Post by Harkovast on May 4, 2017 15:15:36 GMT
So the Avengers film was actually good.
Who would have guessed?
Taking all the super heroes and bunging them together in one film sounds like a disaster, but some how they managed to spin stray into gold and made it work.
So well done marvel, gold star for you.
Buuuuuut taking a crazy concept and making it work is one thing.
Making a SEQUAL to that crazy concept and making it work? That might be asking a bit much.
What's remarkable about this film is that it manages to make me absolutely not give a fuck about anything that happens in it. It almost feels like the film makers went out o their way to lower the stakes at every opportunity.
Age of Ultron starts out with a big, battle sequence where our heroes attack a Hydra base.
I was kind of impressed that the movie managed to so rapidly make me completely lose interest in everything that was happening while blowing so much shit up.
The evil base isn't doing anything super urgent.
Inside the bad guys are doing evil science, but there isn't any kind of ticking clock or anything. The Avengers aren't in any great rush for any reason we are told, they just decided now was the time to start attacking the base.
There is an attempt at a clever shot where the camera follows each of them in turn through the action...but this is undermined by the fact that half of what is happening is goofy CGI, including the people. Humans turn into cartoon characters every time an avenger lays hands on them, and their rag doll loony toon bodies go spinning off into the air.
Aside from having nothing at stake, the bad guys are hilariously ineffectual. They are firing all kinds of machine guns and ray guns by can't hit shit. At the very start of the fight, Hawkeye is being driven around in a jeep (because he's crap) and a hydra jeep is about five feet away firing a huge laser cannon at him but still cant seem to hit anything. A few bad guys fly in on jet packs for some reason, though we don't seem them taking off or putting on their suits, we just see them fly in as CGI people and get splattered immediately during all the carnage. It feels rather like the just gave them jet packs to let them reach the avengers rapidly to make the one continuous shot thing work.
The Avengers toss these losers around with casual ease, mowing down hordes of them. We haven't been given any real reason to hate the bad guys, there aren't any stakes and they aren't a threat.
But just in case that wasn't lame enough, this being a Joss Whedon film, everyone has to start quipping.
Always with the fucking quips.
It increases the sense that there is no danger involved, everyone is just having a bit of a laugh. Considering they seem to be killing loads of the enemy soldiers, this actually makes it all seem weirdly distasteful. Stop enjoying all this needless slaughter Avengers!
There is a particularly cringe inducing bit where Ironman says "shit" and Captain America goes "Language!" and then they quip back and forth about this. I know Captain America is a sap, but wasn't he in WW2?
I was under the impression that the three times it is always appropriate to swear are-
1- During a war
2- During sex
3- While writing a review about a fucking shitty movie.
In addition to their useless mook army, the bad guys send in two super powered people they've got, Quick Silver and Scarlett Witch.
Quick Silver can move very quickly and Scarlett Witch...well its sort of unclear exactly what she does. It's kind of this swirly red telekinesis stuff, but also mind reading and making people have hallucinations. It's swirly and red, I know that much.
These two, despite being trained as part of an evil Hydra plot, aren't presented as very scary or evil, making is extremely obvious they are going to change sides and be goodies later.
Having saved the day...though the day wasn't actually in any danger....won a fight I guess? After winning a fight, our heroes recover Lokis magic staff, that Hydra were keeping for their evil science research.
Using the staff Ironman figures out how to make artificial intelligence.
Just going to let that sit there for a minute.
I suppose that's just something you can do with magic staffs.
They plan to use the AI to bring about world peace, but the AI (called Ultron) they create turns evil IMMEDITATELY!
But this being a Joss Whedon film, it also starts talking in stupid quippy dialogue.
Now I don't want to be racist to any robots that might be reading, but to me when I imagine an artificial intelligence suddenly becoming self aware, I tend to imagine it being logical or mechanical sounding. Instead, this new AI comes right off the bat, talking like a normal human person.
Almost immediately he says things like "This feels weird", "I don't get it" and "Gimme a second." I know people say Whedon gives all his characters the same voice, but its not normally taken to quite this extreme! They turn on an evil super computer and the first thing it does is breaks into Buffy talk.
