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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
By the time she comes back S.H.I.E.L.D. is gone (as far as the movies are concerned) and the individuals responsible are dead. The most anticlimactic revenge story ever.
Infinity War Part II starts when the Avengers go out to find her pod, having crash-landed back on Earth. The door dramatically opens up. They brace themselves in case there's trouble. and then....
"GUYS THERE'S NO TIME WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING!!! S.H.I.E.L.D.'S BEEN INFESTED BY HYDRA!!! WE HAVE TO STOP THEM AT ALL COSTS!!!"
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.I just..... don’t care about Vision. He’s... there? Maybe it’s cause I’ve only seen Ao U once, and he doesn’t get much to do in Civil War, but...
I like Vision. He is part of my favorite part of Ao U with the conversation between him and Ultron at the end of the film. I like the idea that Vision is someone with no human emotions wanting to save humanity while Ultron is someone with so much human emotions wanting to destroy humanity.
edited 28th Mar '18 7:57:56 PM by 123tbones
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Vision himself is cool, but everything about his creation exemplifies some of Ao U's worst problems.
To be fair, the Hulkbuster being useful isn't allowed by the laws of the universe.
This song needs more love.Tony is so bad at making Nounbuster armors.
Or the Hulk is too OP pls nerf.
One or the other.
Forever liveblogging the AvengersRewatching Civil War for funsies.
I look forward to all the characters' reactions when the situation forces them together again. Hostilities, forgivenesses, everything in between, etc.
I expect there will still be a bit of friction, up until the point where the Guardians + Thor arrive and show them how badly things are about to get, forcing them to stop. Hopefully with a bit of Thor going "I leave Midgard for a few measley years and you idiots manage to do what?"
"So. You still like cats. What's that about?"
I can totally buy Sam still not liking Tony or T'Challa. If his behavior towards Bucky is any indication, Sam does not buy into the whole, "We were trying to murder each other yesterday but WE'RE TOTES BROS NOW!!!" aspect of the superhero gig.
edited 29th Mar '18 7:25:26 AM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.So I got to The Avengers in my MCU rewatch. Lot to unpack there.
The Avengers' plot is honestly pretty shit. They spent five movies setting this one up, and the Chitauri still come out of absolutely nowhere. Loki's motivation doesn't make a whole lot of sense (he plans to use an artifact of staggering cosmic power as... a bargaining chip to rule one measly planet?) and his plan is ridiculously circuitous when he seemingly could have, you know, just killed everyone. (But then, Loki's powers being inconsistent, both in terms of abilities and scale, was another problem the movie had.) The Chitauri make no sense (they act more like generic "smash the closest thing I can see" monsters than the invading army they're supposed to be, and why the hell do they all die instantly when their mothership gets nuked?). The "Phase Two" references were a bit too clever for their own good (it's because The Avengers is the last movie in the MCU's Phase One, geddit?!), and the "vague shadowy Council that ostensibly oversees SHIELD" thing was dumb and added nothing but allowing Nick Fury to be a principled anti-authoritarian while simultaneously being an authoritarian himself (as SHIELD's unquestioned Grand Poobah who expects his subordinates to obey orders and not ask too many questions).
The movie also has a problem with feeling really generic at times. The tesseract research facility in the beginning is a good example. There are similar "cool movie science going on" scenes in all the previous movies (except Thor), but unlike the Avengers, those ones all felt... personalized? Tony Stark does movie superscience in his own specific way. Captain America's secret government superscience did a great job of feeling like "hyperadvanced 1940s tech". Even The Incredible Hulk had Banner's super gamma ray science feel appropriately makeshift and ad hoc. Meanwhile, the stuff in The Avengers felt like someone just ordered a "generic high-tech lab" set pulled out of storage and set up for filming. It had no character. Ditto with a lot of the action scenes. I mean, we're talking about Loki, a legendary trickster, and his main contribution for the first half of the movie is using his magic stick as a ray gun to blow things up. Really? That's the best you could come up with?
