We saw "Age of Ultron" and it was about what I expected

[drwex]

My mood is shite this morning so rather than try to do a weekend round-up right away I'll start with the media consumption posts.

Saturday night we took the kids to see "Avengers: Age of Ultron". It was neither as bad as I'd been led to believe nor as good as I would've hoped for. All the rest is spoilers...

Joss Whedon is, among other things, known for writing ensemble scripts. He made his name with ever-larger and often shifting casts of characters on Angel, Buffy, Dollhouse, and Firefly - not to mention Agents of Shield. So when the question comes up "How are they going to handle adding three new characters to the Avengers?" the answer is "It's Joss - it's what he does." In this movie he manages seven major characters and as many important minors with adept hand. Everyone gets good screen time and the ensemble clicks.

Overall I felt the critics had something of a point. The film nearly buckles under the weight of all the fights and the need for the action to be bigger and more explosive. Paradoxically, the fights lack impact. There's no sense that anything hangs on the big action bits and the outcomes are all foreordained. What saves the film is when the camera moves in close. Even when it's a close bit of conflict, the tight one- and two-shot sequences make this film. I remember saying something similar about the first Captain America and it's very true for this film. For example, I felt less emotional impact from the threat of a giant rock smashing into Earth than I did from watching Hulk put aside his anger to take a place with the team protecting the bomb trigger.

(Aside: kudos to the SFX team that manages to make Hulk clearly show Mark Ruffalo's face, however altered.)

The other things that saves this movie for me is its embedding in the richness of the characters. Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) gets an extraordinary amount of screen time and provides a human connection for the audience to empathize with. There's also the Black Widow/Hulk budding romance story, which is both brilliant in its execution and serves as a great foil for other characters to comment upon. The other characters are who they are, and that's not just a copy-paste from other stories, but a way for Ultron to understand them and use Scarlet Witch to attempt to destroy them. That they are who they are is integral to the story.

With all the good interpersonal interactions you'd think this film could manage to pass the Bechdel test. Nope. (ETA: in the comments it's pointed out that there is a meaningful exchange between Natasha and Clint's wife - technical pass.) Despite the larger cast, the reappearance of Agent Hill (Cobie Smulders), the presence of Black Widow/Natasha (Scarlett Johansson) and the introduction of a new female super-powered character in Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) I can't think of a single significant interaction among them. I absolutely adore the scene between Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch in the bombed-out building, and how it was set up by an earlier interaction. But you could easily see how Black Widow might have a thing or two to say to her. Doesn't happen.

Instead Joss sets up the women as "the people who know things" and "the people who tell the others what's going on." In stereotype presentations, women are often confined to maiden/mother/crone roles. But there's also a "wise woman" archetype and it's interesting to see how many of the women in this movie fit that.

As she did in Captain America, Natasha shows she understands people and what they want, what they fear, and how to get close to them. She drives the relationships with Banner and with Hulk. Her line about "...picking up after you boys" that you see in the previews makes a different kind of sense when you see what she does within the team. I hear she's slated to appear in the next Captain America movie and I'm looking forward to that.

Clint Barton's wife clearly is his advisor. She guides not just the family but also schools him in how to relate to his Avenger teammates. When Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch have their little tete-a-tete it makes WAY more sense because we've seen how Laura Barton set it up. Between Wanda and Pietro it's clear she's the cooler-headed and directive member of the pair. She discovers Ultron's plan and guides her brother.

Even the women who never appear on-screen are spoken about as leaders. Pepper Pots "has a company to run" - she's directing Stark Industries, and Jane Foster is apparently in high demand as a scientific consultant around the world. All good things, but I can't help hoping we'll get to see more direct interactions. Talking (well) about women is no substitute for talking (well) to them.

The other thing I wanted to call out from this movie was Thor. We started out the Marvel universe movie sequence seeing him as an arrogant god who needed to find his humanity. We've seen him lose his mother and that has to be hanging over him. In this movie he shows, without necessarily calling a lot of attention to it, how comfortable he's become with his place. Watch him tag-team with Captain America in the fight scenes, for example. Watch his reactions when the other team members can't lift Mjolnir and then when Vision does. He's also the only one with a broader view - he realizes that someone or something is behind what's going on and he realizes he may be the only one who can figure it out. The next Thor movie has been announced but I don't know how it's going to tie in. I would be surprised if it didn't, though the title (Ragnarok) makes it seem like it's going to be more epic battles and less of the story and character stuff I like.

