Rambly Age of Ultron reaction post
Okay, so here are some bullet-pointed thoughts in lieu of a coherent review. It's one of those weird movies where I really enjoyed the whole experience but still have a lot of criticisms, and on rewatching I'll probably still enjoy the character moments but feel it has mixed success as an entry in a series. Remember, I critque because I love...
- Wow, this was a big long movie. Just lots of... everything. This makes it hard to summarise, and I can't say I ever really understood the in-movie science, so I had to keep consciously reminding myself to just handwave it.
- I suspect the action sequences are going to drag on re-watch - they all seemed to go on a bit too long, yet there wasn't, for the most part, the kind of visual flair that makes that more forgiveable. (Also, if the truck with the healing cradle thing in it had booster rockets so it could fly, why didn't it just fly in the first place?) It's not IM3.
- I did like the group fight at the start, though. In that, and in the personal developments, it was made very clear that time has passed. I liked that contrast with the first movie - that was "the team is formed"; this was "the team has been a real and effective team for quite some time". You saw it in the genuine respect and liking between Steve and Tony, in the Natasha/Bruce thing (I've seen people complain that not every step of that was shown, but I like it when canons let stuff evolve between episodes/movies/books) and in the setup Nick and Maria have now that official SHIELD is over. (I've seen people calling it Shadow SHIELD; is that the canon name?)
- Speaking of Natasha/Bruce: I really do love it. I can buy both their mutual attraction and that they'd entertain the idea of running away. If anything, it says a lot about how she feels about him that she considers it. I'm in two minds about the line which is being much discussed re: her calling herself a monster - I don't think it's "I'm a monster because I can't have children" (seems to refer to her intentional failure of her graduation task of murdering a prisoner), but the juxtaposition at that point is clunky enough that it reads that way for enough people to be a problem.
And infertility is a very loaded issue to handle clunkily. While it makes sense for the Red Room to have done that, given their sheer ruthlessness in raising children to be assassins, the film could've had Natasha call herself a monster without dragging forced sterilisation in. I feel that evoking reproductive horror (re: female characters specifically) is... cliched in a harmful way. It's dully hurtful to watch in the same way that "woman character's POV as she is pursued and raped/murdered" is dully hurtful, i.e. these are such common, genuine threats to women's life/safety/happiness in real life that I'm weary of seeing them wheeled on to up the emotional ante or for their 'symbolic' value. Age of Ultron isn't the worst example I've seen by a long shot; it's just my general feeling about how (genre) movies (in particular) use tropes around the control of the female reproductive system and experience.
Overall I loved Natasha and I'm disappointed to see that she's already getting criticised on Tumblr for, basically, being in love with Bruce and showing it, and how apparently this is totally out of character. Because apparently when a female character is in love that somehow becomes ALL she's doing? And she didn't just fight and show her willingness to go down with the floating city if they couldn't get everyone out? I'm... probably going to have to blacklist this movie on Tumblr again this weekend, aren't I?
- More about monsters: overall, it felt like they tried too hard to force the "we're all monsters/we should EMBRAAAAAACE IT!" theme, in that what worked with Bruce and Natasha (infertility aside, it does make sense for a man with a literal inner monster, and a woman moulded into a ruthless killer to feel this way about themselves) is implausible as an argument by which Tony could persuade Bruce to work on Ultron with him AGAIN, given what happened the first time. I just don't get why Bruce rolls over so easily; Tony's reasoning seems weak as hell at that point. The only believable reason for Bruce to cave is... that the writers needed him to cave in order for Vision to be created. And that's really bad writing.
- Also, why is Clint apparently helping them/cool with it (I assume, since he shoots the floor out from under Pietro when the latter intervenes)? Isn't he skeptical? I'm not saying he couldn't theoretically be won over; I'm just wondering how and why.
- I did, however, really like how they laid the groundwork for Civil War (disappointed as I am that what should've been a Steve/Bucky-centric movie will be taken over by that story) - I absolutely buy that Tony would think like that about Ultron, and it evolved very naturally from the nightmare (equal parts fear and ego) that he had under Wanda's influence. Tony is very driven by optimism and it makes him angry when other people don't share it - unfortunately, he's arrogant enough to ride roughshod over their objections. He doesn't really believe that he needs, or should have, any oversight, and yes, Tony, that's pretty much the definition of a "mad scientist." (It's funny how we say "mad" when we mean "arsehole".) It's maddening but believable that he thinks it worth gambling the potential consequences of his being wrong on the possibility of his being right. Even when Tony loses confidence and needs a pep talk from Nick (which was great, by the way), it's all so ego-driven: not a criticism, because I find it very in-character, just an observation.
