I think Wakanda is very cool. There are secret cities and civilizations hidden all over Earth. Why is Africa having one (considering how big it is, it should have lots) suddenly so unrealistic?
I forgot about the museum. In Civil War, the news reports referred to “Known terrorist James Barnes”, so I guess at this point the Winter Soldier/Bucky connection is public knowledge. But your two points are well taken.
Here’s what I think happened:
Zemo decides to destroy the Avengers. He investigates everything he can about them, and creates a war room with pictures, dates, arrows, pins, strings, etc.
Since Cap and the Winter Soldier were at the center of the SHIELD/Hydra takedown, he starts decrypting all the Hydra data that was released.
He hits upon some data about the Winter Soldier, including that he’s really Bucky (if that wasn’t already public knowledge), and the dates of all his missions. He notices that one mission eerily coincides with the death of the Starks. So he doesn’t have any proof at that time, but he damn well suspects it.
He tracks down the Hydra officer in Cleveland, and finds the codebook to activate Bucky. But the Hydra guy won’t give him a mission report.
He creates the whole bombing plot & takes the place of the psychiatrist so he can spend 5 minutes alone with Bucky. He activates him, and gets the mission report. Now he knows that Bucky killed the Starks, and the location of the base in Siberia.
At this point, I’d guess that all he wants to do is get his hands on the recording showing Bucky, Cap’s best friend, killing Tony’s parents, and then figure out how to use it. But jackpot - it turns out that Cap, Bucky and Tony all decide to track him to the base as well. So he changes the plan to show Tony the video right then and there, and sit back and watch the fireworks.
I think a lot of posters are missing the Evil Plot™. The plot was to destroy the Avengers. There are multiple ways the Evil Mastermind was trying to accomplish this was to split them up over the Winter Soldier or have them kill one another. The scene in the shelter was pure coincidence. Remember he had just gotten a copy of the film so did not necessarily have time to post to youtube. Remember in movie time that no matter how much of a head start someone has, everyone arrives within 5 minutes of each other.
I didn’t have any problem with Tony recruiting Peter. I think they could have made his motivations clearer, but they’re not hard to puzzle out.
As noted, he needed someone who both A) has no emotional connection to the other heroes, and B) can take them out non-lethally. There’s no one else on his roster who meets those requirements. Beyond that, presumably the Sekovia Accords apply to all super-powered (however you define that term) individuals, not just the Avengers, either as a group or as individuals. At some point, someone is going to have to track down Peter Parker and either get him signed up, retired, or imprisoned. Doing it this way got Peter on board and cooperating with the new law from the start.
Lastly, in terms of Tony being irresponsible for letting a sixteen year old fight, I think that fits Tony’s personality perfectly. “Responsibility” is no something that’s ever come easy to Tony. I can very easily see him not even realizing the irresponsibility in letting Spider-Man join him. And that’s largely because, I think, Tony sees a lot of himself in Peter, and can see that Peter is handling himself better at that age than Tony did. Tony, at sixteen, was a child prodigy making groundbreaking advancements in robotics and AI. Peter has made groundbreaking advancements in chemistry (the webshooters - not as impressive as AI), so there’s a bit of, “I remember what it was like being smarter than all of the adults in the room, put together.” Plus, Tony used his incredible gifts (his intellect) to get into girls pants until well into his late thirties. Peter is using his incredible gifts (actual superpowers) to save people’s lives. He’d never admit it, but I suspect Tony is blown away by Peter’s responsibility.
And lastly, he’s a sixteen year old kid who can catch a thrown SUV. And he’s going to fight Captain America. So the kid can take care of himself, and he’s fighting a team of superheroes who are going to go out of their way to avoid killing anyone.
Of course, what happens to Rhodey shows that even in those circustances, it’s easy for someone to get very, very badly hurt. So it was still irresponsible for Tony to bring a kid into it like that. But it makes sense that he wouldn’t see it like that, at least not right away. I think by the point where he’s yelling at Spider-Man to stay down, he’s starting to seriously consider what kind of shit he’s just dropped this teenager into.
And don’t forget, back in IM3, Tony was using an 11 year old as his sidekick. So a post-pubescent recruit is an improvement.