Comments

[selenite.livejournal.com]

I loved it, but not for the fights. Hulk's big rampage was a chance for me to duck out for a moment.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

Yeah I got tired of hulks big rampage and honestly for the life of me I can't even remember how he got there to do it. Didn't they cut from a ship off Africa?

[elfy.livejournal.com]

Yes - and he was in a town in South-Africa when he smashed all the things...

[drwex]

Yeah the protracted Hulk rampage and Hulk vs Iron Man bits were the worst parts of the movie. It was already abundantly clear that Banner was deeply conflicted about the killing of bad guys in the initial fortress assault and when Black Widow shoves Banner into the pit was just about my favorite moment in the movie (OMG nonconsensual but so hot). I forgot to list that among my "moments in the movie when the women know what's needed/best" but it's totally in keeping with that theme.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

"I need the other guy" is one of my favorite lines.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

:)

[ricevermicelli.livejournal.com]

It's hot, and necessary, and it certainly explains why he goes off-grid after the evacuation.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

Cool! In conversation after the movie I posited that maybe it wasn't NY - we saw English on the police van but it could well have been South Africa. Was the town recognizable? (Still don't really understand how he got there unless it was a coastal town)

[coraline]

it was johannesburg (filmed in, though it was unclear whether it was supposed to be a city in wakanda), but it was supposed to be coastal and near where the quinnjet was...

[elfy.livejournal.com]

Good review, very much my thoughts :) (I've seen it earlier, somehow it came out in germany a week ahead).
Any thoughts on The Vision? :)

[drwex]

Several, but I'm on thin ice because I don't remember canon and had to ask my kids about it. So let me first talk about it in the movie context...

I like the character and the way he came to be. I like that they've fit him well into the story so far. I think it's going to be hard to manage him within the team but that's not so much about him as about the team getting too big. I do not expect to see Hawkeye in the next Avengers movie and I would not be surprised if Hulk wasn't there either. That opens up room for two, but they've got Scarlet Witch, War Machine, and Vision to fit in and none of them have had back-story movies. So all their synergy is going to have to come from in-Avengers development which is hard to do. Joss pulled off a LOT of it in this movie. If Vision has to share the screen with all the others he's going to get drowned out.

Now, from a canon/story perspective, it's clear he needs to be there as the wielder of that gem. I kind of wonder whether Loki's going to want it back or not since I totally expect Loki to get out of prison in the upcoming Thor movie. I'm also told there's another gem in Mjolnir but that would make things all kinds of awkward so I suspect they'll hand-wave that. So the Avengers are going to be in possession of one gem and I see it going one of two ways. Either they split the gems 2-2 and fight over the 3rd or it comes down to Thanos having 4 and then coming after the 5th, which centers the story on Vision. He seems (in this version of the Marvel universe) to be clever but not overly powerful.

What's not clear in either of these things is how they're going to play his character. He can potentially play the role of naif, able to comment on the team and humanity from an outsider's perspective or they could play him as the ultimate insider, with all the knowledge that Jarvis had accumulated. They played up his strength in the Net vs Ultron but I don't see that having a big future for him, so the question is what use is a guy who flies and shoots beams? OK I guess but what does he do that War Machine and Scarlet Witch don't do better? According to my kid in the comics he's got some powers to alter matter density - in theory that's how he shoved his arm through a robot and then re-solidified it to the robot's detriment - so that's maybe a thing. I think I'd rather see them play up the ability that the gem showed when in Loki's staff to affect the hearts and minds of people (except again he'll be treading on Scarlet Witch territory).

Does that help?

[fordprfct.livejournal.com]

I don't know whether this will affect your thoughts on how the gem situation will play out, but they established there are six gems in total, with the Collector's exposition and light display in Guardians of the Galaxy. On the Infinity Gauntlet, one fits over the knuckle of each finger/thumb, and the sixth is centered on the back of the hand.

The gems, as we have seen them so far:

Red - Reality Stone - "The Aether" - Held by The Collector
Blue - Space Stone - "The Tesseract" - Held by the Asgardians
Purple - Power Stone - No name given - Held by Nova Corps
Yellow - Mind Stone - No other name given - Held by Vision
Green - Not yet seen, name and location unknown
Orange - Not yet seen, name and location unknown

The two remaining stones are "Time" and "Soul".

