I’m pretty sure the scepter was destroyed when they took the stone out of it.
They were celebrating because all that remained were non-threatening clean-up. The scepter had been recovered and they had won.
Saw it last night and had a fantastic time! Now, I do agree with some of the complaints, but I have to say, they really barely matter. Avengers 2 did exactly what I needed it to do - it delivered fantastic actions scenes couched in sufficient quiet dialogues scenes which gave me a reason to care. It moved along at a quick pace. It made me laugh occasionally. In short, it was a blast, and I plan to see it again.
Something else which I loved about it - I’ve always had a soft spot for less flashy, under appreciated characters, and since there’s no Avenger who has taken as much shit for being useless as Hawkeye has, I was thrilled that he got such meaty character development. Really, the movie’s main arc belongs to him and Banner. Jeremy Renner was probably jumping up and down while he read the script.
I continue to be truly impressed with how well Disney and Marvel Studios are bringing the Marvel Universe to life. Ten years ago, could anyone have believed that something as massive and unwieldy as Marvel canon could be adapted to the screen? That we’d be getting not only Avengers movies, but Avengers movies which tie in with Guardian of the Galaxy movies and X Men movies, and featuring such oddities as Vision? With every film, I keep worrying that the whole thing will collapse under it’s own weight, but it hasn’t happened yet, and I couldn’t be happier.
One comment - the party scene where Tony & Thor tried to one up each other with how great their girlfriends are was much better than anything actually involving those characters could have been.
The impression and implied backstory I got from the first few scenes is that at the end of Avengers, no one realized there was anything special about the sceptre besides it being a mind control device. And Thor isn’t the brightest bulb, so he didn’t bother investigating it any further. Some time before Ultron, someone in Asgard realized the sceptre was something probably best not left on Midgard, so Thor came back, and reassembled the Avengers to get it. They’ve been raiding Hydra bases for the past few weeks or months, looking for it. That’s when they were able to develop the protocols to use & deactivate the Hulk - code green and lullaby. Now that they found the sceptre, Thor’s going back to Asgard with it, and the Avengers can disassemble, hence the party.
It does kind of beg the questions as to why if Thanos is trying to collect all the Infinity gems, he’d let Loki take one away. And why if the sceptre itself was powered by the Tesseract, which is why it could be used to deactivate the portal at the end of Avengers, if it contained another Infinity gem. I’d hazard a guess the plan to have the sceptre contain an Infinity gem wasn’t conceived until after Avengers was released.
I admit I had a moment’s flash of “How did Thanos get the Infinity Gauntlet out of Odin’s vault?” before I remembered the end of Thor 2, and thought “Oh, yeah, Loki just freakin’ mailed it to him. Great.”
I assume it was just a loan - that the plan was for Loki to return it along with the Tesseract.
You’d expect Thanos to be smarter than that though - Loki is a trickster god after all. And he was none too stable after the events of Thor. To paraphrase P.J. O’Rourke - giving Chitauri and Infinity gems to Loki is like giving liquor and car keys to teenage boys.
I read somewhere online that Aaron-Taylor Johnston is actually contracted to more movies. Is that true? I can’t imagine that he’s going to be ressurrected, so maybe flashbacks?
Specifically Avengers, or Marvel in general? There’s always Kick-Ass…
If I recall correctly, Thanos gave the scepter to Loki in the opening scene of The Avengers. Being as the Tesseract was on Earth at this time, it clearly established they were two separate items.
Offhand, the last time I remember seeing the scepter was when the Black Widow used it to destroy the teleportation portal on the top of Stark tower. Somehow it subsequently ended up in the possession of Baron Strucker. I guess a Hydra agent in Shield passed it on to him. Shiled has been looking for the missing scepter and in the most recent episode of Agents of Shield, Coulson found out it was in Segovia and passed this information on to Maria Hill, telling her it was time to call in the Avengers. This led to the opening scene of the movie.
The end of The Winter Soldier showed the scepter already in possession of Baron Strucker, along with Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch.
Well, I’ve seen every previous MCU movie, many of them multiple times. I’ve also watched every episode of Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter. I was super duper excited by this movie. And I spent the entire time watching the movie, not talking with anyone else or playing games on my phone or anything.
Here are several criticisms that have nothing to do with “not paying attention”:
(1) Bad animation and cartoony physics, particularly in the opening action scene (called out by multiple people in this thread)
(2) The idea that two geniuses, both of whom have spent much of the past several years dealing with powerful and inexplicable things, would take an alien AI found in an evil magical mind control device and attempt to merge it with a world-defense program, with (as far as we can tell) no safeguards of any sort.
(3) The motivation of Ultron, which somehow manages to be incomprehensible (bringing peace? or the next level of evolution? what do those two things have to do with each other? evolution of what?) and generically forgettable
(4) The connection between Thor’s flashback, Heimdahl, the scientest, the hot tub, and the creation of Vision. (Oh, right, I missed out on all of that because I “wasn’t paying close attention”.) And even if you can explain that all closely, was it necessary? The creation-of-Vision plotline would have been just fine without Thor showing up.
(5) The moving being “overstuffed” meant that some potentially interesting themes and ideas got shortchanged. For instance, one part I did like a lot was meeting Hawkeye’s family. Not a huge amount of screentime, but definitely added to the movie. Compare that to the idea that Captain America now doesn’t know how to do anything but be a soldier. An interesting development for an interesting character… and it’s mentioned maybe 3 times over the course of the movie. Which is a shame and a waste.
I don’t mind that you enjoyed the movie more than I did. Hey, great, I want it to succeed so that more MCU movies will be made, because I love them, even when I don’t love every one. But your attitude that someone would only dislike it because they weren’t paying attention, or weren’t familiar with the previous movies, is just bizarre and unsupportable.
I don’t mind Tony being on it since he was mind fucked with, but Banner? holy shit, the entire movie his character spends brooding about the results of what mad science did to him, that he would just go along with Stark seemed utterly ridiculous. If they had just kept it to mind fucked Tony went a little crazy seeing all his friends dead and screwed up it would have been perfectly fine. I had absolutely no problem understanding Ultron’s motivation: save the earth by destroying humanity and letting the next step in evolution take their place, it doesn’t get any more clear cut than that. It also makes perfect sense from the earth’s point of view.
What do you mean “the next step in evolution”? What’s going to evolve? Is he talking about AIs? Or does he mean chimps or dolphins or something?
Didn’t he flatly say the only thing left living on Earth would be metal?
I saw it yesterday, and liked it. I was glad to read that there was no post-credit scene as I left after the mid-credit scene.
And I was thinking that this is the third big movie I’ve seen recently featuring artificial intelligence (along with Chappie and Ex Machina).
One other thing about Elizabeth Olsen, she has a movie coming up in a few months where she plays Audrey Mae Williams, the wife of Hank Williams, played by Tom Hiddleston, Loki himself. It’s called I Saw The Light and will almost certainly be prominent during awards season. I’m calling Hiddleston for a Best Actor Oscar nomination, and Olson for a Best Supporting Actress nom, though no one knows yet how prominent her role is and keep in mind that Reese Witherspoon WON Best Actress for playing June Carter Cash in Walk The Line.
Two more names soon for that Marvel actors Oscar noms/wins list.
I meant specifically in the MCU movies
One thing I may have missed: why try to get the AI from that gem to run Ultron?
Why not just use Jarvis?
Jarvis wasn’t a true AI, just a really good interface. It was exposure to Ultron that made him self-aware.
Didn’t they show 3D models of Jarvis and the AI from the sceptre, showing how much more complex the AI in the infinity stone was compared to Jarvis?