The Avengers 2 -- Age of Ultron

scarlet witch is hysterical, I wonder what elizabeth olsen looked like doing those hand movements without special effects

wonder no more!

https://youtu.be/56kfzV9GjRU?t=6m27s

I liked this one about the same as the first (if anything Whedon's throwaways are better) although I admit I was annoyed that it was Jams Spader and not J.K. Simmons in Whiplash mode whose voice I was hearing as Ultron.

i want an outtake where ultron says "That girl was, is, and always will be nada!" after wanda leaves

I'm probably the least trustworthy source for opinions on MCU movies as I acknowledge my complete lack of critical distance from them (at least until the inevitable qualitative decline begins in earnest) but this was great. Better than the first, imo, in that it felt more lived in and intentional. Lile they have a clearer vision of the world they're trying to build. Which can (and surely eventually will) be an impediment. Somewhat frustrating from a narrative standpoint, being the middle chapter of a number of different stories, but a lifetime of reading this stuff has prepared me for that particular brand of frustration.

I hadn't seen her in anything else and thought she was an interesting hollywood newcomer until I determined she's one of /those/ Olsens

This was pretty fun? A weird combination of feeling extremely long and messy, but without me wanting to throw anything at the screen. It had a nice number of moments that made me laugh, that kind of short laugh of surprise and delight that they're willing to go there and throw something even more nonsensical at the screen than you saw a minute ago. In that sense, it's not remotely in the same league as something like, say, Raiders of the Lost Ark, but it at least avoided being a completely grim trudge. There were so many beautifully absurd lines of dialogue in this, people shouting preposterous exposition over their communicators and just jamming in a total explanation of the scene and what's at stake because otherwise you'd have no clue what was going on. In that sense it felt very Silver/Bronze Age and I liked that - all that was missing was people announcing exactly what their powers do and how they got them every few minutes. Similarly, the opening battle worked very well for comic-bookyness, the team exchanging their banter as they go about their business. Loved that one stunt with Cap and the motorcycle.

A shame it all flies by so quick; CGI has made it way too easy to have our heroes knock dozens of guys flat in mere seconds rather than set up interesting little challenges/obstacles where you can build some tension for a few minutes, like "they have to get over that barricade but they're pinned down" or whatever. I would have cut at least one big fight out of this and given all of them more time to actually work. When it gets to the end and the "keep him away from the detonator!" type scene, it's just a bunch of stuff whizzing around. First film's climax had some similar issues, and possibly more generic foes, but it had a better sense of weight and space, I think.

And yeah, it's overstuffed, in the way of a third or fourth draft, that one right before you take two weeks off, come back to it and realize you can make major, scythe-like cuts through the thing to get to the meat. Just too many bits and ideas, crowding each other out and pulling the movie in different directions. It doesn't have to be a lean little action-thriller (though I wish more of the "side" movies would accept that, and not feel compelled to do an epic bonanza with the fate of the world at stake), but, for example, Hawkeye was a huge waste of time and brought nothing to the movie, just like in the first movie, but here he's onscreen way more as if they're trying to compensate for everybody pointing out what a waste he was in the first movie. But the ship has sailed and he's ensconced as "the boring one." In hindsight they could have easily built some of the first movie's plot around introducing him as an everyman, rather than a superspy - maybe he's like a really good archer on the college circuit or something, and our point of identification/contact into the weird world of the Avengers - but they didn't do that, they're stuck with this generic guy and in attempting to make him an identifiable everyman they make him even more boring and add the wife/kids scene and it's like, buddy, the movie's not about you.

What's it about? Well, this got a little garbled too I think. Clearly some major stuff didn't make it to the screen... like Whedon shot this ginormous, unwieldy script and then was forced to cut it down into something nonsensical, rather than hitting it with a red pen before filming started. If he didn't have space to make Thor's vision puddle thing with Skarsgård make sense, it should have just been rewritten where he just like, goes into the woods near Hawkeye's house and does some kind of meditating or something. The whole "Scarlet Witch shows everybody bad stuff - so now they can have character-building scenes!" idea was just a cheap plot device. Not a good plot device though: it just made the movie more bulky and confusing.

