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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
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Someone cited Ultron as a broader problem in superhero movies now where the villain's plot makes no fucking sense and seems to change depending on what the plot requires at the moment. I remember Whedon trying to justify that by saying Ultron is insane so of course his plan was stupid and made no sense to anyone but him, but that seems like a copout for lazy writing.
I mean, I can kind of see it with Ultron. I always thought they could've fleshed him out by making it clearer how he's ultimately a newborn child lashing out at the outside world but doesn't really think too far ahead. When you get down to it he's just a robotic teenage punk who read a couple pages of Nietzsche and is in his nihilism phase. They could've made that idea so frighting by playing out as much horror as they could draw from it. Unfortunately that part of his character is inconsistent like everything in the movie.
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?It was more important to Whedon that Age of Ultron be shorter than Avengers
Forever liveblogging the AvengersFat lot of good that did, the movie felt half an hour too long and the plot structure was all over the place. I'd already talked a while back about how the film had two "darkest hour" moments, one at the barn and one after Natasha is kidnapped. The entire final battle was like a bad attempt at redoing the Battle of New York but making it even bigger and longer.
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?Smaller and more intimate tends to mean more time spent on dialogue and characters interacting, which I'm not sure is how you make a movie shorter. Cheaper, maybe. But time's already at a premium given you've got like three new villains (four including Strucker) and Vision to introduce, and then you're also adding Hawkeye's family, Amadeus Cho's mom, and a whole fictional country to boot.
It's not that you can't do all those things, if you budget your time well and script judiciously. But I'm not sure 'small and intimate' is how I'd describe the movie they were trying to make.
Notice in the first Avengers film how Loki never actually fought the entire Avengers team? Sure, he fought Captain America and he stabbed Thor one time, but he never actually went up against the entire team. Hell, when he tries to go up against the Hulk, Loki gets pounded. You could say that this is because Loki isn't a big fighter, more of a schemer...but then again, so is Ultron. Ultron is not a big fighter either.
Sure, there are problems with Age of Ultron. I agree that it's too short — apparently, Joss's original cut was over three hours, but they cut it down to 1 hour and 42 minutes. Honestly, I wish they left it closer to two hours, because the movie really needs more time to breathe. And I wish they cut out that stupid "magic pool" scene and left in the scene where Thor is possessed by one of the Norns, because it was so much cooler, but that's one of the cases of "Test audiences are stupid" because fucking test audiences didn't understand it.
Other than that, though, I still love the movie. It tries to do something different and, for the most part, it works.
edited 10th Apr '17 9:32:50 PM by alliterator
The thing about the character conflicts in Avengers was that it was all based around ego. They all knew what the goal was but couldn't agree on the course of action. They were in the same room but it's not like not working as a team was preventing them from stopping the problem. Banner's "time bomb" analogy didn't quite work because it is obvious when the threat comes all their arguments would fall away because it was just petty ego, almost literally in the case of Steve and Tony.
I had a teacher who would call certain artistic choices a "punt," neither fair nor foul. That's how I would describe that approach to character conflict, it works in the moment but eventually draws attention to the fact the story had nowhere to go until the helicarrier is attacked. There is very little they can do but argue. And even the Battle of New York has no real goal but Hold the Line, they know they need to turn off the portal but that happens incidentally rather than a tangible goal they are working towards.
The better approach is to have each character with a different goal in mind, what they expect to get out of the resolution of the plot. That way, when certain parts of the plot IS resolved it coincides with a characters' arc. In Kingdom Come Aquaman has a classic line when Superman comes asking for assistance, "You have hundreds of champions to protect a few land masses. I protect the other 70 percent of the world, and there is only one of me." It's not ego that puts him in conflict with Superman, but responsibility to his people. That is his only real scene in the book, but it shows what I'm talking about. The Justice League movie seems to be taking cues from that idea, where Aquaman doesn't get involved until it has an impact on Atlantis.
The Dark Word is for me actually an example of good studio meddling. As is Ant-man. If I piece the story together correctly, Taylor had originally free hand with the movie, but after the Test audience saw it and gave it a terrible score, Marvel went and fixed it by adding more Loki scenes. They couldn't fix the whole movie, but the Loki scenes managed to push it from god-awful to "oh, well, at least there is a great Loki-movie in the middle of it". And if Wright had gotten his way, Janet would now be dead and not lost in another realm.
I agree with the idea that a stronger sense of peril would give the movies more impact, and that most of the MCU doesn't really have it. Someone compared it to James Bond, but I never found the Brosnan Bond films engaging for precisely that reason - he feels like he could be sleepwalking through everything, it's so easy for him. The first two Craig movies were more my speed.