I wonder what Pepper will think of all this Ultron shit, considering that emotionally speaking it's a complete rehash of his arc in Iron Man 3 - obsess over threat, tinker obsessively to find a way out of it, go too far and put your loved ones at risk. It's in that sense, rather than the fact that he's piloting the armour again, that his character development in that movie is negated... and that is unfortunate, and odd. I guess it's a risk with a big franchise like this, though: that individual movies exist to serve The Big Arc/can always be undermined by said Arc, rather than being able to float in their own right.
- The Tony/Bruce fight was also good with regard to CW; it made me really uncomfortable how many people they put at risk and how much infrastructure and property they damaged, but then I realised that it was supposed to: realistically, you can only have a team like the Avengers around for so long, doing the kind of damage they will inevitably do, before the world will turn against them. I do wonder how much the world currently knows about the Ultron threat, not that anything would justify that destruction in (as I finally found out, I think from fandom rather than the movie) Johannesburg.
- Location-wise the cues were all over the place: by opening the ship graveyard scene on a shot of a boat called the Churchill that says "Great Britain" on the hull (FYI, British ships have the port where the company is registered, like in this photo of the Titanic which says "Liverpool" under the name, and naming a ship Churchill would be friggin' hokey and weird these past few decades; if you'd wanted to make an interesting visual statement within the movie you'd have named it "Thatcher"), it seems like we're meant to think the location is Britain, but idk. Then apparently the city where Tony and Bruce wreak havoc is Johannesburg, but it's not clear - due to the aforementioned visual cues I assumed it was London, but then the police cars were different but I didn't catch anything to say where it really was.
So after using these real places we get a fake location/place of origin for Wanda and Pietro, because apparently it's okay to use real German and Eastern European accents for the villains (maybe this isn't obvious to Americans, but anti-German hatred is still a thing in the UK; and even moreso, there is a fuckton of racism against Eastern Europeans, so it's very uncomfortable to see those accents trotted out routinely by movies for villains) but we suddenly have sensitivities about depicting a real place when it comes to showing a populace suffering. I don't pretend to understand the decision-making process here. *shrug*
- I will say that Wanda and Pietro's origin story (re: their lives, not their powers) is emotionally resonant. It's also good the way it re-invokes the spectre of Stark weapons: Tony may stop making things that kill people, but the ripples created by his career continue to spread, because all those people are still dead and maimed and they and their loved ones are still having to live with the consequences. That doesn't make Tony's choices less important, but it does show that you don't get to magically atone and then it's all okay.
- I kind of lost track of what was happening with Thor; I understand they cut some stuff that might have made it a bit clearer. I am glad they cut Loki's appearance; the movie is already so stuffed (it feels almost like the concluding part of a trilogy in their determination to squeeze in so many cameos and references to other parts of the franchise) that it would've overwhelmed things. Similarly, I read that at one point Abomination was supposed to show up as a secondary villain - very, VERY glad they didn't go there, because seriously, how would you connect all that up?
- So obviously Bruce isn't dead, but I do wonder how they'll resolve this. It's a shame that it's a standard "put 'em together, then break 'em apart" superhero love story between him and Natasha; I'm always more interested in how couples look when they're functioning but I don't think we're going to get to see that here.
- Too many samey quips. This is the same complaint people make a lot about Joss-isms and how they break character, but here I am making it too. I thought it was particularly unfortunate in the case of Ultron, who becomes less threatening the more he sounds like a BTVS villain (which is a shame, because he's physically very imposing: similar proportions, I think, to the human progenitors in Prometheus - there's something about that size that is really alarming in juxtaposition with a human body). There was a lot of humour that worked for me (the running gag about Steve's language, the thing with the hammer), but I guess I'd want to ask Joss why he's so afraid of letting things rest seriously for a bit. Because when this movie was serious and heartfelt, it really worked.
- Having said that, I hated the way they jerked us around about Clint. I fell for it because I have issues with the whole leaving-a-pregnant-widow-behind trope For Reasons, but doing all that cliche-undermining stuff with the family photo and the fakeout over whether he actually got a fatal injury after all is now as cliche as following through and killing him would've been. And it got me so worried that even when he showed up in his own kitchen, I was thinking it had to be a dream or a hallucination or something, and I just felt annoyed rather than relieved.
- The cinema I was in seemed to really feel it when Pietro died. I was sorry to see him go; it seemed like they'd built up something nice with him and Wanda (you do feel the impact of how much that time they were alone with the bomb changed them and made them an army of two), but I wonder if they thought that, besides using Pietro to save Hawkeye, for a future movie a surviving twin negotiating life in the Avengers would have more character development potential than the two would have together, given how self-sufficient a unit they are. Maybe they felt they needed to break those two up in order to let either one fully develop as a character?
