, in movie language.

I'll grant it didn't make them close unto slashiness like it did Tony/Rhodey or Cap/Falcon, but, it did make them friends.

Date: 2015-11-26 11:46 pm (UTC)
baronjanus: I was searching for the answer, it turns out it's rock and roll. Hugh Dillon Works Well With Others (Marvel - Hulk Bruce fannish)
From: [personal profile] baronjanus
one scene at a party

YES YES THIS

extrapolate

FUCKIN EXACTLY

okay is this thing on tumblr? link me. I have a need. This is important. This is what I've been trying to say and you said.

Date: 2015-11-27 11:13 pm (UTC)
baronjanus: I was searching for the answer, it turns out it's rock and roll. Hugh Dillon Works Well With Others (Default)
From: [personal profile] baronjanus
Thanks.
You're not gonna post it? Can I quote a couple of lines in the linking?

Date: 2015-11-28 02:44 pm (UTC)
baronjanus: Wolf shadow over blue crystals (0 wolf blue grief)
From: [personal profile] baronjanus
To me they're both kinda screaming into the void, but I do it anyway :)

Date: 2015-11-27 03:08 am (UTC)
From: [personal profile] philippos42
Well said!

Date: 2015-11-26 03:53 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ericadawn16.livejournal.com

I think part of the problem is that it's a teaser trailer that makes it seem like the whole conflict is about Bucky when the teaser didn't even show the actual two villains in the film.

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beccaelizabeth: my Watcher tattoo in blue, plus Be in red Buffy style font (Default)
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