Later on he says sarcastic things like "I'm physically incapable of throwing up in my mouth", and "Thank you for asking that, I wanted to take the opportunity to explain my evil plan." Did Stark program the TV Tropes data base into this thing?
Why even have a bad guy that is an evil robot if it talks, acts and thinks just like a normal human?
Within about a minute of having been turned on, Ultron has gone evil and decided it needs to destroy the Avengers and wipe out humanity.
This feels less like it malfunctioning or going beyond its program and more like its factory settings are "snarky" and "kill all humans."
If I was building an AI, I think I would put in a fail safe in case it starts wanting to kill all humans. It does seem to be an activity that artificial life finds fascinating!
If you want a look at artificial super computers done right, let me show you the example of Sky Net in Terminator 1 and 2 (fuck all the other films in that franchise).
Sky Net doesn't speak directly or have a face, it is unknowable and alien. In nano seconds it decided humans were a threat to it and set about destroying them with nuclear weapons. Sky Net isn't the brain of a person inside a mental box.
Now the idea of a machine that talks like a person could get interesting. Ultron could have started out as an efficient machine, working towards world peace, but then as this proves an impossible goal he starts to become more unstable, talking more like a deranged and emotional human as he breaks down mentally.
But who needs a character arc or for the villain to develop or even have a motive?
Just have him start out talking like a washed up stand up comic and have him want to kill all humans cause why not. That would be good too, I'm sure.
Interestingly, Tony Stark already has an AI called Jarvis, who talks like an English Butler, and as we will see in this movie Jarvis is entirely sentient. Jarvis talks in a more factual way, like you would expect a machine to and seems super smart.
So I guess what went wrong was making AI talk sarcastically, as that seems to be what made the new one all evil. Or maybe magic stick and super computers don't mix, I guess that could be the moral.
Probably should have just had Jarvis run everything, could have saved a lot of trouble.
Ultron gets himself a robot body and takes over some of Ironman's suits to start causing trouble. The Avengers smash both him and the suits to pieces (despite being caught off guard and lacking all their gear.) This sets a trend throughout the film, that Ultron is not at all threatening. Aside from his jovial, jokey tone, he seems about as powerful as one of the Avengers, usually fighting them one on one and generally losing each time and having to download himself to a new body.
There is nothing intimidating or scary about this junky machine. Even worse are his robotic drones that are like littler, crappier versions of him.
These things fly around (which is less interesting because we had normal humans with jet packs flying around earlier, making it feel like all bad guys get to fly in this thing) but other than that they are basically completely useless.
The heroes tear them apart with such ease that it makes you feel like they are made out of Lego. Now you might think "well Hulk is very strong, so of course he can break the drones."
Yeah but Hawkeye can kill these things with a freaking arrow to the head!
And not just an arrow from his bow, at one point he holds an arrow in his hand and just stabs one in the head to kill it.
Added to this is the fact that these things are entirely CGI so inherently have no weight or substance, it feels like our heroes are ripping up tissue paper.
Later on Ultron tries to make himself a new, more powerful body with an infinity stone (the most powerful things in the universe) in its head but the good guys steal it and put Jarvis the good AI in it. He becomes the super android Vision, who I guess some comic book fan somewhere must give a shit about.
So Ultron is lame, and the good guys actually have their own android that is better.
The stakes are raising to fever pitch in this one!
Speaking of Hawkeye, why do the Avengers keep bringing this guy along?
He has a bow and arrow. Muskets that you load down the barrel rendered his super power obsolete in the 1700s!
Captain hand gun, whose special power is that he brought a revolver to the fight, has more powers than this guy.
Black Widow is at least a super agents who its implied has had soviet experiments and super training to make her more bad ass. Hawkeye is just completely useless. He contributes no skill or talent that the others don't have.
Think I am being unfair to poor old Hawkeye?
In the movie, the Hydra boss says that his troops should target the weaker Avenger members, and they wound Hawkeye with their shitty ray guns.
So even the movie knows he is a liability! They can't even keep up the pretence that this guy belongs there.
Why do they keep bringing this idiot along and putting him in harms way?
Unfortunately it pus the film makers in a bind because they have to lower the threat level to something that can be killed with arrows.
I think in the comics he was a founding member of the Avengers team, so we are basically stuck with him, unfortunately.
Anyway, enough about how crap Hawkeye is... back to how lame Ultron is.
