Age of Ultron
So I finally saw the movie, and, uhm... it’s a movie. Yup. Moving images on the screen, uh-huh.
I’m ok with shaky premise, I am. It’s a summer blockbuster, realistic is this dream we had once upon a BBQ. THAT SAID.
All the good scenes were in the trailer. The entire rest of the movie was things blowing up. No, really, this film is about 80% explosions, 15% close-up violence, and 5% dialogue. And about half of that last bit was “WTF you have kids?”
Which probably explains why it just wasn’t as much fun as the last one. (by which I mean Avengers; I have different standards for the individual vs. ensemble films, so it doesn’t seem fair to compare AoU to CA:tWS) The entire Hulk-buster fight could have been cut; I wouldn’t have missed it. Chasing the android body, also about twice as long as it needed to be. Final confrontation with Ultron.... hard to say. Might have been the right length in a film balanced more like Avengers, with mostly interpersonal conflict and one big ‘blow the SFX budget’ at the end. In this one? About three times longer than desired.
I was surprised how early JARVIS got taken out - and that was a more emotional ‘death’ than Pietro’s, honestly - but I was distinctly underwhelmed by Vision. And the hammer thing failed as both a moving moment and a gag, probably because it was trying to do both.
I would have liked the twins to get way more screentime; they felt really underdeveloped. So was Ultron, for that matter. But especially given they were gonna kill off Pietro and bring Wanda back for later films, we should have gotten enough development to give a shit and it just... didn’t happen.
The Nat/Bruce thing... was not as annoying as I had been led to believe. They were kinda cute in the beginning? And then it just kinda scrambled and stopped making sense. The ‘monster’ scene everyone is complaining about, I dunno. It did not bother me at all until the very last line (”still think you’re the only monster”) and I’m not convinced it was meant to be a straight line from sterilization = monstrous. I think it was a (really clumsy, but that’s of a piece with this film) reference to her being taught not to care about anything, anyone, except the mission.
Thor’s entire plotline didn’t make a lick of sense; he was in some totally different movie. Cap’s fear dream didn’t make much sense either, especially as a fear-dream. Yeah, we saw some wounded/dying soldiers in among the dancing, but on the whole it was... uhm? And Bruce Hulking would have been a lot better if we’d seen some of what HIS fear-dream looked like.
I also spent a lot of time noticing collateral damage and civilian casualties in this one. Yeah, it’s an action flick and that kinda comes with the territory, but in Avengers we saw quite a bit of protecting civilians and trying (sometimes and not often successfully) to minimize damages. In this one, with the exception of the city evac at the end, there didn’t seem to be any concern at all (Tony’s one line about the fund doesn’t count) for their surroundings. That doesn’t feel much like the team we knew.
Speaking of the team, what the hell was that with the making of Vision scene? That was a hot mess of bad writing; the team tension was believable in the wake of Ultron, but the whole punch/shoot/fight thing just... like, it’s ok to have more that 30 seconds without an action scene? Really it is.
Also, on the whole, it lacked a sense of peril. It purported to bring the team to their lowest point, to tear them down and apart, and to risk the entire world’s fate, but despite the robot armies crawling out of the rubble (did we learn nothing from how bad I, Robot was?) it never really felt like Our Heroes were in any danger of losing, never mind mortal peril.
I’m ok with shaky premise, I am. It’s a summer blockbuster, realistic is this dream we had once upon a BBQ. THAT SAID.
All the good scenes were in the trailer. The entire rest of the movie was things blowing up. No, really, this film is about 80% explosions, 15% close-up violence, and 5% dialogue. And about half of that last bit was “WTF you have kids?”
Which probably explains why it just wasn’t as much fun as the last one. (by which I mean Avengers; I have different standards for the individual vs. ensemble films, so it doesn’t seem fair to compare AoU to CA:tWS) The entire Hulk-buster fight could have been cut; I wouldn’t have missed it. Chasing the android body, also about twice as long as it needed to be. Final confrontation with Ultron.... hard to say. Might have been the right length in a film balanced more like Avengers, with mostly interpersonal conflict and one big ‘blow the SFX budget’ at the end. In this one? About three times longer than desired.
I was surprised how early JARVIS got taken out - and that was a more emotional ‘death’ than Pietro’s, honestly - but I was distinctly underwhelmed by Vision. And the hammer thing failed as both a moving moment and a gag, probably because it was trying to do both.
I would have liked the twins to get way more screentime; they felt really underdeveloped. So was Ultron, for that matter. But especially given they were gonna kill off Pietro and bring Wanda back for later films, we should have gotten enough development to give a shit and it just... didn’t happen.
The Nat/Bruce thing... was not as annoying as I had been led to believe. They were kinda cute in the beginning? And then it just kinda scrambled and stopped making sense. The ‘monster’ scene everyone is complaining about, I dunno. It did not bother me at all until the very last line (”still think you’re the only monster”) and I’m not convinced it was meant to be a straight line from sterilization = monstrous. I think it was a (really clumsy, but that’s of a piece with this film) reference to her being taught not to care about anything, anyone, except the mission.
Thor’s entire plotline didn’t make a lick of sense; he was in some totally different movie. Cap’s fear dream didn’t make much sense either, especially as a fear-dream. Yeah, we saw some wounded/dying soldiers in among the dancing, but on the whole it was... uhm? And Bruce Hulking would have been a lot better if we’d seen some of what HIS fear-dream looked like.
I also spent a lot of time noticing collateral damage and civilian casualties in this one. Yeah, it’s an action flick and that kinda comes with the territory, but in Avengers we saw quite a bit of protecting civilians and trying (sometimes and not often successfully) to minimize damages. In this one, with the exception of the city evac at the end, there didn’t seem to be any concern at all (Tony’s one line about the fund doesn’t count) for their surroundings. That doesn’t feel much like the team we knew.
Speaking of the team, what the hell was that with the making of Vision scene? That was a hot mess of bad writing; the team tension was believable in the wake of Ultron, but the whole punch/shoot/fight thing just... like, it’s ok to have more that 30 seconds without an action scene? Really it is.
Also, on the whole, it lacked a sense of peril. It purported to bring the team to their lowest point, to tear them down and apart, and to risk the entire world’s fate, but despite the robot armies crawling out of the rubble (did we learn nothing from how bad I, Robot was?) it never really felt like Our Heroes were in any danger of losing, never mind mortal peril.