Speaking of underreactions -- not just law enforcement. THE ARMED FORCES. Tell me the National Guard wouldn't have been scrambled for that causeway incident. Where were the jillions of helicopters that should have converged? etc.
Because it's not JUST the terrible running battle between Fury's SUV and the "cop" cars, and it's not JUST the causeway battle, but as we discussed a bit -- it's "oh, at some unspecified point in the recent past, the Iron Patriot suit was co-opted to KIDNAP THE PRESIDENT". And then Thor and some aliens BROKE LONDON. Those two not-insignificant things coming after "Full Scale Alien Invasion of NYC Plus Near-Nuking of Same".
The world, and the U.S. in particular, and D.C. very most in particular, should be way more visibly edgy. Which I guess Project Insight was itself an indication of, but… scrambled National Guard, folks. And given service rivalries, the Pentagon should be giving SHIELD the stink-eye at any attempt to say "that's okay, we got this".
(See, I keep going back to that cartoon I sent around. "IT'S BECOMING CLEAR THAT NO ONE'S GOT THIS…")
I'm vaguely of the conviction that the Pentagon doesn't exist in-universe, simply because they would never allow a building that tall in their own back yard. Or else that the majority of the action was occurring in, like, Fredericksburg, so far up-river that you could drop three football-fields worth of airship into the drink without drowning the richest neighborhood in the nation's capital. How you get through WWII without the Pentagon I don't know, unless the Triskelion is built ON TOP OF the Pentagon and has absorbed it as an organization.
But yes. The Fury sequence started out well -- they arrive in cop cars; heck they may be cops; the streets are deserted as if it were early morning -- but when you have cars explode in downtown Washington, and people don't flip their lids for weeks thereafter, my sense of reality begins to decline.
Just checked -- the Triskelion does seem to be sitting right where the Pentagon ought to be. So that's interesting. Unfortunately, it's pretty clear that's where it is, because of the establishing shot views of the Jefferson Memorial and so on.
I'm a little weirded out that in the comics, the Triskelion is actually a flying base, much like the helicarriers only bigger. So they can move it around and most often they plunk it in a body of water, like New York harbor. But I guess in the MCU continuity they've only had the repulsor technology to make the helicarriers fly for a short time, not long enough to have gotten their base in the air. And now, of course…
But there's certainly a large military that does its own operations. For one thing: Rhodey. For another, it's always the Army that's going after the Hulk. So they've got to be around.
It's definitely telling that we can handwave wacked-out geography and crap better than we can in-universe reactions that don't feel emotionally resonant in the right way.
No. The Triskalion is on top of Teddy Roosevelt Island, about 2.5 miles north of the Pentagon. I did a whole post about it based on promo stills -- you can see the Watergate and Georgetown Harbor immediately across from the helicarrier bay.
(I would have linked to Google Maps, but I can't figure out how to in the new version. Ugh.)
Where the Triskalion bridge lands on DC soil interests me. I need to pay more attention the next time I see the movie.
And isn't there explicit reference to the Pentagon in various Iron Man films?
My headcanon is that SHIELD took over Teddy Roosevelt Island pre-World War II (I wiki'd its history), and had a couple of derelict buildings. Then, post-Iron Man and Hulk, they got a lot more funding and built their shiny new HQ, which was possibly accelerated rapidly after Loki invaded New York?
The dynamics of a paranoid DC are interesting. The Army is reflexive in mentioning Posse Comitatus any time operations on U.S. soil come up, but I remember the National Guard humvee's at intersections in Georgetown post-9/11 (and how WEIRD it was to see 19 year olds in fatigues with weapons as my friends and I shopped).
The coordination of law enforcement in the national capitol region is its own brand of special hell. I think Winter Soldier didn't get it right, but am willing to go with them for Bucky's eyes of pain.
Thank you! Ah, you're right -- the shot of the Watergate should have tipped me off. I kept meaning to try to look at the various views more closely and then kept forgetting until the movie had almost cut away again. (But I remember distinctly thinking "well done, movie, for framing that shot with the Watergate in plain sight behind Pierce").
At this point I can't quite remember whether there's specific references to "the Pentagon" in the IM movies; just that we do get the military in those movies, obviously.
