And if you grab it floating in space, what does it remain stationary relative to?
Random thoughts…
Boy, it would have sure been embarrassing if the Twins had gone on an obsessive mission of vengeance against the fiendish Mr. “Issh Compb.”.
And Cap seems to be really adamant in his position that it’s completely morally unacceptable and slippery-slope brinksmanship to prepare or forearm for future conflict. The ethical thing to do, I guess, is to make at best piecemeal, ad hoc responses to growing problems until they completely blow up in your face, and you’re left scrambling to mobilize and equip a fighting force, and nobly throw wave after wave of it against the Enemy in the desperate attempt to destroy enough of his capacity to construct his war machines—often through razing cities—that he runs out of bullets before you run out of bodies.
Huh. Seems an appropriate modus for both a modern superhero, and a WWII general staff. “To Berlin! For ze Motherland, Comrades!”
When the truck flew off, I thought, “Chitty Chitty Truck Truck.”
I don’t think so. IIRC, Black Widow and Daredevil were an item, and Hawkeye was married to Mockingbird. Both unions eventually dissolved. The movies usually follow the “Ultimate Marvel” storylines though, which I never got into.
I am only in this thread to say I saw it. Somehow I went to go see it on opening weekend, and while the theatre was full, it wasn’t packed by any means. (We went to go see a Friday matinee).
I fucking loved the movie! I love the Vision. I have loved Paul Bettany since Master and Commander and since that Heath Ledger movie with the knights and rock n’ roll. I am so glad to see him with a bigger part.
I also loved Jeremy Renner’s expanded role. And I loved the Twins.
Really I loved everything. I came out of the movie like this :D.
I didn’t read this whole thread because I don’t want to see all the flaws in it, which usually come out in a thread like this!
Very short recap, as this was written through decades of retcons and writer one upmanship:
!) In the 40’s, Marvel (or its precursor) had a flaming guy called The Human Torch, long before the Fantastic Four.
2) The Human Torch series eventually ended, and Marvel later explained it was because he lost control and went bezerk, so his creator had him encased in a stasis capsule to keep him from catching fire when exposed to oxygen.
3) An earthquake caused the casing to crack decades later, and OHT escaped.
4) IM and Dr. Banner didn’t create Ultron. Henry Pym (Ant Man, Yellowjacket, other aliases) did. Some disaster prevented him from completing the process, and Ultron took over on its own. He escaped and eventually encountered a sentient computer (not JARVIS, I think it was actually called Quasimodo, a product of the Mad Thinker) and objected to the way it was created to serve man when it was obviously superior. So, Ultron decided he needed to create a superior human to replace the inferior human species. He also had heavy Oedipus complex issues with Hank Pym, and wanted to flaunt his own superiority to Pym’s face rather than kill him, like he wanted to do to all other humans.
5) Ultron recovered the old Human Torch’s body and used that as a template for making what would eventually be the Vision. He also used the brain patterns of Wonder Man, who at the time was an enemy of the Avengers who died, and was later brought back to life by some voodoo guy. For some reason, the Avengers had his brain patterns on record, so Ultron hacked into that.
6) Ultron located the original inventor of the Human Torch, who had fallen from grace because his creation went bonkers, and now made his living repairing toasters and drinking away his payments. He forced him to work on the Vision’s body.
7) When Vision woke up, he turned on Ultron, because of some snafu the original inventor guy secretly installed to foil Ultron’s intentions. Ultron killed him in retaliation, but didn’t want to destroy his creation, so he fled to rethink his evil plans.
8) Don’t really remember how Vision hooked up with the Avengers, but much like the movie, he started off as innocent and pure, unaware of human foibles. He wanted to become more human to fit in with his colleagues, but wound up getting involved in a love triangle with Mantis and the Scarlet Witch, who were both attracted to his purity. Mantis left to become the Celestial Madonna. Vision eventually married Wanda and they had children, but when John Byrne took over the Avengers, his ego demanded that this particular storyline be obliterated.
9) Ultron eventually created another child called Jocasta, based on Janice Pym, Henry’s wife. That didn’t work out well for him either. Just because robots have human emotions doesn’t mean they’ll automatically agree with each other. Ultron had also created duplicates of himself to activate in case his original form got kiboshed. These duplicates didn’t always agree with him either. One of them wanted to reconcile with Pym and catch up on the father/son relationship he had missed out on. They even had a huggy scene. This was one of those cases where it was hard to determine whether the storyline was intentionally bad or not.
Man, you weren’t kidding with the whole “Oedipus” thing.
Actually Black Widow and Hawkeye were an item in the comics for quite some time. It was mentioned upthread, but I don’t blame you if you missed it (it’s a long thread!). When we first met Hawkeye in the comics, he was a villain and hopelessly in love with the Widow (who was a Soviet spy in those days). Both of them eventually went straight, and remained an item for quite awhile. Although the Widow would occasionally get captured and brainwashed into trying to kill him or something. Bad Sixties!
