I really miss the days when the weirdest thing science created was me

[sovay]

So first I had dinner at the Madrona Tree with gaudior and then we went to see Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) at the Capitol Theatre and then I banged one of my already sprained elbows into a bathroom stall door and walked most of the way home holding my arm and talking way too fast at Gaudior because of the adrenaline, so this is not a movie review; I don't have the typing capacity for it. You may consider these notes. I just want to get something down for posterity before my short-term memory shuts down for the night. [edit] As stated in the previous post, my ability to type shut down at the 2100-word mark and I went to bed. Finished this post in the afternoon, after seeing Buster Keaton's The Cameraman (1928) at the Somerville. Total spoilers everywhere, of course. For the Avengers, not Keaton.

It is increasingly difficult to talk about any of these movies as freestanding narratives than as installments in a serial and it doesn't help Age of Ultron's case that its first quarter-to-third really feels like someone jammed the back half of an unproduced sequel into the front end of the completed script. I understand it's supposed to start the audience in medias res, with a sense of continuing action rather than the artificial implication that our protagonists just put their lives on hold for three years, but it never quite feels like catching us up in the organic swing of the story; instead we get the unraveling denouement of a film that mostly existed in the end credits of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), some nicely improvisational down time in between adventures, and then the next one kicks off so abruptly, it catches the characters by plausible surprise and the audience not so much. I'm not saying I find it out of character for Tony Stark to leave a mad science experiment running unsupervised while he throws a party. There are ways in which that is the summary of Tony Stark's life. I just don't know what it would have hurt to open with the down time and fill in the backstory of the Maximoff twins in conversation or flashback (we even get a summary of their powers literally handed to Captain America; it's recap, but it needn't have been) instead of starting the clock with twenty minutes of video-game-style fight sequence and leaving the smaller moments of emotion or introspection to race alongside the Ultron plot and try to squish themselves in wherever someone was not getting actively walloped by an army of robots. Once the movie gets going, it's a relentless barrel of action. I can't tell if there were more thoughtful moments filmed and they got left on the cutting room floor or if they never even made it out of the shooting script; I miss them, either way. I miss the texture they give to the world, the three-dimensionality of characters who exist beyond hitting the marks of their narrative. This has been a complaint of mine as far back as Thor (2011) and I get that most audiences do not attend a blockbuster for the conversation, but when it's interesting conversation affecting the emotionally complex relationships of intelligent characters, I want as much of it as I can get and I don't want to have to rely on fandom to fill the gaps. Age of Ultron is more than two hours of movie and I'm not complaining about the length, but I wish someone had distributed it a little differently.

(One example: while it doesn't especially affect me one way or the other that Hawkeye has a family, other than a general amusement that it's a secret from all the other Avengers except Natasha—seriously, who expected her not to find out—I don't know why he gets that sensitive exploration of his home life when much more interesting configurations are sidelined. I appreciate the confirmation that Steve is still looking for Bucky; I'm glad that Tony's PTSD was not miraculously cured by having an entire movie about it; I'm still sorting my reactions to the pairing of Bruce and Natasha, but I genuinely like that their attraction raises questions of trust and safety and the definition of a monster in ways that the Bartons' relatively mainstream nuclear family does not, which makes it automatically more interesting to me. It's nice to know something about Clint in general, because he's the character of whom I have always had the least sense, but I'd still rather spend my time with Steve Rogers grappling with the twenty-first century or Natasha Romanoff grappling with her identity beyond the Red Room or Bruce Banner grappling with everything, himself included.)

There's also the issue of voice, which I cannot remember noticing so much in any prior Marvel movie. It may be a function of having finally accumulated enough canon onscreen that the differences between various writers' and directors' takes on the characters are perceptible, but it did nothing to ameliorate the feeling that Age of Ultron really needed one more draft before shooting. The Avengers (2012) surprised me by being, among other things, the first script I'd encountered by Joss Whedon where I didn't feel all the characters were channeling the same voice. Age of Ultron feels more like he's running up against the limits of his own archetypes. He writes a great Tony Stark. He's got the reflexive one-liners, the self-awareness, the interior monologue that frequently blurts into exterior and enough of the real fragility underneath the tossed-off flippancy of remarks like "It's been a long day—like, Eugene O'Neill long" that we believe how badly the Scarlet Witch's mind-meddling shakes him: it's what he sees in his nightmares anyway, the falling void of New York, the skeletal leviathans of the Chitauri gliding through an alien sky and he couldn't stop them, he couldn't save anyone, he never will. Tony's speech patterns are individual enough that we can recognize them in Ultron's off-kilter joviality, his pride and his distractability and his automatic running commentary blurred and distorted into something strangely humorless despite its self-satisfaction, smeared lead instead of mercury. We can even watch Tony recognize them, and look a little miffed at the unflattering mimicry: okay, but it sounds better when I say it, right? It totally sounds better when I say it. All of his creations mirror him one way or another, but Ultron isolates the worst parts and shines them back larger than life and twice as destructive, and Tony's not such a self-involved ass that he misses the metaphor.

Whedon never really has that sure a touch with anyone else in this film. He's good with the snarky side of Steve Rogers, the part of Captain America that will always be the pint-sized punk from Brooklyn who got in the face of bullies three times his size. When Maria expresses unthinking distaste that the orphaned, revenge-seeking Maximoffs volunteered for experimentation at the hands of HYDRA's Baron von Strucker, Steve's response is exactly as pointed and deadpan as it needs to be: "Right, what kind of monster would let a German scientist experiment on them to protect their country?" (See also the title of this post, which is delivered with the right combination of wistfulness and wryness.) Whedon's not as good at writing Steve as a straightforwardly good person and it shows. He confuses stiffness with righteousness with actual ethics; Chris Evans gives the dialogue all the nuance he can muster and I appreciate it, but it's difficult to shake the impression that Whedon views the character as fundamentally more limited than his modern-day compatriots—noble, reliable, and just a little bit dull, like the moral of the story; just a little bit dumb, like a good soldier. I don't get it. There's no reason to treat Captain America as the voice of conservativism when Tony Stark is the one going behind his teammates' backs to create a defense system for the planet that the planet isn't even offered a chance to say no to. Possibly Whedon missed how the entire last movie was about Captain America dismantling unjust institutions even when he was implicated in them. It wasn't story-breaking, but it jarred me just enough every time that I began to notice when other voices were out of key. Someone get Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeeley back on the line.

(He can write Natasha about half the time, I think. When Bruce presents his inability to give her children as proof of his monstrosity and she counters with her much less ethereal experience of sterility; when she kisses him and then shoves him off a cliff; that's the Black Widow I recognize. Anything she can use for the task at hand is a weapon, even or especially herself and other people's feelings toward her. Some of her other scenes, I was not so sure about.)