Really, I'm not SUPER disturbed by them getting the atmosphere of DC wrong -- not enough to make me reject the movie, which honestly I really enjoyed. (As I said afterwards -- Thor and Cap are my favorite Avengers. But while I enjoy Thor's movies, I think Cap's are the *better* movies, and TWS certainly continues that trend.)
But it was something that dovetailed with a big conversation Elishavah and I were having in the car on the way home, about how we just wish the MCU was a LITTLE bit better at writing in some references to the other movies and thus reflecting the world at large that they're building up. I suppose it's because the movies are wary of assuming the audience has seen all of the others (for TWS they're obviously willing to assume you've seen Avenger), but I still think you could write a couple of deft lines that would work if you hadn't seen the other movies, but are especially resonant if you have (and might even work as teasers for the other movies; in other words, if you hadn't seen Thor 2, but found out there was an alien invasion of London that you hadn't known about, maybe it would make you more likely to catch up with it).
The whole MCU thing is explicitly the opposite of "hitting the reset button" on stories, and it's all building, so… I just wish they'd do a bit more to interconnect them in a smart way. It doesn't bother me in any of the solo movies that the other heroes can't come and help out, but it'd make me happier if the story acknowledged that they ought to be on the solo hero's mind.
Anyway, bringing it back around to the "atmosphere of DC" question -- if they're going to stack up events, then it'd be nice to see them realize what that means, and the only way in which this movie stumbled, I thought, was in spacing out on that. At this point, it's not just what happened in NY. Like, okay, what happened in NY was obviously traumatic and people should still be dealing with the fallout from it, but there's a difference between how the world would be dealing with it if it was just a one-off event, and how the world would be dealing with it if it had been followed up by the global-headlines-grabbing events of IM3 and T2. (In a way, by T2 especially, because it's like… "oh great, alien invasions fucking up a major city is now a thing" and "fucking Asgardians AGAIN?" One alien invasion is Very Unfortunate and you would like to believe that's the end of it, but a second alien invasion by a whole different group of aliens within a year or two of the first? Cue the massive freak-outs.)
I guess, though, that the very nature of comics universes means that the writers have to walk this tightrope all the time. You can never follow these developments to their completely logical conclusion, because then the world of the movie *wouldn't* resemble our world very much any more, it would be far more paranoid and panicked and militarized. Which is interesting to examine, but not the kind of story they're trying to tell.
At that point you start pushing at the edges of the genre, I suppose. If you want to tell a single story, then yeah, absolutely, things are changed wildly by the kind of happenings that the MCU is depicting - but they don't want to make that kind of wild change. I mean, it's like how New York City is still heavily populated despite the number of times it's been involved in Marvel apocalypses. At some point people are going to say to themselves, you know, I've heard good things about Chicago, and they say home prices are really low down in Raleigh-Durham...
So to some extent, people don't get to react like people would react. I mean, look at IM2. Senator Stern is COMPLETELY RIGHT. Also a HYDRA mole, but on the question of "should Tony Stark be allowed to run around with his highly weaponized flying suit of armor with no oversight," he's right! But admitting it would break the universe.
Because it's not JUST the terrible running battle between Fury's SUV and the "cop" cars, and it's not JUST the causeway battle, but as we discussed a bit -- it's "oh, at some unspecified point in the recent past, the Iron Patriot suit was co-opted to KIDNAP THE PRESIDENT". And then Thor and some aliens BROKE LONDON. Those two not-insignificant things coming after "Full Scale Alien Invasion of NYC Plus Near-Nuking of Same".
The world, and the U.S. in particular, and D.C. very most in particular, should be way more visibly edgy. Which I guess Project Insight was itself an indication of, but… scrambled National Guard, folks. And given service rivalries, the Pentagon should be giving SHIELD the stink-eye at any attempt to say "that's okay, we got this".
(See, I keep going back to that cartoon I sent around. "IT'S BECOMING CLEAR THAT NO ONE'S GOT THIS…")
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But yes. The Fury sequence started out well -- they arrive in cop cars; heck they may be cops; the streets are deserted as if it were early morning -- but when you have cars explode in downtown Washington, and people don't flip their lids for weeks thereafter, my sense of reality begins to decline.