The best that most superhero movies seem to be able to do in this regard is to create a villain or a conflict that's a threat to the hero(es) on a moral, psychological,or emotional level (Dark Knight, Winter Soldier, Civil War), but Civil War really weakened itself by having an ending that neutered all the film's impact by turning around and saying "Never mind, everything's going to be OK".
The MCU feels pretty determined to make movies that are nothing more than entertaining fluff.
Everything is okay from Steve's perspective. Tony may be a little less okay
Forever liveblogging the AvengersAh, walls of text about why people who dislike AOU are wrong. We truly are back in 2015.
Anyway, yeah. Hoping Hela doesn't suffer from the same problems as Ultron. So far I'm liking what I'm seeing with her though. That scene with destroying Mjolnir was badass. If I didn't already know it was coming that'd be an "Oh shit" moment in the theater when the trailer first came on.
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Totally disagree! Civil War is pretty much the antithesis of a movie which made me think that everything will be okay in the end.
Age of Ultron and Thor: The Dark World both have issues because the villains are pretty ineffectual because their henchmen are the ones who do the actual work. Once the Kursed is dead and the twins team up with the Avengers, there is no sense that those villains are a big threat (though the raising city at least creates a moment in which everything seems lost).
Civil War on the other hand is excellent in slowly raising the stakes, until the airport fight escalates. And the final battle - oh boy, for a second I really thought that Steve would kill Tony at the end.
edited 11th Apr '17 6:13:21 AM by Swanpride
Notice in the first Avengers film how Loki never actually fought the entire Avengers team? Sure, he fought Captain America and he stabbed Thor one time, but he never actually went up against the entire team. Hell, when he tries to go up against the Hulk, Loki gets pounded. You could say that this is because Loki isn't a big fighter, more of a schemer...but then again, so is Ultron. Ultron is not a big fighter either.
Of course he can. Making Hulk and Thor literally unbeatable is neither required nor prerequisite (quite the opposite, in fact), and specifically writing the villain such that they can't win against them in a fight is also a writer's decision.
Note that Ultron has fought teams involving Thor and Hulk multiple times over several decades, and has been a physical threat for many of them. Earth's Mightiest Heroes' version has him outright nearly kill Thor and curbstomp Hulk in his first appearance, thus requiring the heroes to use an intelligent solution rather than a physical one.
In the movie, Loki was established as an "intelligent" threat rather than a physical one, which is to say that he was all about plans and using other people's resources - and as such, the primary threat of Avengers isn't necessarily the Chitauri, but in shutting down Loki's device before the Chitauri become impossible to beat. That's why they never truly fight him, because we already know he can't win in a fight - Thor already showed that.
But as I noted before, the series falters on making Ultron an intelligent threat and put a large amount o focus on making him a physical one, and then screws themselves over by neutering him as one despite devoting large portions of the film to hyping up how strong he supposedly is, how powerful his ultimate body is, having him crow about beating down the heroes, and making a point of how powerful his army of himself supposedly is. But there's no sense, as in Avengers, that the Ultrons might have worn the Avengers down with sheer numbers had they not been stopped fast enough. Unspoken Plan Guarantee is averted with taking down the doomsday device - its destruction is a foregone conclusion from early into the fight. Ultron himself is easily dispatched (multiple times, in fact) once they started trying.
As noted earlier, there's no real stakes to the final battle. It's just the heroes knocking the villain down. And while that's sometimes a neat idea (Oceans Thirteen was a good use of it), in a movie attempting to have epic stakes it's a total waste.
edited 11th Apr '17 9:22:30 AM by KnownUnknown
That's not a bad thing in the slightest. Thor and Hulk's own movies routinely feature villains that overpower them, specifically because the heroes are supposed to be physical powerhouses and thus greater physical threats are required to maintain tension.
The Avengers series is for antagonists even greater than that, antagonists that require all the heroes to fight together rather than being easily defeated by one of them. And again, if they weren't going to have Ultron be powerful enough to back up the setup they did to his strength, then the movie should not have had that set-up in the first place. Either way, it's a failure of the writing.
edited 11th Apr '17 9:26:43 AM by KnownUnknown
Hell, it looks like that's still going to be a thing going by a first look I watched about Infinity War.
"How is Thanos going to be this ultimate threat that the Avengers can't overcome? Oh, 'cause the team's all busted up."
How about, I dunno, because he's the Mad Titan and way stronger than all of them?
My various fanfics.The Worf Effect is only a bad thing when it's done badly (as the trope is now, at any rate, when it started off it was explicitly a bad thing but I digress). If Ultron punched out Hulk and Thor with a flick of his wrist, that'd be absurd, if Ultron managed to handle both Hulk and Thor without being smashed to smithereens, that'd be great.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."
