Welcome to the main discussion thread for the Marvel Cinematic Universe! This pinned post is here to establish some basic guidelines. All of the Media Forum rules
still apply.
- This thread is for talking about the live-action films, TV shows, animated works, and related content that use the Marvel brand, currently owned by Disney.
- While mild digressions are okay, discussion of the comic books should go in this thread
. Extended digressions may be thumped as off-topic.
- Spoilers for new releases should not be discussed without spoiler tagging for at least two weeks. Rather, each title should have a dedicated thread where that sort of conversation is held. We can mention new releases in a general sense, but please be courteous to people who don't want to be spoiled.
If you're posting tagged spoilers, make sure that the film or series is clearly identified outside the spoiler tagging. People need to know what will be spoiled before they choose to read the post.
Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
![]()
Either way, it's nothing short of ludicrous. Hulk's fights have leveled cities. His deathtoll should be in the hundreds of thousands, attributing to the sociopathy he's shown recently.
He may not know his own bodycount, or want to find out for his own sanity. Either way, staying away from big population sites is already the course of action he should take. If a guy in a neighborhood has a rocket launcher on his front lawn that sometimes fires at random, it would be way better to move that thing away before it kills anybody, not after.
edited 6th Jun '15 12:05:57 AM by Tuckerscreator
Movie Ultron
I said this with Mandarin and I'll say it again with Ultron: the finer details have changed, but the spirit of the character is alive and thriving.
He tries. A recurring plot point is that the Hulk just wants to be left alone but people keep dragging him back in.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.I'm going to second the guess the Hulk has killed a few thousand people in his rampages. It'd be absurd for him to have wrecked cities and for not a soul to have died.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."I liked Ultron's characterization in the movie, particularly the ways the writers made him similar to Tony; quite a few of his snarkier lines felt like things Tony would have said.
I agree that a more human-behaving robot was refreshing and interesting after dozens of movies about emotionless, logical A.I.s.
It feels like we're meant to conclude that the Hulk did kill people on his South Africa rampage; Bruce wouldn't have that kind of breakdown and leave the team over just causing some property destruction. If the Hulk had some magical ability to destroy property without harming people, then Bruce wouldn't be so terrified of turning into him.
I don't think thousands, but some.
edited 6th Jun '15 9:17:05 AM by Galadriel
On Ultron.
I'm gonna use what Linkara argued in his review of the Silent Hill comics; there are certain characters who have a unique voice or personality attached to them. But there are some characters whose appeal is that they are the exception to that rule. Ultron is one of said characters. He thinks on a level that is beyond human comprehension. He acts like a machine because he IS a machine; cold, calculating, ruthless, with no emotions.
Sure you have villains like Loki and Joker whose snark and charisma is how they have their fans, but Ultron is not those characters. The sheer horror comes from the complete lack of anything resembling a human being that you can pin on him. When you attach human quirks to him, you rob him of what makes him so frightening. And heaven knows the MCU villains have been lacking in that department.
I don't think non-human villains are particularly frightening, honestly. It's one thing to ascribe evil to an inexplicable force — it's another, far more scary (IMO) thing to make evil us.
The Other is not a concept based in horror; it's a concept to make horror less horrible by disassociating it from ourselves. To tell ourselves we don't have the potential to be that bad, we're normal and evil isn't.
...I mean Ultron has the cartoonishly evil goal of wiping out all of humanity just kinda because so maybe he's a bad example of this in action, I don't know.
"We're home, Chewie."... The same Ultron who hates daddy. And who built himself a wife?
I think the whole thing about Ultron is that he's never been a complete lack of anything human. His thing is he's convinced he's a superior logical existence when he's running off emotions as much as any human.
Forever liveblogging the Avengers
Case in point: Ultron's daddy issues (whether that be with Pym or Stark) and his Oedipus complex toward Jan in the comics (see the creation of Jocasta and that one time he turned Stark's Iron Man armor into a doppelganger of Jan, while Tony was still inside and with Ultron's consciousness running the armor).
I guess that's to be expected when you're based on the mind of someone like 616 Pym or MCU Tony.
"Cynic, n. — A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be." - The Devil's DictionaryHe tries. A recurring plot point is that the Hulk just wants to be left alone but people keep dragging him back in.
But he still lives in populated cities - in Avengers, he lived in Calcutta in the beginning. Lots of people there. If he truly believed having a Hulk-out would cause thousands of deaths, he would immediately move to the arctic and not let anyone drag him away. But he doesn't because the Hulk doesn't cause thousands of deaths. In the movies, actually, I don't think he's caused any deaths aside from Chitauri — even the soldier he threw out of his plane in the first Avengers got his parachute open.
Yeah I dunno how sustainable living in complete and total isolation is.
Maybe you'd be less disappointed if you stopped expecting things to be Carmen Sandiego movies.He definitely killed people in Johannesburg. There were those cops he threw a truck at. And perhaps some of those soldiers at Culver. He wasn't in Calcutta or Brazil because he thought the Hulk can't kill people. He was there because he felt he could control himself by then.
I think it robs the Hulk of a bunch of his meaning if he can never kill anyone. Unlike other supers, the Hulk's powers have typically manifested as a curse. A curse of anger that risks Banner hurting his loved ones if he doesn't learn to control his own dark urges. It's a curse he has to maneuver to do good instead, and can do good, but not good by default.
Like, going back to the rocket launcher thing: you can point a rocket launcher at a bunch of evil terrorists instead of civilians and so do a good thing. It doesn't change that a rocket launcher is still a lethal weapon that should be kept away from innocents, if even it hasn't hurt one yet.

Of course, he still feels guilt for causing billions of dollars worth of damage, but at least he hasn't killed anybody.