[drwex]

I will have to quiz the kids about this as I thought there were five. Thor's line is "four of the stones are in play..." but I don't recall him giving a total number.

I also thought that the Tesseract was given to the The Collector and that it was the source of the stone he was playing with in Guardians of the Galaxy.

Pygment raised a question about timelines that I thought I knew the answer to but maybe don't now. Is GotG supposed to be contemporaneous with Avengers (in the movie universe) or not? I'm pretty sure that comic canon has GotG as time travelers from the far future but if that's true then how does the Tesseract wind up in Starlord's hand? (in the movie universe)

[ckd]

Star-Lord was brought from Earth in the 1980s as a child, and is an adult (physically; not making any promises about emotional maturity here :-) by the time of the movie's main action, which implies that it's in the MCU's "present day" or close to it (barring time travel or being frozen in the Arctic or whatever, of course).

[drwex]

Right, it's the time-travel bit that I'm not clear on. The comic-canon pretty clearly places GotG as a future group (I think). I believe that Starlord's mother knows who his father is and that she agreed to be "hidden" back in the past to raise their son in relative safety.

If the movie-canon changes that to make it all contemporaneous I can see that being easier for coherently bringing everything together, but it's not clear to me from watching the GotG movie.

[fordprfct.livejournal.com]

WARNING, VERY SPOILERY POST

GotG is reasonably contemporaneous with Avengers. Peter is taken in 1988, and the remainder of the film takes place 26 years later, so 2014. The first Avengers film was released in 2012, and didn't have a date named, but was presented as a "now".


Thor
In one scene where we are shown the vaults, you can see in the background the Infinity Gauntlet (minus stones, of course).

Thor: The Dark World
After capturing the Aether, the Asgardians take it to Taneleer Tivan, The Collector, for safe-keeping.
Tivan: If I may ask, why not keep it secure in your own vault?
Volstagg: The Tesseract is already on Asgard. It is not wise to keep two Infinity Stones so close together.
Tivan: That's very wise.
[...]
[handoff occurs, Asgardians leave]
Tivan: One down. Five to go.

Guardians of the Galaxy
When the Guardians bring the orb to The Collector, he provides some exposition while his machine opens the orb containing the purple gem.
Tivan: Oh, my new friends, before creation itself, there were six singularities, then the universe exploded into existence and the remnants of this system were forged into concentrated ingots... Infinity Stones.
[Picture behind him shows the six gems]

Big boom, then Star Lord takes back the gem, and runs. Ronan gets his hands on it, epic dance-off, bad-ass team moment, then Star Lord trolls Yondu, and gives the purple gem back to Nova Corps on Xandar.

Avengers: Age of Ultron
Scepter is shattered, yellow gem is placed in Vision, identified as the Mind Stone by Thor. Some might say that this shows that Loki was very much a loser, being unable to win a fight while having *two* Infinity Stones under his control. My opinion is that he is now exactly where he wants to be. (On the Asgardian throne, everybody thinks he is dead, and Thor doesn't want to rule.) (Loki has good plans. The assault on New York was not a good plan. Therefore, that wasn't his true plan.)

Thanos is tired of all this pussy-footing around with minions not following his script, takes out the Gauntlet, and declares his intent to go hunting.

[drwex]

OK, that's a great summary and reminded me of lots I'd forgotten. Thank you.

So, how does the Infinity Gauntlet get from the vaults on Asgard to Thanos's hands? I'm pretty sure we see him putting on the gauntlet at the end of A:AoU. (Also one of the best one-liners EVAR.). If Thanos somehow got the gauntlet out of that vault does that imply he also has the Tesseract?

It's not clear to me that Loki knew his scepter contained that gem. Ultron says something about "...not looking inside..." just before he pops the stone out so maybe Loki didn't? He certainly used its powers but not to their full extent. My kids tell me that in comic-canon the scepter (and presumably the stone it contained) was forged by the dwarves and given to Loki by Odin. So I can buy that Loki would not know the stone was in there.

I'm also unconvinced that movie-canon Loki is all that clever. His plans are often overridden by his ego or emotions. Thus, possibly dumb. Or rather, not dumb but he's a deceiver. He often seems not to have a back-up plan if people see through his deceptions. I had totally forgotten the ending that shows him on the throne of Asgard. I wonder what his back-up plan for THAT is.