So what did I like about this movie? Mostly character work and the occasional surfacing theme, which seems to have been enough to send me out of the theater talking enthusiastically with Gaudior even before I tried to break my elbow. In no particular order of importance—

I said three years ago that I wanted a Mark Ruffalo Hulk movie; the ending of Age of Ultron seems poised to give us one, with the Hulk striking out on his own like the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno TV series. Until then, I'll enjoy that this film devoted almost enough screen time to the fault lines between the scientist and the other guy, which have only fractured further since the first movie. Ruffalo is just very good in the part. His Bruce Banner is a remarkably fearful character and it's played for sympathy rather than comedy or condescension; his most characteristic gesture is an anxious tangling of his fingers, apprehensive as the duck of his shoulders or the flinch of his brows. You don't see a lot of non-metaphorical handwringing these days, but here it only adds to the very physical sense that Bruce is hanging on to himself by his fingernails if he has to, holding himself back from reaching out, from wanting or responding, from taking any action at all; from losing control. Something in his balance is shifting. He's less confident in his boundaries. The Hulk remains a skyscraper-smashing juggernaut, but after the debacle in South Africa—we never see what visions the Scarlet Witch teases out of their twinned fears, but it's enough to send the Hulk rampaging unstoppably through the streets of Johannesburg until the combined stubbornness of Iron Man and an orbiting shutdown system named Veronica finally hammers him into unconsciousness and out of green—Bruce curls painfully in a blanket in the back of the jet, twisted with memory and shame. His arms around himself are tight as a straitjacket, his eyes open with anguish or wincing closed; he looks as though he wants to disappear into himself, except that's where everything went wrong in the first place. At the Bartons' safe house, there's the Avengers all in a row in their war-gear and there's Bruce in a sweatshirt standing a full pace from the rest. In or out of himself, he's not safe, and just enough expression other than rage crosses the Hulk's face to show that it's not as simple a split as a rational man and an unleashed id. What it is may be what he's run away to find out.

(Did anyone else get massive Bride of Frankenstein vibes off the parallel scenes in which Tony seduces Bruce into doing mad science with him? Bruce as Colin Clive's reluctant Frankenstein, meddled in God's domain once already, thanks, got this monster, look how well that worked out for me, Tony sadly less fey than Ernest Thesiger in the Dr. Pretorius role: "I don't want to hear the man-was-not-meant-to-meddle medley . . . We're mad scientists, we're monsters. You got to own it." There is a nested Frankenstein mythos running through the film, explicitly noted in the final face-off between Vision and the last of Ultron's bodies, creators and their unsatisfactory creations. Of course, being a team effort rather than a mostly solo act of hubris, Vision comes out nearly godlike and genuinely nonhuman; Ultron is much more the classical monster, misshapen and embittered, much too like the man who birthed it. I'm talking about Tony again. Bruce has—or is—an alter ego already, and it's nothing to do with transhumanism or robotics. The Bride always was more of Pretorius' idea, but I do feel this leaves Bruce sidelined both in terms of responsibility and weight in the mythscape of the film. I'm wondering if it really is as simple as Whedon understanding the inside of Tony Stark's head best.)

I still want a movie about Natasha. Whether metaphor or memory, the balletic slices we see of the Red Room are tantalizing and appropriately disturbing; I hope they are in continuity with the training program we saw in Agent Carter (2015), because that was some superbly creepy shit. I don't buy infertility as a reason to think of herself as a monster, but I believe it as a tactic to shock Bruce out of his self-pity. Of course he can't give her the normality that child-fruitful Laura Barton and her idyllic Midwestern homestead represent, but when did she ever ask him for that? When did she say that normal was what she wanted? "I adore you, but I need the other guy." (And if you really want kids, Dr. Banner, adopt some like the rest of the planet. Just don't build any. You got lucky with Vision.) For that matter, I like the ambivalent suggestion that Natasha's relationship with the Hulk is actually more stable than her relationship with Bruce: she can get the Hulk to touch fingers with her and will himself back into his vulnerable other self, but she can barely get Bruce to touch her under any circumstances. What works less well for me, therefore, are the two counterpoised scenes where she declares her feelings and he backs away each time. Possibly we are meant to read her as more uncertain and faltering when dealing with real emotions rather than playing them for the benefit of a long con, but I don't see why that should be the case; witness her eventual camaraderie with Steve in The Winter Soldier, which took some work and was nowhere near as awkward. All of that said, I continue to care about the character far more than I expected I would before The Avengers and I enjoy Scarlett Johansson's ability to introduce ambiguity in between lines I suspect were written to be much more clear-cut. I want a Hulk movie and a Black Widow movie, though. No fair combining them.

I did not expect to like the Maximoffs. They are shortchanged by the pace of the plot; they deserve a lengthier introduction and more time to themselves, especially considering how strongly they register with the scenes they're given. I am a little sorry that their new history has so thoroughly divorced them from any chance of connecting up with the hell of a universe next door at 20th Century Fox (and I'm guessing they're no longer Romani Jewish, if Magda and Magneto are no longer their parents), but I am inexpressibly thankful that Wanda was not merely the latest incarnation of Whedon's wild-haired mad dancer; she has the physical look and some of the powers, but she's grounded. Her brother is older, faster, physically stronger, but he looks to her for direction. When she says they change sides, they change. I can't help but see the two of them slightly through the lens of Ian Tregillis' Milkweed trilogy, even if Wanda's a lot saner than Gretel and Pietro can't actually run through walls. His death surprised me when almost nothing else in the film did. I'm not entirely sure how future comics arcs will square with it. Maybe we'll get parallel universes in here after all.

Strangely, I have the least to say about Ultron. It's not that he's a boring villain, but he's a one-shot player and he is most important for what he brings out in the Avengers, not for what they show about him. He is very well voiced by James Spader, who makes his default register an eerily hypnotic combination of bemusement, amusement, self-absorption, and disgust; every now and then another emotion breaks through, like his childlike horror at accidentally severing an arms dealer's left arm (Frankenstein's monster, not realizing that children sink where flowers float), but nothing in the speed or pitch of that syrup-thick, slightly synthetic baritone varies to prove it. His plan is standard-issue planetary genocide cloaked in evopsych, but he's explicitly an experimental robot that got dropped on its head during delivery, so I feel like he might get a pass for how stupid the idea is.