Ultimately, there's a lot in The Avengers that feels like it happens to facilitate expected Epic Movie beats rather than making any sense. Hawkeye fires one arrow that blows a massive hole in the side of the helicarrier, and doesn't actually target the engine but rather next to the engine, so that the heroes can have an awesome "fixing the damaged engine" scene. Then he fights his way to the bridge and fires a super autohacking arrow into a computer port (really?!) which immediately shuts down one — and only one — of the three remaining engines, in order to add tension to the "fixing the engine" scene. Why not just blow up the engine (or multiple engines) directly? Why not hack all four engines offline? Why not sneak in and use a super-explosive arrow on the Avengers conference room? That'd kill everyone but Thor and Hulk in one go.
A lot of the character drama didn't really fly, either. Black Widow and Hawkeye do a lot of the emotional heavy lifting in terms of adding personal stakes to a largely impersonal plot, but neither's really up for it. We've had five movies worth of character development, why are we focusing on one character who had minimal development (Black Widow played a part in Iron Man 2) and one who had none at all (Hawkeye shows up in one scene of Thor, where he does nothing)? The "Black Widow vs Hulk" scene in the helicarrier fails for largely the same reason (plus Banner Hulking out for little apparent reason than dramatic necessity). The key to breaking Loki's mind control of Hawkeye being "beat him up" also fell ridiculously flat. Captain America and Iron Man's personality conflict would have made more sense if Cap knew Iron Man from before he was Iron Man, but he didn't and Tony's had two movies' worth of character development that makes Cap come off as just being a dick, which is super out of character for him. Reusing Selvig instead of Foster as the tesseract scientist that Loki mind controls was also a huge wasted opportunity — it would have added more personal conflict into the mix, and helped make Thor more plot relevant. Having Coulton's death be the thing that brings the team to get their act together felt cheap — he was a fan favorite, but none of the characters had any particular deep, personal connection to him.
That said, there are some legitimately good scenes mixed in with the nonsense, and the visual spectacle is obviously fantastic. The first scene between Thor and Loki, where Thor tries to appeal to their shared childhood, is great. The "Loki demands that random bystanders Kneel Before Zod" scene was good in concept, though somewhat marred by the fact that everyone in Stuttgart is speaking perfect English for no apparent reasons (we had an entire scene in Russian earlier, why not one in German?) and probably would have been better if he did it in order to control the crowd so he could spike the dude's eye, rather than just for villainous funsies after the fact. The scenes in Manhattan where the team really comes together as a team (rather than just individuals working toward the same goal) for the first time works really well. Pretty much all the Banner scenes were solid — Ruffalo was a good choice to replace Norton as Banner, though they play the character very differently. Norton was very intense and focused, emphasizing the self-control aspect of "Bruce Banner, alter-ego of The Hulk", while Ruffalo is more relaxed and thoughtful, which works better for "Bruce Banner, mild-mannered scientist".
Ultimately, I'd say that The Avengers was enjoyable, but I wouldn't call it good. It's very self-aware of the fact that "this is THE BIG MOVIE, guys!!" and sets aside everything else in order to hit those BIG MOVIE!! tropes as hard as possible. The result is a fun watch that doesn't really stand up to any significant scrutiny. If you're willing to accept the film as it presents itself, it's great. If you dig past the surface level, it largely falls apart. This is particularly surprising because the earlier MCU had largely avoided that pitfall. Maybe it's Whedon's influence as director? It's hard to tell.
Oddly enough, I found myself thinking both better and worse of it on rewatching than I did originally. After the first watch, my opinion was basically that the first three quarters of the movie were crap, and then the climax in Manhattan was so amazing that it made up for it and averaged out to a pretty good movie. After the rewatch, I was less enamoured of the Manhattan battle (it stretches on too long and has too much empty "look at the cool fight, guys!" that adds nothing to either plot or characterization) but more forgiving of some of the earlier stuff (like the scene where everyone is arguing with each other in the helicarrier, which I rolled my eyes at the first time around, but thought was pretty solid character writing the second time).
Anyway, I've rambled long enough. The Avengers is also the end the MCU's Phase One, so I'll talk about Phase One as a whole later.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.Whedon initially did not want to use this trope, but ultimately went for it because it would take even longer to depict the Avengers finishing off all the remaining aliens.

Wow, Hawkeye sure looks different here
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