And their dreams they dreamed awake
allofthefeelings and I went to see Age of Ultron last night. At the theater with the reserved seats and recliners, so we didn't have to get there early and stand on a line or anything. That was great.
Okay, wow, that was even worse than I expected and my expectations were low, given everything I'd heard, though I wasn't really spoiled for much in terms of plot. I don't even know. Like, did Joss just ignore Iron Man 3 and CATWS? The characterization in this movie made little sense following those movies, and let's be real, Joss apparently only cares about Tony Stark, so we got another round of Tony Stark fucks up and Tony Stark fixes it, which is fine for an Iron Man movie, but less so in an ensemble piece. Bruce was wishy-washy, Natasha was...what even was that? and clearly he has no understanding of or interest in Steve at all. And Thor might as well not have been there. Like, fine, Avengers *should* have been Thor's movie emotionally (since it was, you know, HIS BROTHER who was the main villain), but the big character growth arc was given to Tony, which was then reiterated in IM3, so I don't know why we have to sit through it again. Like, Tony wants to put armor around the world and nobody says, "Hey, we just stopped SHIELD from doing that via Project Insight, which was wrong even before we discovered HYDRA was planning to kill millions of people with it!" Also, Tony just plugs unknown code into Jarvis? (The visuals of Vision defeating Ultron gave me AtLA flashbacks - Jarvis, I mean, Vision was energybending Ultron!) Also, Fury's reveal with the tractor should have been to Clint, not Tony.
I can only hope the Russos do better, but I'm already dreading that Cap3 is really just IM5: Tony turns into a fascist and then has to fix it somehow. Bleh. DO NOT CARE AND DO NOT WANT.
And then we end with the Avengers being SHIELD again and just no. It's bad enough they disregard CATWS on Agents of SHIELD, but to do it here is just terrible writing and planning. Ugh ugh ugh.
There were things I liked - the attempts to lift the hammer at the beginning (though I call bullshit on Steve not being able to; I get that it was just to set up Vision doing it later); Natasha's flashbacks (though the less said about equating her forced sterilization to being a monster the better - I don't think that was the intention, but ugh, given the other bullshit she gets put through here, where she gets captured only so she can be rescued by the Hulk, it's just more crap because of course having babies is a woman's primary desire out of a relationship what?); Natasha getting to fight with the shield; all of Steve's fighting with the shield/the way he uses it in conjunction with his teammates' weapons; Wanda, surprisingly, and Clint's under-fire mentoring of her; Vision (given how Wanda was reacting to him, are Billy and Tommy in our future? especially since we've got Scott Lang in Ant-Man? Which I still have no desire to see, btw); James Spader as Ultron; standup SHIELD tech dude on the helicarrier; Rhodey; Sam; Stan Lee's cameo with the old vets and the Asgardian liquor. Oh, and I really liked the emphasis on clearing the city and minimizing civilian casualties. Response to Man of Steel?
Otoh, the running language gag with Steve was terrible and OOC, and wtf even was his vision? I don't get what the point of that was. Because let's face it, the worst has already happened to Steve - he woke up and everyone he loved was dead or had forgotten him, Bucky turned out to have been tortured for 70 years, and the world he fought and died to save was still terrible. I don't get how having nightmare at the dance hall was supposed to be frighteningly revelatory to him. (I also don't understand Thor's - he's already abdicated the throne, so being a bad king seems like a throwback kind of worry, unless it's meant to hint that all's not well in Asgard? But I don't know, since it was really only a vehicle to get the stones into the Avengers' consciousness.) It's nice that they referred to Sam continuing to search for Bucky but Steve could have shown some kind of emotion about it, but just like in Avengers, apparently that relationship means nothing to Steve in Joss's hands.
I don't care one way or the other about Bruce/Natasha, but they did not sell it to me here at all. I didn't mind Clint's secret family (glad they weren't fridged like in the comics) but it does seem like a huge retcon considering Loki was in his head and knew everything. I guess he didn't have time to make Clint go home and kill them?
Pietro was fine, he's at the bottom of the list in terms of my favorite speedsters (he's no Wally West, Barry Allen, Bart Allen, Tommy Shepherd, or Irey West) though, so I didn't have high expectations going in. I liked his relationship with Wanda, but it wasn't enough for me to feel more than, "thank god they didn't kill any named ladies" when he died.
And on a technical note, wow, that was some terrible 2003-level CGI in that first battle - I don't know if it was the 3D or what, but it looked really cheap.
So yeah. I mean, it's entertaining while you watch it? And if you want a fun summer blockbuster and don't care about continuity and characterization, I guess it's fine. There's definitely space for fic. But it did not work for me at all in the way all the other MCU movies have, even IM2, which I still think was kind of a terrible movie. Obviously, mileage varies.
And then to add insult to injury, the Rangers lost with ONE POINT EIGHT SECONDS LEFT. I thought it was going to overtime! I WAS STILL ON THE BUS. And ESPN told me it was the third intermission, and then my brother and Amber both had to let me know, that no, the Rangers lost. Bah. I came home, ate some ice cream, because I was SO HUNGRY and hadn't had dinner, and then I went to bed.
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