The United States is a wealthy, advanced nation on a (pair of) continents synonymous with war, famine, disease, and frequent coups.
Yeah, but he wasn’t deliberately putting Harley in harm’s way. He is specifically recruiting Parker to fight in a battle against powerful entities including the lethal force projector Scarlet Witch, known terrorist the Winter Soldier, and some guy with a bow and arrow. Tony’s entire argument is how the Avengers need to be kept in check to prevent injuring innocents (never mind that had they not acted as they did in Lagos, many more people would have been killed by the blast, and tens of thousands to millions might have been at risk of a bioterrorism attack using the presumbly infectious agent that Crossbones was trying to steal), and yet, his first instinct is to bring in a kid with no training whose biggest experience is fighting petty criminals? Especially when he already has Vision, who should be able to pretty much lay out everyone introduced in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to date. (Honestly, the only real challenge for him would be Hulk, or the yet-to-be introuced Carol Danvers and Steven Strange.)
Certainly, losing Pepper and his guilt over Sokovia has altered his reasoning faculties, but let’s face it; the real reason Spider-Man was in the film at all was because of the deal that Marvel made with Sony to license back the rights and set up a standalone film. It wasn’t as awkward of a setup as that for Thor: Ragnorak in the middle of Age of Ultron, but it did smack of “We need to rig a hook here for a future movie,” and it isn’t as if the normally Manhattan-based Peter Parker really fits into the galactic-wide conflict of Infinity Wars. Indeed, one now wonders why Parker isn’t doing something to help out the people trying to rid Hell’s Kitchen of its more threatening and destructive villains. The Spider-Man could probably make quick work of The Hand, Kingpin, Punisher, et cetera. But no, he’s too good to hang out in Midtown West and give Murdock, Jones, and company a little help.
Stranger
It’s also… are people really that unaware of this trope? Lost societies in inaccessible locations with secrets and technology well in advance of those of the modern world is an old, old pulp fiction trope. Just a few off the top of my head:
Shambala, mythical enlightened city at the heart of the Hollow Earth, in certain Hindu and Buddhist traditions, was a favorite of writers from 1933’s Lost Horizon (where it was renamed Shangri-La) to 2009’s PS3 video game, Uncharted 2.
El Dorado, a city of fabulous riches lost somewhere in the South American jungles. In popular fiction, is often guarded by giant stone robot cats or giant birds made out of gold that can still fly.
Tarzan frequently encountered the city of Opar, which I don’t think had super-tech or magic in the originals, they’ve certainly been portrayed as such in other media.
I suppose one could arguably include Mars here, too, from Burroughs’ John Carter books.
And those are just the lost cities that are still supposed to be inhabited. The lost cities that are abandoned, sometimes by a pre-human culture, but still have technology advanced beyond modern standards, includes Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria, Irem, the Antarctic Mountains, and a dozen others.
And that’s leaving out the specific such cities that also exist in Marvel and DC comics. Iron Fist alone’s got, like, seven of them.
This is a conceit in pulp fiction that goes back for more than a hundred years. There’s reasons to dislike it as a trope, or not want to see it included in the MCU, but it’s not like Marvel just pulled this out of its ass, and I’m not saying that because the place first showed up in a Fantastic Four comic in the '70s. The idea had been around for at least a hundred years, if not more, before then.
Or the hundreds of millions they saved by doing what they did in Sokovia (not even counting the thousands they saved on the land itself when it was rising)…
I understand it’s a really easy trope for superheroes to have a “you kill innocents while fighting your superbad”, but a rational group of people (read: governments) would write that off in a second because of what they do to protect everyone else.
Having a mom show that she hates you because her son was killed makes for a compelling and believable story to a hero because it’s HER son that died and she feels it. But I honestly don’t believe a system of government or governments with no personal connection to innocent deaths can think “Wow, we need to make sure these guys come in only when we want to because they’re too reckless”.
Compared to what?