[dpolicar]

Yeah, Thanos is definitely putting on a glove with places where the gems would go at the end of AoU. That might just be visual poetic license, though.

I think that in comics canon Loki's sceptre has nothing whatsoever to do with the Infinity Gems.

Neither did the Cosmic Cube, which is the thing the movie Tesseract is riffing on, though it's a lot more powerful in comics canon. (Which eventually was revealed to be a Shaper of Worlds egg, though I think Marvel has been desperately pretending that storyline never happened ever since.)

In general, Marvel is tying together a whole bunch of plot threads for the movies through the device of the Infinity Gems that in the comics are unrelated to each other and unrelated to the IGs. I have been impressed thus far with how smoothly they are doing so... the end result is actually way more coherent than the original comics canon it draws from.

Which admittedly isn't saying much.

[drwex]

I give a lot of credit here to Joss Whedon. He's been a comics nerd since FOREVER and he's suffered through the incoherence and constant retcons with the rest of us. Plus he's got experience managing diverging and crossing plot lines (Angel/Buffy most notably).

[dpolicar]

As near as I can figure it, the movie Vision is actually drawing from the comic canon of Adam Warlock.

[drwex]

Right! I knew he seemed other-familiar. In comic-canon Warlock is somehow involved in the Infinity Gauntlet stories but I forget how. I also remember him being something of a messianic character... ish. I remember that I was reading "Stranger in a Strange Land" around that time and Adam Warlock reminded me of Valentine Smith, too.

Gods, childhood memories I haven't dredged up in decades.

[dpolicar]

Yeah, Adam Warlock was totally a trippy psychedelic messianic kind of character... not particularly a VMS clone, but they're both definitely drawing from the same cultural meme-pool.

IIRC, he had a green Soul Gem in his forehead that was later retconned into being one of the Infinity Gems when that plot was created. (Canon Vizh doesn't have an Infinity Gem in his forehead, he just has a laser cannon there, because it looks cool and comics.) Warlock and Thanos have a whole backstory, too... I vaguely recall it being a time-loop thing where Warlock is his own worst enemy, or some such thing, but I may be confusing several plotlines.

IIRC, one of Adam Warlock's tribe was Gamora, whom we've recently seen in the Guardians of the Galaxy move. (Another one was a foulmouthed troll named Pip. I don't remember the others.)

The 60s and 70s have a lot to answer for.

[coraline]

remember, loki isn't currently IN prison -- he's replaced odin, as of the last time we saw him. i assume all hell is going to break loose on that front in the next thor movie.

[drwex]

Right, right. I had indeed forgotten that little bit. And yes, since the next Thor movie is subtitled "Ragnarok" I'm guessing that's exactly what goes down.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

Oh, but Thor's face when Steve just manages to shift Mjolnir a little bit and the palpable relief when it goes no further. One of my favourite moments in the movie.

I did think some of the Natasha/Bruce stuff and Clint's family felt a little "HEY, YOU REMEMBER THE NEW GUY, RIGHT?" (as TVTropes terms it)

[drwex]

Yes, props to Hemsworth for that bit of face-acting. It's well done.

Dammit you made me visit tvtropes. I escaped.

OK so it's clear that Clint's family is intended to be a secret he's kept from the rest of the team (except Natasha). I totally buy that. I disagree about Natasha/Bruce, though. I think you get hints of it from their very first meeting and her dialog with Fury clearly indicates that SHE thinks HE expected them to fall for each other. If that makes sense. Again, I buy it.

[sweetmmeblue.livejournal.com]

But what about all the angst and such between Clint and Nat in the previous movie, playing up as if they were supposed to be romantic potentials? He already had family in play at that time....

[drwex]

I don't think that's played romantic. They're the two most similar people on a team full of monsters and super-powered heroes. Neither of them has extraordinary powers, just training and talent. I think Captain America 2 clearly shows Nat is someone who's capable of playing close to another person without romance being part of it.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

Oh, see I felt (informed by comics canon) that it was totally romantic and Natasha and Clint were a thing (or maybe a past thing for MCU purposes?), whereas Ultron started off kind of ham-handedly making it very clear that they were not. As I termed it on elbows:
"HELLO CLINT! YOU ARE MY BEST FRIEND."
"HELLO NATASHA, WE ARE GOOD BUDDIES AND NOT AT ALL ROMANTIC!"