I do like the final combination of the new Avengers team. It's a major boost in diversity and it's a collection of personalities that promise interesting bonds and clashes. No one on the new team is a direct replacement for a predecessor, no matter how their powers or technologies may align: War Machine is not Iron Man is not the Falcon, the Vision is not Thor is not Wanda, Erik Selvig is a relatively normal professor of physics instead of a mad genius and he and Helen Cho can commiserate in the canteen about getting brain-zapped by Loki's scepter. While we're talking statistics, I really appreciate that there are two black men and four five women (including a woman of color) in this movie and none of them die. We don't need bodies all over the floor in order to raise the stakes or make room for the new generation. And I do not object to the holdovers—Steve and Natasha pretty much are the only remaining Avengers I would trust to train a new team. Thor would keep forgetting not everyone is functionally invulnerable and Tony has pretty much already proven he's crap at mentoring. Hawkeye was surprisingly empathic in that one scene with Wanda during the levitation of Sokovia, but that's the most outgoing we've ever seen him. I'm not really surprised he retires to his farm at the end: he's always been the Avenger who seemed most to be putting his time into the job, not his identity.

(As I type this, I have identified one of Whedon's problems with Steve Rogers: he keeps forgetting Steve isn't old. He made a time-jump; he didn't live through those seventy years. His life experience is twenty-odd years as the bantamweight of Brooklyn and then two years as wartime Captain America and then maybe five in the modern world with S.H.I.E.L.D. and aliens and escalating moral complexities. Whedon writes him like the grand old man of the Avengers, and quite possibly he is immortal with that self-renewing metabolism that kept him alive on ice all those years, but in strictly experiential terms he's still the youngest of the original team except, someone correct me if I'm wrong, perhaps Natasha. His authority is moral, not paternal. There's a huge difference.)

So those are my scattered thoughts on Avengers: Age of Ultron. It's not as strong a sequel as The Winter Soldier or even Thor: The Dark World (2013), which frustrated me, but I am not sorry to have seen it and it doesn't seem to have set any of the characters in directions that make me scream, although I may revise my opinion based on succeeding movies. I may well see it again to consider further. Maybe I should stop typing now. These 3400 words sponsored by my fine backers at Patreon.

Comments

[kate_nepveu]

I prefer to believe that Natasha's birthdate that, uh, computer-dude in _CA:TWS_ claims to be 1984 is a deliberate misdirect in her files and that her prior claim to work for the KGB is correct, and thus she is older than she looks. But we don't know for sure.

Your reading of much of the movie is more charitable than mine, and I appreciate the other perspective.

(Also, yes, I agree about Steve's dry sarcasm.)

[sovay]

I prefer to believe that Natasha's birthdate that, uh, computer-dude in _CA:TWS_ claims to be 1984 is a deliberate misdirect in her files and that her prior claim to work for the KGB is correct, and thus she is older than she looks. But we don't know for sure.

Thank you. I actually have a hard time seeing her as that young, so I think I will adopt your comics/headcanon.

Your reading of much of the movie is more charitable than mine, and I appreciate the other perspective.

You're welcome. I have a dubious advantage over much of my friendlist in that I have little to no familiarity with comics continuity and I do not read any of the fic, so my investment in the films is strictly in the films themselves and therefore I may be less bothered by divergences from the source material or fanon, but the stuff that is inconsistent between films does grate on me and things like the movie being a structural mess, there's nothing to do but acknowledge it and try not to grit my teeth because I have enough dental problems already.

(Also, yes, I agree about Steve's dry sarcasm.)

I genuinely like Steve. He is my favorite of the Avengers and I didn't expect him to be; traditionally I gravitate toward head cases like Bruce or walking loci of moral ambiguity like Natasha. Captain America was a gift and The Winter Soldier mostly kept on giving. It is therefore very difficult to see him being played with great skill and commitment by an actor who has to know that half his lines are out of character, except technically they're not because the film is canon, except Joss Whedon stop trying to write Captain America already, you really aren't very good at it.

[kate_nepveu]

I don't read the comics but I do read a moderate amount of the fic--though the fandom-eating pairings are, alas, not to my taste, so much of the fannish convulsions that are doubtless taking place right now are of blissful lack of relevance to me. I just have a lot of ~~feelings~~ about the MCU.

Steve is so my favorite. Poor Chris Evans.

[kore]

Steve is so my favorite. Poor Chris Evans.

Me too.

[kore]

Captain America was a gift and The Winter Soldier mostly kept on giving. It is therefore very difficult to see him being played with great skill and commitment by an actor who has to know that half his lines are out of character, except technically they're not because the film is canon

Ouch. Yeah.

[kore]

I prefer to believe that Natasha's birthdate that, uh, computer-dude in _CA:TWS_ claims to be 1984 is a deliberate misdirect in her files and that her prior claim to work for the KGB is correct, and thus she is older than she looks.

Me, too -- I think they might've picked the 1984 birthdate (God I am old) as an easter egg because that's ScarJo's birth year, too, maybe. But I love the backstory that she got serum'd too and has all that history with Bucky.

[kore]

That's really one of the best breakdowns I've seen of why Whedon doesn't get Steve -- no, he's NOT old! That is the TRAGEDY, that he missed out on all that life experience and he's still young but the entire world of his youth has disappeared. He's not a ghost, his home is. Poor Steve.

[sovay]

That's really one of the best breakdowns I've seen of why Whedon doesn't get Steve

Thank you. It occured to me specifically because I was thinking of Hawkeye going home and Steve . . . not.

he's still young but the entire world of his youth has disappeared. He's not a ghost, his home is.

Yes. And I think that may be what his vision is intended to convey: Captain Steve Rogers in his soldier's uniform, demobbed, ready for peacetime, ready to come home, but the hall is empty and no one is there to dance with him and he knows that even as the ghosts call to him; it's not a fear, it's just a fact. I found it effectively poignant (even if I really expected to see Bucky or even Howard reaching out a hand alongside Peggy, all his loved and lost ones as they never will be together again) where Thor's vision of apocalyptic Valhalla was just confusing (again, if he was meant to see the Æsir accusing him of their deaths, why isn't Sif white-eyed and battle-drunk along with Heimdall, why isn't Loki's blood on his brother's hands) and Tony's waking nightmare made me want to shake him slightly and remind him that it's okay, trauma doesn't vanish overnight, but he just spent a lot of time working through this particular set of issues and regressing into the belief that suits of armor solve everything will not, in fact, help anything. But the dialogue needed to reflect that understanding of Steve and his peculiar relationship with time and it simply didn't. And I don't know why these blind spots about the characters; it's not like Whedon doesn't have access to the earlier movies. This is canonical characterization we're talking about, not generalized fan agreement. But there it is and all I can hope is that the next film will do better.

