Avengers: Age of Ultron


Koete

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I'm also seeing a lot of criticism about Ultron's sense of humor. Did I miss something? He quipped, but he wasn't a fucking embarrassment like the Mandarin in IM3. He was dead serious a majority of the time. I'm not getting it.

There was a lot of emphasis on Ultron being "human" in personality, including the jokes, the foremost of which being his "I'm sorry" after cutting off Gollum's hand. And then there was the understanding head-nodding while listening to the Maximoffs' backstory. It just felt really disingenuous and weird.

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.

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To be fair, Ultron's goals in the comics haven't been anything else other than world/galactic/universal domination. He's Marvel's Brainiac.

Marvel has a real villain problem. The comics are full of great ones, but they haven't put a great one on screen yet...other than Kingpin.

Anyone catch the Roy Thomas Easter Egg?

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I'm also seeing a lot of criticism about Ultron's sense of humor. Did I miss something? He quipped, but he wasn't a fucking embarrassment like the Mandarin in IM3. He was dead serious a majority of the time. I'm not getting it.

There was a lot of emphasis on Ultron being "human" in personality, including the jokes, the foremost of which being his "I'm sorry" after cutting off Gollum's hand. And then there was the understanding head-nodding while listening to the Maximoffs' backstory. It just felt really disingenuous and weird.

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.

That was Tony Stark's personality, just twisted. Which'd make this at least the fourth time they did the "dark reflection of the hero" thing with Iron Man? It might be the best realized though.

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Okay. Fuller thoughts now that I've had about a day to process it.

When Will and I inevitably cover this, I think we're going for the director's cut. This movie was originally an hour longer. I have a feeling there's some stuff we lost in translation.

-Whedon's not really gotten that much better at fight choreography, but at least I can mostly tell what's going on this time.

-This entire movie is a bolded, italicized apology letter to Hawkeye from last movie for doing him wrong, Laura was basically a walking trope, but I'm betting she and the kids get self defense lessons from Aunt Nat

-Dude, you couldn't have had Sam show up to assist in evac for that final fight? Was he off chasing Bucky leads that Steve seems to have conveniently moved past for the sake of this movie/Whedon's opinions about Bucky staying dead??

-The women. Okay. Great that we got Helen Cho at least briefly. Would've loved to see more of her beyond gushing over Thor/getting mind controlled by Ultron. Maria Hill: at least she got to do something at the end there? I don't know.

-Good excuse for not being able to get Portman or Paltrow back.

-Black Widow/Hulk. Can totally buy this. Wish it hadn't been thrown out of the window by the end of the movie.

-Black Widow. Whedon. Just please don't, ever, with her, ever again. That whole I'm sterilized -> I'm a monster segue, while clearly meant to be about her assassin-ing, is just incredibly cringeworthy. Also spending part of the last hour locked away in a cell? Come on. Like, she swings between the action character I know she can be and these absolutely cringeworthy characterization choices on Whedon's part.

-Your motivation for the children of the Holocaust survivor was to make them volunteer for experiments with Hydra?? Holy shit. There's a bunch of shit with Roma racism re: their portrayal that I'm not even going to get in here.

-Was not expecting them to off Pietro. He was fun. I look forward to seeing Scarlet Witch actually develop in another film?

-Just realized that Maria and Black Widow have never actually directly spoken to each other. Even when they were sharing a room in Winter Soldier. What.

-Liked Spader as Ultron. Believe him wanting to destroy everything after a quick look at the internet. Probably also where he got the sense of humor from.

-Vision was also awesome.

-side note: a large portion of my facebook/twitter/tumblr people want to fuck the robots. I don't get it.

-Whedon wanting Bucky to be dead is kind of reflected in Steve's nightmare sequence? I don't know. Him suddenly dropping anything to do with Bucky doesn't make sense given Winter Soldier for me, but eh.

-I squeed at the mention of Wakanda. Sue me.

-So is Tony a supervillain now? That's kind of what I'm getting from his arc.

-Mmmm. Thor.

-So the fuck is gonna happen to Hulk now?

I like it if I don't think about it. The more I think about it the more it falls apart.

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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."

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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."

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