Ultron is such a weird villain with his tonal shifts, maybe they were going for "unsettlingly creepy schizo" but it seems more likely they had intended to do more with him having this imprint or influence of Tony Stark, but it's never clear why that would be, really, and after the one scene with Klaw is built around that, it sort of falls out of the movie. So my theory is, at one point the script was really upfront about this being an evil version of Tony Stark, maybe even like a nanotech thing he's working on that takes over his body (which would also mean the team is now fighting without their leading brain guy). It would be great if his evil plan was basically to actually implement Tony Stark's global security apparatus, but in doing so we see everything that's wrong with the idea. Could be kind of a Colossus: The Forbin Project with a chance to gesture vaguely at the security state, Snowden, and all the contemporary infrastructures of control/exclusion. Even if it were just more about the character and his arrogance etc., it would tie better in with the Hulk and Black Widow guilt stuff.

Either way they should have given us a better sense of just how ubiquitous and unstoppable Ultron is, or isn't - really seemed like we were being set up for a "the Avengers have to operate off the grid, on the run, without all their toys!" but then everything's fine, I guess they switch to some backup Internet or something. Not saying I wanted another hacker-fighting movie but it was just weird to play up the "he's on the Internet, he's everywhere!" thing and then have it not matter at all.

Final gripe for now: the Hulk was way less fun in this movie than the last one. Not sure what went wrong there but maybe he was just too central. Worked really well as this lovable neurotic super-nerd who kind of quietly turns into the raging Hulk with only a few scattered lines of dialogue in the movie. Oddly, the Jekyll and Hyde complex, which of course is what actually defines the Hulk as a concept, is maybe just not that interesting to watch in a movie. I do like how, after his big scene where he and Black Widow decide not to run away but to join the battle, the two of them leap into a forest and then he... does nothing, as far as I can tell, until suddenly reappearing in the "keep away" scene. Maybe I blinked and missed how he got there, or what he was doing in between.

And yet... I was entertained! I didn't hate it! It was kind of a dumb mess and I should ask for better from my light diverting action fare, but it could have been way worse, I guess!

speaking of overstuffed...

I forgotten everything that happened in this film, apart from the Thor's hammer gag.

James Rhodes finds his level.
Audience wonders why this charismatic arms dealer seems so familiar.
The old Kiss 'n' Cliff.
Everyone has an interesting story inside them, except Steve.

(Off to restart my attempt to re-introduce 'interstitial chapter titles' to summer blockbusters.)

I felt the dialogue in this was offensively bad and it made me sad for Whedon. There were of course some zingy lines that sounded like him, but they had a sense of weariness to them, like "the only thing I can think of to bring some life to this thing is to roll out some patented Whedon zing, but my heart's not in it." And it was laughable when the fight scenes kept slipping into dopey slo-mo (occasionally this was to represent Quicksilver's POV, ok, fine, but most of the time just because, well, I don't know why, some people still like the Matrix?)

I think most of the slow-mo bits were mean to recreate the effect of a comics splash page e.g. the shot of all the Avengers mid-flight at the start, or the one that spins around them as they fight off Ultron's hordes

That does make sense in the abstract. But it still looked bad. I feel like there's a lot in this movie that's meant to be delightfully ridiculous but they forgot to make it delightful.

I finally saw this and pretty much loved it. The reveal of Clint as stable family man, pretty much in total opposition to his comic book persona, was really funny to me. I didn't think the action scenes were particularly difficult to follow and, if anyone got shortchanged in terms of character development, it was the twins (particularly Quicksilver) but the beats they WERE given worked very well in defining both why they would help Ultron and why they would ultimately turn against him.

Ultron himself was fantastic, as was Vision. Thor's defining trait as beefcake is also pretty funny.