[kore]

Captain Steve Rogers in his soldier's uniform, demobbed, ready for peacetime, ready to come home, but the hall is empty and no one is there to dance with him and he knows that even as the ghosts call to him; it's not a fear, it's just a fact. I found it effectively poignant (even if I really expected to see Bucky or even Howard reaching out a hand alongside Peggy, all his loved and lost ones as they never will be together again)

AUGH no no I'm okay oh Steve my heart

And I don't know why these blind spots about the characters; it's not like Whedon doesn't have access to the earlier movies. This is canonical characterization we're talking about, not generalized fan agreement.

The cynical theory is that Whedon didn't watch any of the earlier movies which....just doesn't seem possible. But maybe more acceptable than he just didn't care. There is the possible theory that a lot of stuff (some Natasha backstory?) was there but cut, if the original was three and a half hours long, but I think it was probably more of the same. The problem isn't so much that the movie got cut (except for poor Thor) but for what was already in it.

OT, but

[kore]

Aww. http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/may/03/nigel-terry

The wildness came from a deep, still centre. Off stage, in the pub, I remember him rolling his own cigarettes, very slowly, while staring into a pint. As a student, he drove a flatmate crazy with his protracted silences at the breakfast table. “I can’t stand your fucking moods!” the flatmate exclaimed one morning. Another silence of 10 minutes. “Moods?” Terry muttered, darkly.

[sovay]

“Moods?” Terry muttered, darkly.

Oh. Thank you for telling me. Because it was the first Jarman film I ever saw, Caravaggio will always look like Nigel Terry to me.

[kore]

Yeah, the news made me sad, but I loved that article and thought you might like it.

[sovay]

Yeah, the news made me sad, but I loved that article and thought you might like it.

It's a great remembrance and I really appreciate it. "Deeply attractive and private to the last . . ."

[kore]

//whispers furtively I had such a huge fucking crush on him as King Arthur (which I saw on cable, one of the first movies I saw that way, along with Bladerunner I think). He totally outshone Lancelot!

[abigail_n.livejournal.com]

There's no reason to treat Captain America as the voice of conservativism when Tony Stark is the one going behind his teammates' backs to create a defense system for the planet that the planet isn't even offered a chance to say no to.

That's a very good observation, and I wonder how it ties into the kneejerk and increasingly self-contradictory distrust of institutions in most of Whedon's work. Whedon clearly identifies Tony with individuality and Steve with institutions (which is both out of character given his actions in Winter Soldier, and accurate given that he ends the film taking over the new SHIELD-in-all-but-name), but even if you accept that reading it still leaves you with the problem of how unexamined his prejudice against institutions is, as well as the fact that the MCU as a whole clearly wants there to be a SHIELD. It feels almost as if Whedon resents Steve's presence and role in the movie - as if he thinks that Steve is someone to rebel against.

If you add to that the fact that Whedon has never been very good at writing earnest characters (I think perhaps the closest he's ever come is Simon Tam? But he was an underdog and I'm willing to bet he would have become more morally compromised if Firefly had kept going), it's not surprising that he gets the character so wrong. As you say, there are moments where he seems to capture Steve's wryness and sarcasm, but I wonder how much of that is Whedon and how much Chris Evans.

[sovay]

Whedon clearly identifies Tony with individuality and Steve with institutions

Even more specifically than institutional power, Whedon characterizes Steve first and foremost as a soldier. That worked fine in The Avengers where Steve was newly defrosted, time-shocked and grieving and not knowing where he belongs or who he should be in this strange new world: as I've said on LJ, Fury offers him a mission and he takes it without hesitating, not because he needs to be taking orders for his emotional well-being, but because it gives him something to do. By the time of The Winter Soldier, however, he's negotiating the twenty-first century just fine (he doesn't agree with a lot of what he sees, but disagreement is different from failure to comprehend), he's coping about as well as humanly possible with a seventy-year time-skip (i.e., still pretty badly, but he's a functional adult with a sense of humor), and his identity is so much not bound up in his work for S.H.I.E.L.D. that he can walk away from its wreckage to look for Bucky without a second thought (and the audience is with him all the way). So, at the end of Age of Ultron, taking charge of the new Avengers with Natasha looks much less like an automatic gravitation toward the chain of command and much more like a normal result of Steve's strong sense of personal responsibility and instinct to volunteer for anything and everything where he can make a difference. The entire reason the Avengers were created was to protect Earth. Tony's attempt to replace them with "a suit of armor around the world" comprehensively failed. So someone still needs to be out there, making sure Earth's not defenseless—but not starting the war first—and that is exactly the sort of work by which Steve has always defined himself. ("I don't like bullies.") I'm not saying that the effective re-formation of S.H.I.E.L.D. does not have its problems! I just have trouble seeing it as a statement that Steve Rogers is not comfortable anywhere but the army, which feels like the message Whedon intended to convey with those last few lines about "the guy who came out of the ice" and home. It's a peculiar restriction to set on a character defined above all, in previous movies, by his desire to do the right thing, rules and regulations be damned.

(I can't speak to the larger question of Whedon's distrust of institutions because I am not deeply familiar with his work. I had a scattershot and mostly indifferent-to-negative experience with various pieces of Buffy, Angel, Firefly/Serenity, and Dollhouse; it enabled me to form an opinion on his handling of voices and archetypes, but not to feel comfortable teasing out things like recurring themes or philosophies. I think I was shown Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. I had an allergic reaction to the trailer for his Much Ado About Nothing and consequently did not see it.)

as if he thinks that Steve is someone to rebel against.

Well, if he imagines him as the older generation, then of course he is.

As you say, there are moments where he seems to capture Steve's wryness and sarcasm, but I wonder how much of that is Whedon and how much Chris Evans.

I remain very impressed with Chris Evans, so I'm willing to credit him with a lot; I'm not sure I'm willing to say he's always working against the text here. Some of his lines do feel like things Captain America would say. It makes the ones that don't all the more frustrating.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Your interpretation of Natasha's conversation with Bruce is interesting, and I hope that on a rewatch I agree with you. It initially read to me as sincere, and therefore the one truly jarring wrong note in the film. I just don't buy that Natasha would think of her sterilization as a sign of monstrosity. We do know she makes a habit of manipulating people with her apparent vulnerability; this could be more of the same, and the first (?) time we see her do it without an immediate and obvious reveal that it was all a calculated con.

Agreed re: the Maximoffs. I would have liked them to take on a stronger role with Ultron initially, with it seeming more like a teamup rather than them tagging along after him; that would have given us less of Ultron and more of the twins, and also a stronger punch when they face-turn and join the Avengers. (Love love love the conversation between Scarlet Witch and Hawkeye.) I am hoping Quicksilver actually survives; I will forgive that kind of bait-and-switch in order to have both of them around some more. If not -- well, at least we'll get more of Wanda's beautiful hands, moving like elegant claws to destroy everything around her.

