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 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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