If the UN had control over The Avengers when Ultron was on the loose, how many innocents would have died while they:
-Debated whether or not Ultron was a world threat
- Voted on which jurisdiction held precedence as to wherever he was at the moment
- Sent in wave after wave of soldiers to their deaths as Ultron and his killbots decimated everyone
- Used nuclear bombs to end the threat (exposing more innocents)
- finally called The Avengers and let them deal with Ultron and probably had innocents die
Yeah it doesn’t sound like a good plan. Again, I understand that on an individual level it works, but to extrapolate it to a world-leaders type view is just unbelievable to me
I am rather curious - since I don’t remember Ultron very well - how much information about Ultron people other than The Avengers would have had given the time constraints?
Stark invented it, and then The Avengers and the thing they made got into a fight in Sokovia and a bunch of people died. I’m not sure that saying, “Well the thing we created would have killed MILLIONS of you if we hadn’t interceded, so y’all better be grateful!”, really makes sense. I mean if the British government bombed a building in the middle of New York saying, “Well, we were developing a horrible biological weapon of war on your soil and then we found out it was about to get lose and kill everyone, so we bombed the building to destroy the weapon.” America wouldn’t be all, “Oh, well thank you Mr. British Ambassador. Well done.”
If The Avengers were able to suppress the fact that they created Ultron, then that allows them to seem like heroes. But if everything happened in such a hurry that Ultron never had a chance to notify the world that he was going to kill them all, and there’s no good explanation for where Ultron came from, then their story would still be rather questionable. Basically, they showed up somewhere, did a bunch of damage, and left, all without much explanation and everyone has nothing more than their word to go on that they were saving everyone.
I saw it with the family yesterday and I thought it was decent but long, like look at my watch long.
Captain America is my favorite MCU character and I appreciate that he is a character who will strive to “always do the right thing” no matter the cost, but walking away from the Honda Accords seemed kind of “eh,” and add in Stark’s quickness to sign up made the whole situation of the movie feel a little forced. I get where they were going and I see both sides but Rogers worked for SHIELD in the past without worrying about signing up for oversight.
I think Sec. Ross had a very good point about there being oversight for nuclear weapons that fit this and I think there should have been some room to meet in the middle – UN Guidance with some autonomous ability to react to sudden emergencies (I’d hate to be sitting on the tarmac in my Quinjet waiting for the UN to vote that I could go attack Thanos) but I don’t think the movie really had the time to develop that type of a solution.
Spider-Man was great. I’m not too keen in the idea that he gets his suit from Stark or that he needs goggles to filter out the stimulus, and I kind of with they could have made him a little older, but the action and the quips were spot on.
Zemo was OK. I understood his motivations but also think that he got a lot of distance with kind of a thin plan. Heroes need good villains to fight against and I think MCU could do a little better in that regard. That includes making a decent antagonist in the previous movie and then blowing him up in the first 15 minutes of this one.
Agent 13 is blah. I liked the scene with her and Rogers kissing only because of the banter with Winter Soldier and Falcon. Cap needs to go up against the Serpent Society in the next movie so he can start dating Diamondback.
Steve had worked for SHIELD, but it turns out that they had been infiltrated by Hydra for years. Not just by a few moles, but a very large number of people. I can understand why he’s hesitant about signing up for oversight by another big organization. Even with his hesitation, it seems he was considering it and leaning towards signing but with seeing how Bucky was being questioned without a lawyer and how he would have been shot on sight if Steve wasn’t there and hearing how Scarlet Witch was basically under house arrest with no trial, he had reasonable doubts.
I think some compromise could have been reached, where there was UN oversight on the Avengers, but there were checks and balances to make sure that no one too corrupt was in charge of things, and maybe a contingency plan on what to do if aliens arrive and immediately start attacking within an hour. But with Zemo manipulating things and Bucky in danger, it both rushed things and made Steve more hesitant to sign.
Actually, there is an even better counterexample from the first Avengers film, in that the “World Council” instructed Director Fury to launch a nuclear attack on New York in response to Loki opening the wormhole for the Chutari invasion, and then when he disobeyed (“I recognize the Council has made a decision, but given that it’s a stupid-ass decision I’ve elected to ignore it,”) ordered a launch anyway, which would have killed hundreds of thousands or millions of people and still not closed the wormhole. (Who the World Council is and why they have direct control over an organization with a nuclear arsenal, or why they are then so suprised that S.H.I.E.L.D. is later able to act with impunity in The Winter Soldier with apparently nothing in the way of safeguards is never explained.)