On the whole my feelings are like yours -- fun, but not as well put-together as one might hope -- but I will add one more thing in the "positives" column, and that is the pointed, consistent attention to the well-being of civilians. I've heard it said, with some truth, that this is the fundamental difference between recent DC cinematic offerings and Marvel ones: Marvel cares what happens to ordinary people. The challenge at the end of this film is not "defeat Ultron," but rather "save people from Ultron." Because of that, you get meaningful tension; they can blow up the city-island, maybe even do it in a way that won't kill any of the heroes, but they won't do that until everybody is safe, but delaying might mean endangering or even killing an even larger number of people on the ground, so is there a point at which you say "acceptable losses" and do what you have to . . . that's vastly more interesting than "we have to find Ultron's weak point." And it makes the characters vastly better people, too.

[sovay]

Your interpretation of Natasha's conversation with Bruce is interesting, and I hope that on a rewatch I agree with you.

It just seemed so bizarre as a straightforward confession; I found it much easier to believe as a thing that is true about Natasha,¹ but also a thing that was correctly jolting for Bruce to hear in the middle of his one-track misery, because that's a huge set of assumptions and equations he just made there. If he wants to start calling them both monsters based on their destructive capacities or their body counts, whatever. But if she is a monster, her reproductive ability is not what defines that status, and neither is his.

1. That she was forcibly sterilized; it's in keeping with the dehumanizing methods of the Red Room. I can even believe that it would take years to break out of the mindset that the inability to have children means the inability to form "normal" relationships. I just can't believe that Natasha subscribes to it now, if she ever did.

If not -- well, at least we'll get more of Wanda's beautiful hands, moving like elegant claws to destroy everything around her.

I really enjoyed the physicality of her powers; she looks like she is dragging forces out of the earth, out of the figures around her, pulling gravity like a tensile wave and people's thoughts like marionette strings. It doesn't look easy, but it doesn't look dramatic and meaningless, either. We can always tell which way she is working the laws of physics against themselves.

but I will add one more thing in the "positives" column, and that is the pointed, consistent attention to the well-being of civilians.

Yes! I completely forgot to mention it in this post, but it was one of the elements gaudior and I went out talking positively about. It's very distinctive, starting with the scenes in South Africa and following all the way through to Steve refusing to leave Sokovia unless he can get all the civilians off safely. It's a really welcome change from the vague background assumption of enormous casualties that attends any scene in which a city falls and the film never even shows you first responders in the rubble.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I really enjoyed the physicality of her powers; she looks like she is dragging forces out of the earth, out of the figures around her, pulling gravity like a tensile wave and people's thoughts like marionette strings. It doesn't look easy, but it doesn't look dramatic and meaningless, either. We can always tell which way she is working the laws of physics against themselves.

The IMDB tells me Elizabeth Olson's mother was a ballet dancer; it doesn't say whether she had dance training herself, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Also, looking that up brought me to this quote:

"I've been really interested in how people's physicality can manipulate their emotions, as opposed to emotions manipulating someone's physicality."

Which is an interesting angle to look at it from, and might explain some of the effect we see. It reminds me of LARPing, and why there's a part of me that prefers it to tabletop gaming: being in costume changes the way I move, and the way I move influences my experience as the character. There is seriously a part of me that thinks the only way I'm going to manage to write this novella I've been staring at rather balefully is to break out my sabre and hanger and wear them around the house for a while, maybe with low-heeled boots on, so I'll remember how that character moves.

[sovay]

There is seriously a part of me that thinks the only way I'm going to manage to write this novella I've been staring at rather balefully is to break out my sabre and hanger and wear them around the house for a while, maybe with low-heeled boots on, so I'll remember how that character moves.

Mary Gentle in at least one interview talked about LARPing/historical reenactment as a valuable resource for her novels, swords and hangers included. I think it's legit. Just remember to take pictures.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

No, there will be no pictures, because it looks dumb strapped on over my jeans and t-shirt.

. . . but it is possible I'm wearing it right now, because I want to work on this novella while I'm on tour, and I leave the day after tomorrow, so.

(Sadly, there are no especially good pictures of the full original costume, back when I could still fit into my leather pants. And only one rather bad-quality picture of the "anime" version of the character.)

[sovay]

. . . but it is possible I'm wearing it right now, because I want to work on this novella while I'm on tour, and I leave the day after tomorrow, so.

I hope it worked!

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Well, I have 1500 words of novella so far, so that's something. :-)

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Yes, Yes yes yes. I just got back from seeing Age of Ultron, and while it's possible there's something chemical going on with me, I found myself both consistently entertained and actually quite moved, especially in the latter sequences. The twins were one of the best parts for me as well, and I'm going to miss their interaction (though possibly, hopefully, not forever); I think they're probably going with them being Eternals rather than mutants, so that would definitely remove Magneto from their background (though apparently "Peter" Maximoff is coming back in X-Men: Apocalypse, so that's going to be weird), but nothing I saw here completely wipes out most other parts of their background, and I actually like the fact that their having volunteered to be enhanced by HYDRA puts them firmly in the misguided former villains turned heroes camp, which they always were. (There's nothing as yet which explicitly says that what HYDRA did to them didn't just involve waking up abilities which already lay dormant inside them, either.)

My own verdict is that while this is indeed the least efficient of the MCU movies overall, I liked the disparate, not very-well-blended sections of it very much. I agree that Whedon doesn't seem to get Steve as a character, and that his central misunderstanding does indeed lie where you diagnose it to lie. That said, and even admitting it's not a great speech, I don't even vaguely think Natasha was saying she was a monster because she can't have kids--just that it easy shorthand for all the other ways she fatalistically believes herself to be forever monstrous, partly something Russian (I love that moment when she tells Steve that flying Sokovia isn't a bad place to die because where else could you get this sort of view, on some level knowing that's going to break Steve out of his own fatalism loop and make him go completely Brooklyn: Yeah, no, screw THAT noise.) and partly her knowledge that the ledger doesn't ever balance, that the red can't ever be wiped out. She wants it, but it's not possible, and she can still hold those two things in her mind at once moving forwards--sort of like the Vision doesn't exactly disagree with anything Ultron says about humanity, simply shrugs and jokes that after all, he WAS born yesterday. Humanity's always going to die of something, but you can't let bitterness over that stop you from living while you're alive.

Anyhow: as always, I'm out of step with the crowd, and perfectly happy to be. Also, Tumblr Savior is very much my friend.;)

[sovay]

but nothing I saw here completely wipes out most other parts of their background, and I actually like the fact that their having volunteered to be enhanced by HYDRA puts them firmly in the misguided former villains turned heroes camp, which they always were.

