KnightWing

Some of the audio in a few scenes there is distorted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuYhjAXIAro

I kinda wonder if this show might have a bit of a rotating cast anyway.

I guess conversely, my favorite version of Spidey is the Ultimate comics/Spectacular TV version. I kinda like the idea of taking so many of the things that were done with Peter in the comics in his college years and aging them backward to high school. Maybe because a lot of Peter's growth works in the context of the kind of growing up that goes on in high school.

From all that, it sounds like Civil War is the real Avengers movie this phase, and Age of Ultron was just a lead-in.

I have a feeling like the vast majority of the characters are going to be treated like some of the guest heroes in Avengers 2: sure, they're there, but they're not exactly vitally important. Which is basically how the comic went, too. It was the Cap and Tony show, with Spider-Man in the middle and a whole lot of other people in the background not being important.

Yeah, pretty much. The thing is that when her role is "make the hero feel bad", all it does is create conflict for Barry and make us feel bad at the same time. And what does that technically do in terms of her being a protagonist versus antagonist? If she's having mostly a negative influence on Barry, then that makes her more of a hindrance than a help. She had her brief moment of giving Barry a pep talk, but then she went back on it at the end with her whole "but I STILL don't like any of you!" speech. So yeah, if she's gonna be pissed then okay, but she needs more positive things to do unless she's just gonna go down the villain route.

I think a high school-age Peter makes sense in the context of the greater Marvel pantheon of heroes. If there are already so many adult heroes out there, making Spider-Man a kid seems like a good way to make him feel special and different.

That sounds great. I wonder if they'll have Gwen already be dead so as to avoid confusion or repetitiveness. They could basically do a Hulk/Incredible Hulk move, where they pick up after the events of the last movie even if the last movie isn't canon anymore.

So this movie literally has everyone short of Hulk and Thor, which is exactly how the comic was. Now if we can just get Spider-Man in there it'll be perfect.

I don't think that's quite how it works, but he is a minor enough character that maybe he can pull a Quicksilver.

I think most people just loved the idea of Old Man Logan and the fact that it existed, not the content of the story itself.

And there was much celebration!

My only problem with Iris acting the way she did in this week's episode is that she mostly only complained at everyone. And not without reason, of course, but if her role is just to be angry at being mistreated, then that's not good enough.

I'm not implying that she's been literally romantically involved with them, just that there've been romantic/sexual themes and/or tension with them. On a case-by-case basis it makes sense, but now that it's happened with 4 of the 5 male Avengers, it's weird. And, really, they never did explain why she needed to be Tony's secretary; that was pretty much literally just "let's have Scarlett Johansson be all sexy up in our movie; logic be damned."

Beta Ray Bill.

I think if anything, the worst thing about Natasha in Age of Ultron is the fact that she's completely unimportant aside from her relationship with Banner. (to be fair, Banner is conversely only important as he relates to Natasha, but that's not really the point) Also, there is the fact that her pairing with Banner is the fourth pairing she's had with a fellow Avenger. She was a seductress/sexy secretary for Tony in Iron Man 2, a pairing with Hawkeye was heavily hinted at in Avengers (didn't end up panning out, obviously, but still), she made out with Cap in TWS and pretty much straight-up asked if he wanted to be more than friends, and now she's hot for Banner. Out of all four movies Black Widow has been in, there hasn't been a single one where she wasn't paired with a different guy—and they're all on the same team in this movie. It's really not cool that her role so far has largely been "the Avengers' girlfriend."

It's a baffling choice if you're coming at it backwards like we are. It's not like they cast Lupita and then decided she would be CG later. They probably cast her as a character they knew was going to be CG from the get-go.

Careful with those expectations. The going fan theory is that somehow the gang is going to do something to allow Wells's consciousness to take over Thawne's body. And that it may have already been partially doing so, considering how Wells does seem to have some legitimate goodness in him that doesn't feel particularly Reverse-Flashey. And since we know Flash fights Reverse-Flash in the future (Wells/Thawne's past) anyway, we get to have our Wells mentor cake and eat our Thawne villain cake too. I feel like that last metaphor went to a weird place.

It kind of relates back to a bigger problem with Ultron: he has no real motivation whatsoever, other than being a program with a goal. He's more like the MCP from TRON than anything else, really. But then his human characteristics don't make sense. Having human emotion and mannerisms makes sense for a human who's had a lifetime of experiences, but Ultron is basically an encyclopedia that somehow has a complete personality. Loki had a similar "I want to conquer/reshape the world to my will" goal, but we'd had an entire movie previously to explain what was driving him as a person. Ultron basically popped out of the womb as a supervillain, which kinda makes sense, but it doesn't explain why he seems to be a complete individual who can make jokes. I might have bought it more if Ultron initially was stiffer, but got more of a personality as he progressed through the movie. But at the end of the day, Vision made a lot more sense as a character.

I liked it. Didn't love it. It's a good time with the Avengers, smashing robots most of the time, with some good character bits in there. But it's nothing special. Very mild spoilers, only tagged just in case you wanna go in 100% blind:

Yeah, he apparently watched the entire 90s cartoon before making the first movie, and that was in the VHS era.