- Another nice detail: given how she feels about Tony, and how her brother died, it's nice that he's leaving the Avengers, because I don't think it would really be plausible that Wanda would feel able to join the team if he were still present. But she's fought beside Clint and seen how Natasha and Steve went all-out to save those people, so she can have confidence in them. I'm really curious about what kind of team they'll build together with Sam and Rhodey. Why is Sam prepared to change his mind after being so adamant that the Avengers is not for him, though? Maybe just the whole world-tilted-on-its-axis impact of Ultron making him re-evaluate. Perhaps he sees how badly Steve and co. are going to need him?
- Overall, one thing I didn't notice, until I talked to a friend who pointed it out, is that this film is a weird throwback to WWII/Cold War propaganda movies in that it does the whole chin-stuck-out, we-must-all-make-sacrifices thing - while I admire the fuck out of that in characters' individual attitudes, it's just interesting to see how it's an underlying message of the movie (complete, as I said, with nostalgic callbacks, in the form of Sacrifice and villain accents, to an era when supposedly you knew who the villain was and Life Was Simpler And Duty Too), and the main place it sticks out like a sore thumb is the Hawkeye-nearly-dying thing. I read the ending as him having left the Avengers, but other people have said he's obviously just gonna take some leave and then be back. Which, fair enough, SHIELD sunk a lot of training into him and even if he's not a metahuman he's got a rare level of skill and experience in combat and is obviously important to the team's interpersonal cohesion (and that's presented as being something to do with his mundane ordinariness; that he has a family life going on beyond the team at the moment so is capable of ~teaching the others to be a family - they must have their own stuff going on too, but we don't get to see that in this movie). So. Again, that idea of sacrifice. I got a bit (VERY) lost in this paragraph but it's 1am and I'm only still up because I'm in pain and had meant to finish and post this days ago, so apparently sleep isn't going to happen for a while yet.
The other place the whole duty-versus-personal-life thing comes in is Bruce and Natasha: they could run away, but they don't, and she could let him stay human, but she doesn't, and at the end he makes the decision to take himself out of the game altogether. Or at least, it seems that way, as if Bruce has nudged the Hulk just a little way out of the driving seat. Is that possible, and consistent with the way the Hulk has been portrayed so far? Or is it a consequence of Natasha's rapport with him and the way she was lullaby-ing him towards the end there?
- Wow, this was a big long movie. Just lots of... everything. This makes it hard to summarise, and I can't say I ever really understood the in-movie science, so I had to keep consciously reminding myself to just handwave it.
- I suspect the action sequences are going to drag on re-watch - they all seemed to go on a bit too long, yet there wasn't, for the most part, the kind of visual flair that makes that more forgiveable. (Also, if the truck with the healing cradle thing in it had booster rockets so it could fly, why didn't it just fly in the first place?) It's not IM3.
- I did like the group fight at the start, though. In that, and in the personal developments, it was made very clear that time has passed. I liked that contrast with the first movie - that was "the team is formed"; this was "the team has been a real and effective team for quite some time". You saw it in the genuine respect and liking between Steve and Tony, in the Natasha/Bruce thing (I've seen people complain that not every step of that was shown, but I like it when canons let stuff evolve between episodes/movies/books) and in the setup Nick and Maria have now that official SHIELD is over. (I've seen people calling it Shadow SHIELD; is that the canon name?)
- Speaking of Natasha/Bruce: I really do love it. I can buy both their mutual attraction and that they'd entertain the idea of running away. If anything, it says a lot about how she feels about him that she considers it. I'm in two minds about the line which is being much discussed re: her calling herself a monster - I don't think it's "I'm a monster because I can't have children" (seems to refer to her intentional failure of her graduation task of murdering a prisoner), but the juxtaposition at that point is clunky enough that it reads that way for enough people to be a problem.
And infertility is a very loaded issue to handle clunkily. While it makes sense for the Red Room to have done that, given their sheer ruthlessness in raising children to be assassins, the film could've had Natasha call herself a monster without dragging forced sterilisation in. I feel that evoking reproductive horror (re: female characters specifically) is... cliched in a harmful way. It's dully hurtful to watch in the same way that "woman character's POV as she is pursued and raped/murdered" is dully hurtful, i.e. these are such common, genuine threats to women's life/safety/happiness in real life that I'm weary of seeing them wheeled on to up the emotional ante or for their 'symbolic' value. Age of Ultron isn't the worst example I've seen by a long shot; it's just my general feeling about how (genre) movies (in particular) use tropes around the control of the female reproductive system and experience.