Yes—and we're even signaled by Steve's self-comparison to think of them as sympathetic antagonists rather than the next head of HYDRA to be rooted out. "We're not at war, Captain," Maria protests immediately after that line. Steve doesn't even know the twins' link to Stark Industries, but his reply cuts through all the self-protective (American) illusions of that statement: "They are."

(There's nothing as yet which explicitly says that what HYDRA did to them didn't just involve waking up abilities which already lay dormant inside them, either.)

I noticed they hadn't ruled that out! I think that's the interpretation my fingers are crossed for. Ultron's theory that their desire for vengeance allowed them to survive when all the other test subjects died was poetic but unconvincing.

the least efficient of the MCU movies overall

That's a good way of putting it.

(I love that moment when she tells Steve that flying Sokovia isn't a bad place to die because where else could you get this sort of view, on some level knowing that's going to break Steve out of his own fatalism loop and make him go completely Brooklyn: Yeah, no, screw THAT noise.)

Yes. Much of this film forgot that The Winter Soldier existed, but at least Natasha's rapport with Steve didn't mysteriously evaporate. I have fond memories of how much of the previous movie was basically the two of them plus Sam Wilson on a ridiculously high-stakes road trip during which Captain America and Black Widow attempt to look more or less like normal human people doing normal human people things (while not super-spying and uncovering the existence of secret fringe Nazi conspiracies) and Sam actually is a normal human person who just happens to have a pair of mecha-wings up his sleeve. "I never said I was a pilot."

sort of like the Vision doesn't exactly disagree with anything Ultron says about humanity, simply shrugs and jokes that after all, he WAS born yesterday. Humanity's always going to die of something, but you can't let bitterness over that stop you from living while you're alive.

I really like the Vision. I didn't know the character and I didn't know he was slated to be in this film, so he came as a pleasant surprise: he looks the most like a classical superhero of any of the Avengers, but he's not at all human and he doesn't need to be. His lightning-charged creation is very Frankenstein, while we're continuing that theme.

Also, Tumblr Savior is very much my friend.

I shall watch for your reblogs!

(How does it work, anyway? I still don't have a Tumblr, so I can't tell if the way I see different people's—dashboards?—is the way they appear to them.)

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

My problem with the problems other people seem to have with this film basically fall into three categories. The first pile deals with people who just straight-up think Joss Whedon is the fount of all evil, as opposed to a flawed human being steering a massive, ever-changing circus float made up of other people's properties--yes, he does make questionable decisions in terms of what to have onscreen and what not to have onscreen, but because I know what the exigencies of film production normally consist of, I'm less likely to put stuff like (for example) Pepper and Jane's absence down to Bad Pseudo-Feminist Man Assholery and more likely to put it down to those two actors being A) unavailable and B) unnecessary, given the sheer amount of story he's been told to cover and the sheer amount of characters he has to juggle. Sunny Moraine often admits that the only way to make The Walking Dead's current cast manageable would be to kill a bunch of them, because otherwise you're constantly having to assume people are talking to each other offscreen and there's some reason you're not being allowed to see it happen, besides "bad writing." But these storytelling lacunae and jokey bits of dialogue that not everyone is going to think of as clever or useful are only going to become more and more likely as the MCU expands, and it's just going to keep on expanding.

For example: even stuff I don't personally like in this film, like Bruce not knowing where/what Wakanda is or Thor's trip to the Pool of Overarching Plot Point Recognition can be explained as Whedon grasping clumsily/desperately at a way to establish shit without slowing down, if nothing else/better; explained, if not accepted. Is it bad he keeps putting these bits of business in the same characters' mouths? Yes, but as you've pointed out, he's more comfortable with some of them than with others. So while it'll be great if we kept on getting movies where the plot only involves a set number of people, like The Winter Soldier, because that's where the character development will occur, I think there's a general failure to recognize that these are not those movies and that that's an inherent problem of making them which only going to get worse as we go along, rather than something Whedon brought to the mix or manufactured.

(I'll be VERY interested, in a mordant sort of way, to see if the Russo brothers can emerge from Civil War and Infinity War still bearing the crown of being fandom's current darlings, the people who understand these characters so much better, or whether--heigh-ho!--they might actually end up running into exactly the same sort of difficulties! Ie, the kind this sort of multi-player tentpole movie generates, by virtue of it being a two-plus hour theatrical film rather than a six- to eight-comic miniseries.)

BTW, I don't think it's so much that AOU acts as though TWS didn't happen as it is that A) Bucky isn't/can't be involved in this story, so he's been shuffled aside; B) Whedon doesn't get Captain America and C) there is at least definitely a nod to SHIELD's collapse and its identification with HYDRA, but it goes by real fast, much like everything else...I was going to say "everything else that doesn't involve punching," but I think it's hard to make that distinction, because the pace remains so relentlessly breakneck throughout. I love that line Pietro has about "THIS is SHIELD?!" (Cap: "It's what SHIELD should be."), when he sees the helicarrier turn up to get people out of Sokovia; there should've been more of that. But no time, etc.

How Tumblr Savior works, essentially, is that as long as people tag their hate, I can block those tags. That means I don't have to see anything I don't want to, and it's lowered my overall blood pressure considerably. In the beginning I was blocking "age of ultron" itself, but I think I'll take that off so I can reblog stuff I like and actually be able to see it; people have finally moved on to making their own sub-tags like "aou negativity" and "age of ugh", as opposed to tarring everything with the same brush. I blocked "joss whedon" almost immediately, though, and I haven't regretted it.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

You know, the other thing which people seem to be not getting with Natasha/Bruce, besides their infuriating blanket assumption that because she HAS a "love interest" she now only IS a "love interest" (and that reduces and guts her, makes the movie full of toxic levels of heteronormativity, etc.), is that...Bruce and Natasha are not actually involved with each other, as yet. I would bet really good money they haven't even hugged, let alone anything else, mainly because of Bruce's obsessive belief that if she gets too close to him (lit or fig), he'll hurt or kill her. So what we're seeing is a flirtation, a sadly adult feeling-through of the concept of them acting on what they are starting to believe they feel for each other, and that makes Bruce's immediate (il)logic-jump from "let's run away together" to "let's get married and have babies" particularly mordantly hilarious and worthy of outright mockery, though probably in a less clumsy and easy-to-misinterpret way than Nat chooses to mock it.