Despite the movie being about the "Age of Ultron", Ultron himself is useless so ropes Quick Silver and Scarlett Witch to help him out.
His relationship with them is confusing and unclear, as we sort of assume he is just using them to help with his plans because he is an evil machine that wants to kill all humans...but then he seems to act like he really cares about Scarlett witch and is upset when she turns against him.
He really does want to kill all humans, by the way. He makes an eastern european city fly into the sky, intending to crash it down and kill everyone (no really).
Then when he is damaged during the final battle he sees her and say "if you stay here, you will die." I'm not a super computer, but I am fairly sure that during a global extinction event, where you are standing probably doesn't make a big difference.
Does he know that his two friends are humans? And that they would be included in the subset of "things that die when you kill all humans" ?
Of course, as I mentioned these two aren't threatening or evil (they seem to get roped into helping Hydra and then roped into helping Ultron), so the fact Ultron has to get them to come to do his fighting for him tells you how lame Ultron really is.
Remember when I said he could take over Ironman's suits? He never does that again. I assumed he was going to be able to control machines and robots by taking over their programming, but no that would be way too effective. I mean that would actually make him a threat in some way, and we can't have that.
At the end his big plan is just to pile in dozens of his useless drones that the Avengers bash to bits casually. Even the super quick guy breaks some of them by just punching them, and he isn't super strong! Are they made out of old Storm Trooper armour?
The final humiliation for me comes when Ultron steals a plane to attack the good guys. No he doesn't take it over with his evil machine powers. He just gets in the cockpit and pilots it. Ultron can fly and fire energy from his hands...but needs a plane with a gun to fly around and shoot at people.
Ultron is pretty big, like about seven or eight feet tall, so I don't really know how he fits in the cockpit, but he looks delightfully hilarious sitting in there. Something about a machine piloting another machine always cracks me up. It's like on the old Battlestar Galactica when they had three Cylons flying each bad guy fighter and sometimes they would look at each other when they were worried or things were going to shit. Or on the Jetsons, where you build a robot to operate the vacuum cleaner for you...rather than just having a vacuum cleaner that does it itself.
To sum up this whole stupid movie, the Avengers created the problem, then they solve it, but solving it wasn't super difficult.
And that's the entire movie.
Oh Black Widow and Hulk have a romance subplot, which is as embarrassingly stupid as you would imagine. I guess she wants Hulk to smash.
The fast moving kid dies, which I guess is meant to imply some kind painful loss, even though he was only introduced in this film and was a bad guy for most of it.
There is an entire middle section to this movie that I can't remember at all because nothing of any interest or consequence happens.
The movie is a special kind of bad, in that its not JUST total crap (though it absolutely is total crap) but just so boring and pointless. All this money and effort went into producing something utterly meaningless. We feel nothing and learn nothing.
Poor Joss Whedon was hounded off the internet by an angry twitter mob and for what? To produce something of no value at all.
Anyway in the end Vision cuts Ultron off so he can't go through the internet to get to new bodies and after a bit of fighting Vision blows him up.
Probably for the best.
Who would have guessed?
Taking all the super heroes and bunging them together in one film sounds like a disaster, but some how they managed to spin stray into gold and made it work.
So well done marvel, gold star for you.
Buuuuuut taking a crazy concept and making it work is one thing.
Making a SEQUAL to that crazy concept and making it work? That might be asking a bit much.
What's remarkable about this film is that it manages to make me absolutely not give a fuck about anything that happens in it. It almost feels like the film makers went out o their way to lower the stakes at every opportunity.
Age of Ultron starts out with a big, battle sequence where our heroes attack a Hydra base.
I was kind of impressed that the movie managed to so rapidly make me completely lose interest in everything that was happening while blowing so much shit up.
The evil base isn't doing anything super urgent.
Inside the bad guys are doing evil science, but there isn't any kind of ticking clock or anything. The Avengers aren't in any great rush for any reason we are told, they just decided now was the time to start attacking the base.
There is an attempt at a clever shot where the camera follows each of them in turn through the action...but this is undermined by the fact that half of what is happening is goofy CGI, including the people. Humans turn into cartoon characters every time an avenger lays hands on them, and their rag doll loony toon bodies go spinning off into the air.