Reply
I'm a little weirded out that in the comics, the Triskelion is actually a flying base, much like the helicarriers only bigger. So they can move it around and most often they plunk it in a body of water, like New York harbor. But I guess in the MCU continuity they've only had the repulsor technology to make the helicarriers fly for a short time, not long enough to have gotten their base in the air. And now, of course…
But there's certainly a large military that does its own operations. For one thing: Rhodey. For another, it's always the Army that's going after the Hulk. So they've got to be around.
It's definitely telling that we can handwave wacked-out geography and crap better than we can in-universe reactions that don't feel emotionally resonant in the right way.
Reply
(I would have linked to Google Maps, but I can't figure out how to in the new version. Ugh.)
Where the Triskalion bridge lands on DC soil interests me. I need to pay more attention the next time I see the movie.
And isn't there explicit reference to the Pentagon in various Iron Man films?
My headcanon is that SHIELD took over Teddy Roosevelt Island pre-World War II (I wiki'd its history), and had a couple of derelict buildings. Then, post-Iron Man and Hulk, they got a lot more funding and built their shiny new HQ, which was possibly accelerated rapidly after Loki invaded New York?
The dynamics of a paranoid DC are interesting. The Army is reflexive in mentioning Posse Comitatus any time operations on U.S. soil come up, but I remember the National Guard humvee's at intersections in Georgetown post-9/11 (and how WEIRD it was to see 19 year olds in fatigues with weapons as my friends and I shopped).
The coordination of law enforcement in the national capitol region is its own brand of special hell. I think Winter Soldier didn't get it right, but am willing to go with them for Bucky's eyes of pain.
Reply
At this point I can't quite remember whether there's specific references to "the Pentagon" in the IM movies; just that we do get the military in those movies, obviously.
Really, I'm not SUPER disturbed by them getting the atmosphere of DC wrong -- not enough to make me reject the movie, which honestly I really enjoyed. (As I said afterwards -- Thor and Cap are my favorite Avengers. But while I enjoy Thor's movies, I think Cap's are the *better* movies, and TWS certainly continues that trend.)
But it was something that dovetailed with a big conversation Elishavah and I were having in the car on the way home, about how we just wish the MCU was a LITTLE bit better at writing in some references to the other movies and thus reflecting the world at large that they're building up. I suppose it's because the movies are wary of assuming the audience has seen all of the others (for TWS they're obviously willing to assume you've seen Avenger), but I still think you could write a couple of deft lines that would work if you hadn't seen the other movies, but are especially resonant if you have (and might even work as teasers for the other movies; in other words, if you hadn't seen Thor 2, but found out there was an alien invasion of London that you hadn't known about, maybe it would make you more likely to catch up with it).
The whole MCU thing is explicitly the opposite of "hitting the reset button" on stories, and it's all building, so… I just wish they'd do a bit more to interconnect them in a smart way. It doesn't bother me in any of the solo movies that the other heroes can't come and help out, but it'd make me happier if the story acknowledged that they ought to be on the solo hero's mind.
Anyway, bringing it back around to the "atmosphere of DC" question -- if they're going to stack up events, then it'd be nice to see them realize what that means, and the only way in which this movie stumbled, I thought, was in spacing out on that. At this point, it's not just what happened in NY. Like, okay, what happened in NY was obviously traumatic and people should still be dealing with the fallout from it, but there's a difference between how the world would be dealing with it if it was just a one-off event, and how the world would be dealing with it if it had been followed up by the global-headlines-grabbing events of IM3 and T2. (In a way, by T2 especially, because it's like… "oh great, alien invasions fucking up a major city is now a thing" and "fucking Asgardians AGAIN?" One alien invasion is Very Unfortunate and you would like to believe that's the end of it, but a second alien invasion by a whole different group of aliens within a year or two of the first? Cue the massive freak-outs.)
I guess, though, that the very nature of comics universes means that the writers have to walk this tightrope all the time. You can never follow these developments to their completely logical conclusion, because then the world of the movie *wouldn't* resemble our world very much any more, it would be far more paranoid and panicked and militarized. Which is interesting to examine, but not the kind of story they're trying to tell.
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So to some extent, people don't get to react like people would react. I mean, look at IM2. Senator Stern is COMPLETELY RIGHT. Also a HYDRA mole, but on the question of "should Tony Stark be allowed to run around with his highly weaponized flying suit of armor with no oversight," he's right! But admitting it would break the universe.
Reply
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