I think given both the nature of the threats that only the Avengers are able to face, and their own remarkable, indistiguishable-from-magic abilities, Captain Rogers is quite right to decline the shackles and orders of a UN-directed command, and especially one apparently headed by the guy who created the Abomination (which is still lurking in the corners of the MCU somewhere). Hank Pym made the same argument, and in retrospect with good reason, as if Hydra had been able to access the Pym particles for their own uses it would have been beyond the ability of any conventional forces to respond (at least, according to the suitably creepy marketing video that Darren Cross made to apparently market it to terrorists).
Stranger
What I think is hilarious is that the Avengers (and you KNOW Steve reads the paper) were evidently rather surprised that a hundred and seventy something governments had signed on to a phone-book sized accord. Really? In, like, how long? Because if you told me five years, that I might believe. Maybe. But one does think it would make the Times, if not the front page.
(Also sorry Sharon but your relationship there was shoehorned in and that isn’t fair to you.)
ETA - a good point made by some in the film and not really discussed is that they’re not going to have a choice - it’s sign or they’ll come for you and they’re not going to stop coming. What are Steve and friends going to do now, hide in Wakanda for the rest of their lives? How is that different from what they were going to have to do before by not signing; i.e., resign?
We just came back from it and really liked it. I did have one question: when the airport fight scene was about to kick off, I wondered why Captain America didn’t ask if the detention effort was sanctioned by the UN Security Council. They went through a lot of effort to establish the rule of law at the beginning of the movie, only to have Bad Mustache William Hurt send them off on a mission.
One thing I noticed was the super solider serum that Stark was carrying was blue, could it be this variant was in part from harvested Kree?
I thought the same thing and that would be good synergy…but are the movies really ever going to do anything with tv show stuff?
Also… why was Howard Stark carrying super soldier serum in his trunk?
Although S.H.I.E.L.D. has clearly had access to the Kree “Guest Host” for a while, it doesn’t seem to have been used for much before Project T.A.H.I.T.I., and it certainly didn’t grant Coulson any special strength or agility. It seems more likely a variant of the Super Soldier serum that Howard Stark was working on by himself. Stark, it has been noted, was obsessed with Steve Rogers (as mentioned by Tony on several occasions) and was probably trying to find ways to reproduce the effects of the serum and continue Project Rebirth.
The movie production and show production people are pretty much separate groups, and the movie people seem intent on trying to ignore the show as much as possible, which is probably for the best, since the show has to develop and maintain a continuity that may have little do to with the goals of the individual films or the ultimate Infinity Wars endgame. As for why Stark was carrying the serum in his trunk, Tony makes the comment during his parting discussion about Maria having to tolerate a stopover at the Pentagon, implying that Howard was delivering the serum for testing, though why he would deliver it to the military rather than S.H.I.E.L.D. begs a number of questions, though it is apparent that neither Tony nor the world at large was really aware of S.H.I.E.L.D. despite the fact that they had a giant high rise building complex across the Potomic River from Foggy Bottom, so Tony may have just been unaware of his father’s role. Anyway, the better questions were why Stark was so unequipped to defend himself and his wife or escape, giving that he had previously built flying cars and various weapon and defensive systems.
I’d really like to see a deeper exploration of the schism between Stark, Pym, and Carter, which apparently undermined S.H.I.E.L.D. and allowed Hydra to grow unconstrainted within it. Honestly, that would make a great movie or short series on its own, much more than the awkwardly shoehorned Agents of than S.H.I.E.L.D.. However, that story might have it’s own gap-filling problems.
Stranger
The original super-soldier serum in First Avenger was also Windex blue.
It’s possible that Erskine developed his original serum by toying with a dead alien, but it seems a bit out of character from what we saw of the guy.
I am also annoyed with the use of Zemo, but not for the same reasons: I continue to be of the opinion that Marvel left money on the table by jumping straight to Ultron and, after that, straight (relatively speaking) to Thanos, without first pitting the Avengers against the Masters of Evil.