The parallel she chooses to draw, however--you think you're not worthy of love/me because you're a monster, but honey, we're BOTH monsters--is one which has been drawn consistently throughout, explicitly and otherwise. All the Avengers are monsters, "circus freaks," one bad idea away from supervillainy, one good impulse away from heroism. They deform reality through their very existence, hurting the normal people around them even when they choose not to do anything; everything they do is a risk that carries horrifying potential consequences. Even Hawkeye, the strenuously unpowered human of the bunch, is a man whose job could kill him and everyone he loves at any minute. There's no comicbook universe in which the simple fact of supers doesn't produce their antithesis, almost like some sort of cosmic physical law--that's why Ultron inevitably produces the Vision, who's HIS fuck-up the way Ultron himself is Tony's fuck-up. It's great that way, and awful every other way.

[sovay]

Bruce's immediate (il)logic-jump from "let's run away together" to "let's get married and have babies"

I agree that said a lot more about Bruce than it did about Natasha.

All the Avengers are monsters, "circus freaks," one bad idea away from supervillainy, one good impulse away from heroism.

If anything, I think the movie could have run further with its interrogation of monstrosity: Steve understanding the choices of the Maximoff twins, Tony's pride in his nature versus Bruce's shame over his, Natasha's hard-won belief that being a monster and being happy need not be mutually exclusive, Hawkeye's jaw-dropping mainstream normality when he's not fighting a robot army with a bow and arrows. Ultron and the Vision, talking philosophy right before one of them dies. There's enough there to chew on, but there's so much more available. Aagh, I want good secondary scholarship on everything I enjoy.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I see this kind of thing a lot with media criticism, not just in movies but in TV shows, video games, etc, etc. (Less so with books, because the nature of the medium makes things like "budgetary constraints" and "actor availability" less of a concern. But it happens sometimes there, too.) People have a very clear idea of what they want, but much less clear an idea of what it would take to make that happen, what the effects of it would be*, etc. A particularly memorable example was somebody's lengthy screed on things that should have been different about Mass Effect 3, which included elements like "there should have been a scene for people romancing Garrus where they had a conversation and Garrus had his shirt off etc etc" -- which, as someone else pointed out, would have been a MASSIVE INVESTMENT OF RESOURCES for a scene that, by the structure of the game, would have been seen by only a small percentage of the players (those playing a femShep who is in a romance with Garrus). For that, you want the designers to put some of their budget toward developing and testing a model of shirtless Garrus that will only appear in that single scene? Not gonna happen, people. Or, to take an example that annoyed me recently: sure, it would have been nice if Dragon Age Inquisition didn't feature somebody human-splaining elven religion to my elven Inquisitor. But I reminded myself that avoiding that would have meant recording two separate dialogue trees, one for people playing elves, the other for people playing humans, dwarves, or qunari, and Bioware had other demands on their budget. I'm still annoyed, but I understand why it happened.

So yeah: I can be somewhat irritated at Whedon for not finding more graceful ways to do X, Y, or Z. But my irritation will remain small unless I can see an obviously superior way he could have done it, whereupon I have to ask myself whether he wasn't bright enough to think that up himself, or thought it up and decided not to do it.




*Sometimes I see people going off about how thus-and-such would have happened . . . and it's blatantly clear they haven't really thought that through/don't have a great deal of skill as storytellers, because they don't see how putting thus-and-such in would change everything around it, often for the worse.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this. I sometimes feel like I'm an old woman shouting at clouds when I start talking about production/budget stuff. I mean, it's odd--I'm a committed Watsonian when it comes to character, far more likely to go "well, maybe Natasha genuinely feels [x] about [x], as an individual person who doesn't necessarily stand in for every other woman on the face of the earth," as opposed to asking "but why would Whedon make her feel [x] about [x]?", even though on some level I realize that this is the one area of a movie where the writer actually does have full power to make bad representative decisions that come out of their own failings as a human being. But overall, a movie is utterly production-dependent, storytelling always at the mercy of time, money, the whims of executives and allocation of resources; you can't just think it into being! Without a budget, a cast and all those moving parts, as well as the delivery system it's made to fit into, it literally wouldn't exist. So you can't just gloss over/decide not to factor that stuff in at all, when trying to figure out why whatever ended up making it onscreen did (or didn't).

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I consider it one of the benefits/hazards (benezards?) of being a professional writer: I am often aware of how the sausage is made. (I semi-blew a professor's mind in grad school by writing a paper for an English Lit class that took into account the fact that books are acquired by editors working for publishing companies, and these entities may exert influence on what sees print.)

Frankly, I don't even assume "full power" on the part of the writer at that level: it is amazing, what producers and such may decide to screw with. I know a guy who's a screenwriter, and the stories he tells . . . <shudder> But yes, I'm there with you, defaulting to the Watsonian view while also keeping the Doylist realities in mind.

[sovay]

The first pile deals with people who just straight-up think Joss Whedon is the fount of all evil, as opposed to a flawed human being steering a massive, ever-changing circus float made up of other people's properties

So last night I watched the first twenty-ish minutes of The Avengers for the first time since the summer of 2012. (Thank you for sending me the DVD! I intended to watch the entire movie, but I had to fall over from exhaustion first.) What struck me immediately is what a deft, clean, efficient opening it is. It's fast-paced and easy to follow; it packs an incredible density of information without resorting to exposition or superfluous action. We open with a brief scene with Thanos and the Chitauri, authorizing them to obey an as yet unknown ally in the conquest of Earth; cut to the S.H.I.E.L.D. facility where Loki comes through the two-way gate of the Tesseract, ensorcells the immediately necessary personnel and kills everyone else or leaves them to die; there is an intercut chase scene as Fury, Maria, and Coulson make their separate escapes combined with an unsuccessful attempt to capture Loki; and then after a very little debate with his shadowy superiors, Fury activates the Avengers Initiative. Natasha is having a day as usual somewhere that speaks Russian, posing as a sexualized damsel in distress in order to ensnare an arms dealer; informed that she has to abandon the operation, she sighs with annoyance and disposes of her captors in contemptuous seconds. Bruce is on altruistic walkabout in India when a house call turns into a visit from Black Widow, emissary of S.H.I.E.L.D.; he threatens to Hulk out, she threatens to shoot him in cold blood, he looks a bit embarrassed and agrees to come with her because she wants his advice on gamma rays, not the fastest way to level a city with one's fists. Steve is working out in a S.H.I.E.L.D.-owned gym, trying to pummel time-shock and survivor's guilt out of the latest in a long line of punching bags; Fury offers him a mission and he takes it instantly because it gives him something to do. At this point I went to bed, but we know the set-up and the stakes, we know what the antagonist plans if not how he intends to accomplish it, we know (most of, I haven't yet seen Tony's introduction) the protagonists and their strengths and some of what drives them, and it's all been fun to watch and tantalizing of what we haven't seen yet. In retrospect, it really highlights how much of Age of Ultron feels like undigested chunks of plot.