IDK, I guess I don't get what people are looking for from these movies that they would come away from something like this violently hating it unless you just flat-out hate all of the Marvel movies. It wasn't the best one they've done but I thought it was a ton of fun and hit all the notes I wanted it to.

Oh OK I might watch this

Ultron's voice is terrible.. couldn't get past it. as DCasino said upthread, there's no real sense of tension to the action, with all of the CGI bullshit going on

Ultron's voice... was pretty much James Spader being James Spader. It's not like, say, Christian Bale gargling tacks to come up with a menacing Batman voice and that seems like a weird criticism, or at least stated weirdly (like, I would get "I hate James Spader's voice and therefore I didn't buy his Ultron" if that's what you mean).

There's "no real tension to the action" because it's a comic book franchise where characters rarely die and, when they do, someone brings them back later, so it's hard to feel like any major character is actually in jeopardy or that anyone who does get killed is going to remain dead by virtue of the environment the story exists in, which is completely aside from "all of the CGI bullshit" as you put it.

I mean, obv it's your opinion and you can express it however you want; I vehemently disagree with you

There's "no real tension to the action" because it's a comic book franchise where characters rarely die and, when they do, someone brings them back later, so it's hard to feel like any major character is actually in jeopardy

there is something to this though, it does rob traditional action sequences of any weight - in general for an action sequence to work in these films it comes down to the characters' powers/abilities being used in a creative, novel or otherwise unexpected way. But watching two guys punch each other for five minutes is basically just wasting my time, is how I feel about it.

xp they do actually kill someone though! The CGI is less of a problem there than the plangent slo-mo (Thanks, Peter Jackson)

The only scene with two guys punching each other is the Hulk/Hulkbuster, which is full of lots of smart tactical decisions and obviously only possible due to CGI.

smart including dumb there.

xp they do actually kill someone though! The CGI is less of a problem there than the plangent slo-mo (Thanks, Peter Jackson)

hence someone brings them back later

Even if that character remains dead, that doesn't make the feeling that a future writer isn't going to pull a resurrection for pathos/story beats (esp. given The Infinity War coming up, that's a cheap way to escalate personal stakes)

The slo-mo felt like splash pages to me, as someone alluded to upthread.

fwiw I was speaking generally of the genre, not about this movie specifically (which I haven't seen)

xp

I was only mildly disappointed with Ultron's voice because I'd always imagined him to sound more like a Dalek. He looks like a screamer. But Spader performed commendably.

I dunno, I enjoy these movies as live-action "What-If?" setpieces featuring characters I only peripherally followed in the comics until the first Iron Man movie came out; I'm not looking at them for much more than "how many quips, beatdowns and explosions can we get over the next couple of hours and are the staged/delivered well enough to make easily-entertained me smile"; it's a remarkably low hurdle to clear tbh but I feel like demanding that movies entertain me rather than putting myself in a mood to enjoy what they have to offer and then enjoying them is easier and makes me happier.

i want to watch this again

i enjoyed this enough though it definitely cemented a sense of superhero movie fatigue. thought the gulf in quality between this and the first avengers movie is wildly overstated though obv the first one had the novelty of omg a teamup and omg they got hulk right etc. thought spader was great, as an offspring of stark it made sense he would be this asshole who thinks he's the smartest guy in the room. plus, yknow, less than zero.

Dr casinos overstuffed post otm except about Hawkeye, who is the soul of this movie.

Ultron was a vg villain imo, equal parts hal, skynet and evil stark, pity that whedon couldn't keep that going rather than turn him into a fighty robot but otherwise this was as good as it was going to be

no comments on this in more than a year? guessing people are not too geared up for a 2-part sequel then.

oh I'm geared up

not looking forward to the part where Cap eats it though

the movie isn't out for another year what is there to talk about

It's four MCU movies away, gotta hyperventilate in the correct order.

yeah exactly. so much more MCU to go