(Sorry for exposing you to the dangers of tvtropes. congrats on escaping! many try and fail.)

[drwex]

I may need to re-watch Avengers I to have a better opinion. I think some of the problem is how ham-fistedly Natasha was handled in this movie compared to previously where there was more room for viewer interpretation.

[ricevermicelli.livejournal.com]

If Clint and Natasha weren't romantic at all in Avengers Assemble, they sure fooled me. And Loki. That was a masterful piece of counter-interrogation Natasha was doing there, I guess, pretending that Loki was getting under her skin by poking at her connection with Barton. I took "Love is for children. I owe a debt." as evasion, not literal truth.

[drwex]

I got the sense that pretty much everything Natasha said or did to Loki was playing him. I thought that was the point of the whole "I'm doing an interrogation here" comment to Coulson. That said, see above comment to rmd.

[minkrose]

Total tangent, but I'm realising that the fanfic I've been reading has shaped my assumption that Clint & Nat are NOT together. I only have 3 or 4 authors I actually like, so I just read everything they write -- that does mean I'm not following specific pairings, and just end up with whatever those authors feel like writing. But while most of them do acknowledge a closeness with Clint & Nat, it's usually never sexual-present-tense. Usually, sexual in the past, or legit emotional/sexual poly (usually with Coulson). Most often, I see Clint paired with Coulson (and Nat with the Winter Soldier, which I believe also has some basis in canon, somewhere?)

Anyway, these are all people who know comics canon way better than I do, and it's interesting that most of them DON'T choose to put those two together as anything other than super-intense friends. But I have no idea how much that relates to actual comics canon.

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your thoughts on the movie. I wanted to see it, and Norman didn't; he was afraid it would be all fights with nothing interesting about the characters. Sounds like maybe I can drag him to it after all. :-)

[badseed1980.livejournal.com]

I am a total sucker for character interaction and backstory. Those are the reasons why I have become addicted to the MCU. Action can be fun, but as I get older, I find myself waiting for the fight scenes to be done so we can find out how the characters feel about them. I really enjoyed AOU. The pissing contest about whose girlfriend is the most accomplished that was mentioned in the OP almost made me squeal out loud. :)

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

I write Star Trek (TOS) fan fiction because I want to know how the characters feel about EVERYTHING, and if it wasn't in the original episode, I have to write it. So, yeah, I understand completely. :-)

Thanks for telling me about your reaction to the movie; that makes it all the more likely that I can get my husband to go to it. ;-)

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

(Aside: kudos to the SFX team that manages to make Hulk clearly show Mark Ruffalo's face, however altered.)

Absolutely agreed. It was something that kept striking me through the movie. Very well done.


With all the good interpersonal interactions you'd think this film could manage to pass the Bechdel test. Nope.

Actually, I thought it had. I remember a lovely little interaction between Nat and Clint's wife about the coming baby. They weren't talking about man, unless you consider the unexpected twist that the baby turns out to be a boy, which, I think, is a stretch and not in keeping with the spirit of the test. Or maybe I'm interpreting things incorrectly?

Regardless, it was a very believable and warm exchange that showed that they are good friends, very comfortable around each other and that Nat is very much a part of Clint's family life. I thought it was brilliant and gave the movie heart in the best places.

[drwex]

Yeah, OK, you're right. That's a technical pass.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

I read somewhere that they've apparently radically improved the motion capture/cgi for the Hulk so that they can capture both expression and movement in the same session, which lets Ruffalo do a lot more acting in his Hulk acting and lets them get more immediate feedback for additional takes.

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

And I believe that it was Andy Serkis who was the advisor on that, if I remember the movie credits correctly. He would know.

[minkrose]

Can I just say that I LOVE LOVE LOVE that Andy Serkis has become the go-to guy for this stuff? I mean, it's entirely deserved, and I feel like he should get SOMETHING out of flailing around in an icy stream in a body suit (which I can't find video of right now but it's in the LotR extras somewhere).

[tommy50702.livejournal.com]

It’s a middling movie that unfortunately came on the heels of “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “The Winter Soldier.”

[cynicale.livejournal.com]

Random stranger here(found your post through LJ Spotlight a few days ago), just wanted to say that I really enjoyed reading your take on the movie:)

[drwex]

Thank you and thanks for stopping by. You'll see there are a couple follow-up postings focusing specifically on the discussion (controversy?) over Black Widow.