Aside from having nothing at stake, the bad guys are hilariously ineffectual. They are firing all kinds of machine guns and ray guns by can't hit shit. At the very start of the fight, Hawkeye is being driven around in a jeep (because he's crap) and a hydra jeep is about five feet away firing a huge laser cannon at him but still cant seem to hit anything. A few bad guys fly in on jet packs for some reason, though we don't seem them taking off or putting on their suits, we just see them fly in as CGI people and get splattered immediately during all the carnage. It feels rather like the just gave them jet packs to let them reach the avengers rapidly to make the one continuous shot thing work.
The Avengers toss these losers around with casual ease, mowing down hordes of them. We haven't been given any real reason to hate the bad guys, there aren't any stakes and they aren't a threat.
But just in case that wasn't lame enough, this being a Joss Whedon film, everyone has to start quipping.
Always with the fucking quips.
It increases the sense that there is no danger involved, everyone is just having a bit of a laugh. Considering they seem to be killing loads of the enemy soldiers, this actually makes it all seem weirdly distasteful. Stop enjoying all this needless slaughter Avengers!
There is a particularly cringe inducing bit where Ironman says "shit" and Captain America goes "Language!" and then they quip back and forth about this. I know Captain America is a sap, but wasn't he in WW2?
I was under the impression that the three times it is always appropriate to swear are-
1- During a war
2- During sex
3- While writing a review about a fucking shitty movie.
In addition to their useless mook army, the bad guys send in two super powered people they've got, Quick Silver and Scarlett Witch.
Quick Silver can move very quickly and Scarlett Witch...well its sort of unclear exactly what she does. It's kind of this swirly red telekinesis stuff, but also mind reading and making people have hallucinations. It's swirly and red, I know that much.
These two, despite being trained as part of an evil Hydra plot, aren't presented as very scary or evil, making is extremely obvious they are going to change sides and be goodies later.
Having saved the day...though the day wasn't actually in any danger....won a fight I guess? After winning a fight, our heroes recover Lokis magic staff, that Hydra were keeping for their evil science research.
Using the staff Ironman figures out how to make artificial intelligence.
Just going to let that sit there for a minute.
I suppose that's just something you can do with magic staffs.
They plan to use the AI to bring about world peace, but the AI (called Ultron) they create turns evil IMMEDITATELY!
But this being a Joss Whedon film, it also starts talking in stupid quippy dialogue.
Now I don't want to be racist to any robots that might be reading, but to me when I imagine an artificial intelligence suddenly becoming self aware, I tend to imagine it being logical or mechanical sounding. Instead, this new AI comes right off the bat, talking like a normal human person.
Almost immediately he says things like "This feels weird", "I don't get it" and "Gimme a second." I know people say Whedon gives all his characters the same voice, but its not normally taken to quite this extreme! They turn on an evil super computer and the first thing it does is breaks into Buffy talk.
Later on he says sarcastic things like "I'm physically incapable of throwing up in my mouth", and "Thank you for asking that, I wanted to take the opportunity to explain my evil plan." Did Stark program the TV Tropes data base into this thing?
Why even have a bad guy that is an evil robot if it talks, acts and thinks just like a normal human?
Within about a minute of having been turned on, Ultron has gone evil and decided it needs to destroy the Avengers and wipe out humanity.
This feels less like it malfunctioning or going beyond its program and more like its factory settings are "snarky" and "kill all humans."
If I was building an AI, I think I would put in a fail safe in case it starts wanting to kill all humans. It does seem to be an activity that artificial life finds fascinating!
If you want a look at artificial super computers done right, let me show you the example of Sky Net in Terminator 1 and 2 (fuck all the other films in that franchise).
Sky Net doesn't speak directly or have a face, it is unknowable and alien. In nano seconds it decided humans were a threat to it and set about destroying them with nuclear weapons. Sky Net isn't the brain of a person inside a mental box.
Now the idea of a machine that talks like a person could get interesting. Ultron could have started out as an efficient machine, working towards world peace, but then as this proves an impossible goal he starts to become more unstable, talking more like a deranged and emotional human as he breaks down mentally.
But who needs a character arc or for the villain to develop or even have a motive?
Just have him start out talking like a washed up stand up comic and have him want to kill all humans cause why not. That would be good too, I'm sure.