Later, Natasha did become romantically involved with Daredevil, and was a regular supporting character in his book for a couple of years during the 70s.
I thought it was weird that they make a point of having Iron Man reference “Peace in our time”, which of course is immediately associated with Neville Chamberlain’s disastrous arrangement with Nazi Germany… but they seemingly don’t do anything with that after throwing it out there?
Heck, even Cap’n America should have had something to weigh in on that line.
Well, it did foreshadow that things weren’t going to end up well.
Can an anvil be “foreshadowing?”
Years of Looney Tunes leads me to vote yes.
After that quote, they pass a ship called the Churchill. There was definitely something going on there, but I couldn’t figure out how to connect the pieces.
Anyway, I loved the movie.
Yeah, I wanted Cap to scream at Stark “Peace in our time!? Here’s a cultural reference for you: NEVILLE FUCKIN’ CHAMBERLAIN!” Yes, specifically including a curse word to show just how much he’s lost his cool :eek: and to give a serious(ish) contrast to the earlier “Language!” banter. (Serious to the characters; I’m sure the audience would’ve laughed if he did that.)
The movies seem to be following the Ultimates line in regards to Hawkeye. He’s a black ops agent rather than a reformed villain. And he’s a devoted family man who keeps his home life secret from most other superheroes.
In the Ultimates line, Black Widow hooks up with Tony Stark.
Spoilers:In a rather complicated plot involving Loki and a team of international supervillains, Hawkeye’s family is murdered and Captain America (!) is framed for the murders. Black Widow was just faking their relationship so she could get close enough to Stark to steal his Iron Man technology and then kill him.
They did go somewhere with “Peace in our time”. Ultron, while he’s still in software mode, hears that line, and goes on a virtual animate Wikipedia binge, or the equivalent, which is presumably one of the major influences on his personality.
I’m not going to be able to comment on everything in this thread, so just a few points:
Overall, I thought that this one was inferior to the first Avengers, but still plenty good. There’s a lot of room for “worse than the first Avengers”.
My favorite part was seeing how well the Avengers are now working as a team. That, I thought, was the real virtue of the opening action sequence: It shows us the teamwork.
My least favorite part was Ultron’s over-articulated face. Yes, I understand that he needed to be able to emote with that face, but look at what Johnny 5 or his protege Wall-E was able to do with just moveable lens covers. They could have given Ultron something that made sense on a robot body, but which could still convey emotion.
I liked how the heroes were making it a priority to try to save everybody, 100%, but I don’t like that they succeeded. Let them save 95% of the populace by dint of their superheroic above-and-beyond, but 100% just feels too much like a Saturday morning cartoon.
One thing that nobody’s mentioned yet: OK, the helicarrier launching lifeboats made sense. But why didn’t the carrier itself nose up to some truncated street on the floating city, so people could run over directly onto the deck? It seems like that would have significantly increased the efficiency of the rescue.
And I was totally expecting an end-of-credits scene where we see just what Stark managed to do with the Bartons’ tractor.
I thought of that too, but then decided that it would have been a bad idea. The helicarrier could have easily become entangled in the various crap sticking out from the city, which would have resulted in everybody biting it.
Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Kaboom!
But that was one of the central themes of the movie. These guys have powers and they were asking themselves if they were doing enough with them. You own an Iron Man suit and can use it to save people: how many hours a week do you use it? Forty? Sixty? Eighty? A hundred? How do you justify taking a weekend off and relaxing when you know that dozens of people will die during that weekend who you could have saved? Tony Stark was asking himself how much more he should be doing. Those expectations were what led him to build Ultron. He wanted to create something that could save everyone.
Agreement. The first movie set an awfully high standard. This movie didn’t meet it…but, damn, who is ever going to be able to equal it? This one was very, very good.
Agreed. That took away something from his depiction. I also was less than happy with his glib, almost witty tone, his saucy derision. On the other hand, if he’d just recited lines like an old style vocoder (or a business phone voice index system) it would have been…flat. There may not be a “right answer” here.
Agreed yet again. In a disaster on the scale of any of the fight scenes in this movie, people are going to be dead. Hulk’s rampage could not have avoided fatalities. There’s just too damn much kinetic energy flying around.
I did miss the after-the-credits quip scene, and that would have been a good one!
I did love the running joke about Captain America’s squeaky cleanness, and also the running joke about Thor’s hammer. This is the sort of throwaway that adds to the richness of a story.
I thought the Hulk/Black Widow romance felt tacked on. It didn’t really seem to follow from what has gone before. It was nice, but it wasn’t logical. She could do a lot better…and he knows it too.
I felt they’ve been building to a Widow/Banner thing since their interaction in the shack in the first Avengers movie, actually.
And I didn’t get the impression they saved 100% of the people - Ultron bots were definitely shown taking out some individuals, I’m sure.