Overall I loved Natasha and I'm disappointed to see that she's already getting criticised on Tumblr for, basically, being in love with Bruce and showing it, and how apparently this is totally out of character. Because apparently when a female character is in love that somehow becomes ALL she's doing? And she didn't just fight and show her willingness to go down with the floating city if they couldn't get everyone out? I'm... probably going to have to blacklist this movie on Tumblr again this weekend, aren't I?
- More about monsters: overall, it felt like they tried too hard to force the "we're all monsters/we should EMBRAAAAAACE IT!" theme, in that what worked with Bruce and Natasha (infertility aside, it does make sense for a man with a literal inner monster, and a woman moulded into a ruthless killer to feel this way about themselves) is implausible as an argument by which Tony could persuade Bruce to work on Ultron with him AGAIN, given what happened the first time. I just don't get why Bruce rolls over so easily; Tony's reasoning seems weak as hell at that point. The only believable reason for Bruce to cave is... that the writers needed him to cave in order for Vision to be created. And that's really bad writing.
- Also, why is Clint apparently helping them/cool with it (I assume, since he shoots the floor out from under Pietro when the latter intervenes)? Isn't he skeptical? I'm not saying he couldn't theoretically be won over; I'm just wondering how and why.
- I did, however, really like how they laid the groundwork for Civil War (disappointed as I am that what should've been a Steve/Bucky-centric movie will be taken over by that story) - I absolutely buy that Tony would think like that about Ultron, and it evolved very naturally from the nightmare (equal parts fear and ego) that he had under Wanda's influence. Tony is very driven by optimism and it makes him angry when other people don't share it - unfortunately, he's arrogant enough to ride roughshod over their objections. He doesn't really believe that he needs, or should have, any oversight, and yes, Tony, that's pretty much the definition of a "mad scientist." (It's funny how we say "mad" when we mean "arsehole".) It's maddening but believable that he thinks it worth gambling the potential consequences of his being wrong on the possibility of his being right. Even when Tony loses confidence and needs a pep talk from Nick (which was great, by the way), it's all so ego-driven: not a criticism, because I find it very in-character, just an observation.
I wonder what Pepper will think of all this Ultron shit, considering that emotionally speaking it's a complete rehash of his arc in Iron Man 3 - obsess over threat, tinker obsessively to find a way out of it, go too far and put your loved ones at risk. It's in that sense, rather than the fact that he's piloting the armour again, that his character development in that movie is negated... and that is unfortunate, and odd. I guess it's a risk with a big franchise like this, though: that individual movies exist to serve The Big Arc/can always be undermined by said Arc, rather than being able to float in their own right.
- The Tony/Bruce fight was also good with regard to CW; it made me really uncomfortable how many people they put at risk and how much infrastructure and property they damaged, but then I realised that it was supposed to: realistically, you can only have a team like the Avengers around for so long, doing the kind of damage they will inevitably do, before the world will turn against them. I do wonder how much the world currently knows about the Ultron threat, not that anything would justify that destruction in (as I finally found out, I think from fandom rather than the movie) Johannesburg.
- Location-wise the cues were all over the place: by opening the ship graveyard scene on a shot of a boat called the Churchill that says "Great Britain" on the hull (FYI, British ships have the port where the company is registered, like in this photo of the Titanic which says "Liverpool" under the name, and naming a ship Churchill would be friggin' hokey and weird these past few decades; if you'd wanted to make an interesting visual statement within the movie you'd have named it "Thatcher"), it seems like we're meant to think the location is Britain, but idk. Then apparently the city where Tony and Bruce wreak havoc is Johannesburg, but it's not clear - due to the aforementioned visual cues I assumed it was London, but then the police cars were different but I didn't catch anything to say where it really was.
So after using these real places we get a fake location/place of origin for Wanda and Pietro, because apparently it's okay to use real German and Eastern European accents for the villains (maybe this isn't obvious to Americans, but anti-German hatred is still a thing in the UK; and even moreso, there is a fuckton of racism against Eastern Europeans, so it's very uncomfortable to see those accents trotted out routinely by movies for villains) but we suddenly have sensitivities about depicting a real place when it comes to showing a populace suffering. I don't pretend to understand the decision-making process here. *shrug*
- I will say that Wanda and Pietro's origin story (re: their lives, not their powers) is emotionally resonant. It's also good the way it re-invokes the spectre of Stark weapons: Tony may stop making things that kill people, but the ripples created by his career continue to spread, because all those people are still dead and maimed and they and their loved ones are still having to live with the consequences. That doesn't make Tony's choices less important, but it does show that you don't get to magically atone and then it's all okay.
