Avengers Age of Ultron thoughts

[astolat]

OK, I saw it tonight! Massive spoilers here under the cut-tags! I had a reasonably good time at the movie, but, er, you probably can't tell by the relative volumes of what's under the cuts? My main reaction was, it was fine, I didn't have a bad time watching, it kept flowing nicely, but I just didn't care much about it the whole time.

Comments

[liviapenn]

The whole sequence at Clint's house, while it seemed kind of nice to me initially, has been bothering me more and more the longer I think about it. The idea of him having a family was nice, but it also felt... obvious? It made him feel oddly MORE a generic dude than before -- like, having a wife and kids and a house is not actually a substitute for characterization? And his wife -- wow, that woman is living some kind of horrifying nightmare, she's alone in an isolated house with two small children and pregnant, I don't see how she can even have a support network or so much as go out and talk to people because it would expose their secret, and clearly she's not even allowed to be angry that her husband abandons her constantly because his job involves actually saving the world. But... do we know any of this? How do we know they don't live 5 miles from Clint's parents and a whole town full of Barton aunts & uncles & cousins? I mean, it's entirely possible Laura has a part-time nanny or whatever that she sent home when Nick Fury showed up

[veronica_rich]

See, that's me. I figured Laura has as much of a life as any SAHM and farm wife (which isn't enough for me personally, but yay, the point of choice). Clint clearly respects her and thinks she's capable of running the place in his absence (she might actually be the farm manager; happens a lot) - and he doesn't leave behind a big strong man to watch her when he leaves. It's almost like they've worked out ahead of time what can happen, and he figures she knows what to do if she sees baddies coming. :-)

[astolat]

Well, if you're talking about realm of possibility, sure, you can imagine there's actually a second quinjet in hiding behind the trees to the left and an entire city on the right off the screen, lol

[walmer92]

This is definitely part of the problem I had with Clint's background, although you put it far better than I ever could. But it does also bother me that it's such a big departure from the comics, where Clint Barton is anything but a family man. The comic and MCU characters are obviously different, but given that we got no real characterisation for Clint in A1, there seems to be nothing of comic Clint at all in the movie version, and I don't feel much of a connection to him

[liviapenn]

Well, if you're talking about realm of possibility, sure, you can imagine there's actually a second quinjet in hiding behind the trees to the left and an entire city on the right off the screen, lol.

I... have actually spent a lot of my life living in rural areas and I don't understand why this is an automatic "lol." Seriously. Rural areas look really "undeveloped" until you turn a corner and there's a town. Is she five minutes from a major city? No, but I don't think she's 50 miles from the nearest human being either. Yes, the Quinjet lands there but it's also established later in the movie that when a Quinjet is in stealth mode not even SHIELD can track it. So maybe the house is near a busy air force base and no one notices one extra jet flying by now and then. That actually makes a lot more sense to me than "in the middle of nowhere."

As for social isolation, I mean, this is not about needing some kind of cover story for, oh that fellow Barton down the road, he's not at home half the time. He's an Avenger -- his face is known

[walmer92]

Ok, it's not that I don't get where you're coming from, but if he doesn't want this super spy life, then why didn't he give it up before. Yes, there's some suggestion in the movie that he wants this to be the last mission, but he back tracks on that, and there's no indication that it's something he's seriously considered before. He hasn't been waiting for a clock to tick down and his time with SHIELD to be over. From the little we know about him, he's often teamed with Natasha, often in seriously desperate and dangerous situations, and there's nothing to indicate that he might be trying to escape that. And given that he was with SHIELD long enough to have brought Natasha in, he has to have been working for them since his kids were very young, at the very least