So I know that the same writer-director and production team can tell a story in the same universe with the same characters neatly and compellingly; I agree that it makes me look for reasons for all the technical problems with this story that are not "one or more of them must be the Devil." I remain frustrated by Whedon's apparent failure to grasp the core traits of one or more of his main characters, partly just because I don't like seeing complicated characters done poorly, but also partly because it creates a ripple effect of compensating problems, like the awkward bits of business you identify, which then just intensifies the sense of things being off or awkward or drafty. (I'd forgotten Bruce apparently having never heard of Wakanda. Maybe he needs a new prescription on his glasses.) I don't know if I would have given the structure more leeway if I had felt that the characters were all acutely themselves no matter the shapelessness of the story around them, or if I would have given the intermittent character inconsistency a pass if the film had been tight and intricate and so cleverly clockwork that I understood how even out-of-key lines were contributing to the payoff. Having to cope with both just felt like too much for an uncomplicatedly positive viewing experience, although not so much so that I didn't still enjoy it.

[I hate LJ-comment limits so much.]

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Establishing character and relationship efficiently has always been one of Whedon's biggest strengths. Which makes it all the more surprising to find that aspect so muddled in AoU.

[sovay]

Which makes it all the more surprising to find that aspect so muddled in AoU.

I am wondering if I can blame a recut. Otherwise the script is just an incredible mess. I am not a person who has trouble following cinematic action and it took me way too long to feel certain even that the opening raid in Age of Ultron was happening for real, never mind what it was supposed to accomplish or where everyone was in the melee. That is not a good place for your audience to come in.

[edit] Indeed, The Avengers remains a fast, smart, beautifully put together action film in which every main character has agency, interiority, and at least one moment of pure writer sympathy, whether it's for their cleverness or their kindness or their problems. God damn, Age of Ultron must have had production issues.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

I find this exchange really interesting, because to me the structure of Ultron was clear precisely because it seemed so similar to that of the first film. To wit:

Opening action sequence and establishing stakes:
Loki steals the cube
vs
Tony has a vision

Reminder of who the Avengers are:
Recruitment scenes
vs
party scene

First skirmish with big bad:
Loki in Germany
vs
Ultron in South Africa

Leading into Avenger vs Avenger:
Thor vs Iron Man vs Cap
vs
Hulk vs Iron Man

Downtime and sidequests, leading into action sequence
Discussions on the Bridge, Steve investigates Phase 2, Nat talks to Loki, Science Bros; all leading into Helicarrier action sequence
vs
Farm followed by Thor in a Cave, Tony at the Internet Hub, Steve in Korea action sequence

Final Showdown
Chitauri in NY
vs
Ultron in Sokovia

The major difference, to my mind, is in what I've called the "downtime and sidequests" portion, which in Ultron takes up more space. But the spines of the two films really do seem similar to me. I think it's having the unnecessary fanservice Avenger-vs-Avenger fight in the same place that does it, as much as anything.

[sovay]

So while it'll be great if we kept on getting movies where the plot only involves a set number of people, like The Winter Soldier, because that's where the character development will occur, I think there's a general failure to recognize that these are not those movies and that that's an inherent problem of making them which only going to get worse as we go along, rather than something Whedon brought to the mix or manufactured.

No argument that the film is overstuffed. It's one of the reasons I am really curious about deleted material (see exchange with juliansinger below), because what gets excised versus what remains can make a huge difference to the feel of a film, and I consider it highly likely that my priorities as a viewer are not the same as those of a director required to cut a full hour of material out of a movie in order to bring it down to something a summer blockbuster audience will sit through without starting to throw sodas at the screen.

I love that line Pietro has about "THIS is SHIELD?!" (Cap: "It's what SHIELD should be.")

Yes; I liked the line and I liked what it acknowledged, because it's about the only reason (other than faith in our protagonists) we have to trust the new version of the Avengers forming in upstate New York will not be subject to the same institutional problems as S.H.I.E.L.D. itself. Not having been infiltrated by Nazis from the get-go is not actually a guarantee of success. Plenty of people are not Nazis, actual or metaphorical, and do dreadful things in the name of their ideals.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

BTW, I mean Inhumans, not Eternals.;)

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

... I can't tell if there were more thoughtful moments filmed and they got left on the cutting room floor...

I have heard (in someone else's LJ comments, so take with a grain of salt) that there will be an Extended Edition.

I do not like this trend, and did not like it in the LOTR movies, either.

[sovay]

I have heard (in someone else's LJ comments, so take with a grain of salt) that there will be an Extended Edition.

I will almost certainly watch an extended edition if it exists, because I want to know what was passed up in favor of more fight scenes, but if the answer is "all the character development," I will mostly be annoyed. More conversation, less punching CGI, thank you.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Oh, that was in Kate Nepveu's place, where you are reading just as much as I am anyway, but in any case, now it's more "I have heard there was a 3 1/2 hour movie and I want to see that," which is not at all the same thing as "I heard there will be one."

In any case: Yes, the proportions do seem to have been terrifically off. (Then again, Joss doesn't seem to get some of the characters very well, but I would /still/ rather have more conversation, less punching CGI, yes.)

[sovay]

Kate Nepveu's place, where you are reading just as much as I am anyway

The hazards of simultaneous conversation! (Do you have a different handle on DW? I didn't see you in comments, but I might not have known what to look for.)

(Then again, Joss doesn't seem to get some of the characters very well, but I would /still/ rather have more conversation, less punching CGI, yes.)

Agreed on both counts.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Back when she first posted I hadn't seen the movie yet, and then I was very busy today and, also, burned out my commentary in a (very loquacious) chat. (But I'm julian over there.)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

smeared lead instead of mercury

loved that--it's a phrase that says so perfectly exactly what you want it to say.

[sovay]

loved that--it's a phrase that says so perfectly exactly what you want it to say.

Thank you!

[umadoshi]

Well, I've clearly failed utterly at leaving any kind of thoughtful response to this post, even after having seen AoU a second time (last week, and I still hold out vague hope of writing something else about it), but I wanted to at least comment and say how much I enjoyed this post. In particular, I think you've really crystallized Whedon's issues with writing (or remotely comprehending) Steve (which are SO FRUSTRATING the more I think about them), and I love your thoughts on the Maxmimoffs.

[sovay]

I wanted to at least comment and say how much I enjoyed this post.

Thank you! I'm glad you did.

In particular, I think you've really crystallized Whedon's issues with writing (or remotely comprehending) Steve (which are SO FRUSTRATING the more I think about them)

There's some more discussion scattered throughout comments. A lot of the issues mentioned in this review are ones that I was able to parse after the film was over: Steve's voice was something I couldn't but think about at the time.