- I kind of lost track of what was happening with Thor; I understand they cut some stuff that might have made it a bit clearer. I am glad they cut Loki's appearance; the movie is already so stuffed (it feels almost like the concluding part of a trilogy in their determination to squeeze in so many cameos and references to other parts of the franchise) that it would've overwhelmed things. Similarly, I read that at one point Abomination was supposed to show up as a secondary villain - very, VERY glad they didn't go there, because seriously, how would you connect all that up?
- So obviously Bruce isn't dead, but I do wonder how they'll resolve this. It's a shame that it's a standard "put 'em together, then break 'em apart" superhero love story between him and Natasha; I'm always more interested in how couples look when they're functioning but I don't think we're going to get to see that here.
- Too many samey quips. This is the same complaint people make a lot about Joss-isms and how they break character, but here I am making it too. I thought it was particularly unfortunate in the case of Ultron, who becomes less threatening the more he sounds like a BTVS villain (which is a shame, because he's physically very imposing: similar proportions, I think, to the human progenitors in Prometheus - there's something about that size that is really alarming in juxtaposition with a human body). There was a lot of humour that worked for me (the running gag about Steve's language, the thing with the hammer), but I guess I'd want to ask Joss why he's so afraid of letting things rest seriously for a bit. Because when this movie was serious and heartfelt, it really worked.
- Having said that, I hated the way they jerked us around about Clint. I fell for it because I have issues with the whole leaving-a-pregnant-widow-behind trope For Reasons, but doing all that cliche-undermining stuff with the family photo and the fakeout over whether he actually got a fatal injury after all is now as cliche as following through and killing him would've been. And it got me so worried that even when he showed up in his own kitchen, I was thinking it had to be a dream or a hallucination or something, and I just felt annoyed rather than relieved.
- The cinema I was in seemed to really feel it when Pietro died. I was sorry to see him go; it seemed like they'd built up something nice with him and Wanda (you do feel the impact of how much that time they were alone with the bomb changed them and made them an army of two), but I wonder if they thought that, besides using Pietro to save Hawkeye, for a future movie a surviving twin negotiating life in the Avengers would have more character development potential than the two would have together, given how self-sufficient a unit they are. Maybe they felt they needed to break those two up in order to let either one fully develop as a character?
- Another nice detail: given how she feels about Tony, and how her brother died, it's nice that he's leaving the Avengers, because I don't think it would really be plausible that Wanda would feel able to join the team if he were still present. But she's fought beside Clint and seen how Natasha and Steve went all-out to save those people, so she can have confidence in them. I'm really curious about what kind of team they'll build together with Sam and Rhodey. Why is Sam prepared to change his mind after being so adamant that the Avengers is not for him, though? Maybe just the whole world-tilted-on-its-axis impact of Ultron making him re-evaluate. Perhaps he sees how badly Steve and co. are going to need him?
- Overall, one thing I didn't notice, until I talked to a friend who pointed it out, is that this film is a weird throwback to WWII/Cold War propaganda movies in that it does the whole chin-stuck-out, we-must-all-make-sacrifices thing - while I admire the fuck out of that in characters' individual attitudes, it's just interesting to see how it's an underlying message of the movie (complete, as I said, with nostalgic callbacks, in the form of Sacrifice and villain accents, to an era when supposedly you knew who the villain was and Life Was Simpler And Duty Too), and the main place it sticks out like a sore thumb is the Hawkeye-nearly-dying thing. I read the ending as him having left the Avengers, but other people have said he's obviously just gonna take some leave and then be back. Which, fair enough, SHIELD sunk a lot of training into him and even if he's not a metahuman he's got a rare level of skill and experience in combat and is obviously important to the team's interpersonal cohesion (and that's presented as being something to do with his mundane ordinariness; that he has a family life going on beyond the team at the moment so is capable of ~teaching the others to be a family - they must have their own stuff going on too, but we don't get to see that in this movie). So. Again, that idea of sacrifice. I got a bit (VERY) lost in this paragraph but it's 1am and I'm only still up because I'm in pain and had meant to finish and post this days ago, so apparently sleep isn't going to happen for a while yet.
The other place the whole duty-versus-personal-life thing comes in is Bruce and Natasha: they could run away, but they don't, and she could let him stay human, but she doesn't, and at the end he makes the decision to take himself out of the game altogether. Or at least, it seems that way, as if Bruce has nudged the Hulk just a little way out of the driving seat. Is that possible, and consistent with the way the Hulk has been portrayed so far? Or is it a consequence of Natasha's rapport with him and the way she was lullaby-ing him towards the end there?