Interestingly, Tony Stark already has an AI called Jarvis, who talks like an English Butler, and as we will see in this movie Jarvis is entirely sentient. Jarvis talks in a more factual way, like you would expect a machine to and seems super smart.
So I guess what went wrong was making AI talk sarcastically, as that seems to be what made the new one all evil. Or maybe magic stick and super computers don't mix, I guess that could be the moral.
Probably should have just had Jarvis run everything, could have saved a lot of trouble.
Ultron gets himself a robot body and takes over some of Ironman's suits to start causing trouble. The Avengers smash both him and the suits to pieces (despite being caught off guard and lacking all their gear.) This sets a trend throughout the film, that Ultron is not at all threatening. Aside from his jovial, jokey tone, he seems about as powerful as one of the Avengers, usually fighting them one on one and generally losing each time and having to download himself to a new body.
There is nothing intimidating or scary about this junky machine. Even worse are his robotic drones that are like littler, crappier versions of him.
These things fly around (which is less interesting because we had normal humans with jet packs flying around earlier, making it feel like all bad guys get to fly in this thing) but other than that they are basically completely useless.
The heroes tear them apart with such ease that it makes you feel like they are made out of Lego. Now you might think "well Hulk is very strong, so of course he can break the drones."
Yeah but Hawkeye can kill these things with a freaking arrow to the head!
And not just an arrow from his bow, at one point he holds an arrow in his hand and just stabs one in the head to kill it.
Added to this is the fact that these things are entirely CGI so inherently have no weight or substance, it feels like our heroes are ripping up tissue paper.
Later on Ultron tries to make himself a new, more powerful body with an infinity stone (the most powerful things in the universe) in its head but the good guys steal it and put Jarvis the good AI in it. He becomes the super android Vision, who I guess some comic book fan somewhere must give a shit about.
So Ultron is lame, and the good guys actually have their own android that is better.
The stakes are raising to fever pitch in this one!
Speaking of Hawkeye, why do the Avengers keep bringing this guy along?
He has a bow and arrow. Muskets that you load down the barrel rendered his super power obsolete in the 1700s!
Captain hand gun, whose special power is that he brought a revolver to the fight, has more powers than this guy.
Black Widow is at least a super agents who its implied has had soviet experiments and super training to make her more bad ass. Hawkeye is just completely useless. He contributes no skill or talent that the others don't have.
Think I am being unfair to poor old Hawkeye?
In the movie, the Hydra boss says that his troops should target the weaker Avenger members, and they wound Hawkeye with their shitty ray guns.
So even the movie knows he is a liability! They can't even keep up the pretence that this guy belongs there.
Why do they keep bringing this idiot along and putting him in harms way?
Unfortunately it pus the film makers in a bind because they have to lower the threat level to something that can be killed with arrows.
I think in the comics he was a founding member of the Avengers team, so we are basically stuck with him, unfortunately.
Anyway, enough about how crap Hawkeye is... back to how lame Ultron is.
Despite the movie being about the "Age of Ultron", Ultron himself is useless so ropes Quick Silver and Scarlett Witch to help him out.
His relationship with them is confusing and unclear, as we sort of assume he is just using them to help with his plans because he is an evil machine that wants to kill all humans...but then he seems to act like he really cares about Scarlett witch and is upset when she turns against him.
He really does want to kill all humans, by the way. He makes an eastern european city fly into the sky, intending to crash it down and kill everyone (no really).
Then when he is damaged during the final battle he sees her and say "if you stay here, you will die." I'm not a super computer, but I am fairly sure that during a global extinction event, where you are standing probably doesn't make a big difference.
Does he know that his two friends are humans? And that they would be included in the subset of "things that die when you kill all humans" ?
Of course, as I mentioned these two aren't threatening or evil (they seem to get roped into helping Hydra and then roped into helping Ultron), so the fact Ultron has to get them to come to do his fighting for him tells you how lame Ultron really is.
Remember when I said he could take over Ironman's suits? He never does that again. I assumed he was going to be able to control machines and robots by taking over their programming, but no that would be way too effective. I mean that would actually make him a threat in some way, and we can't have that.
At the end his big plan is just to pile in dozens of his useless drones that the Avengers bash to bits casually. Even the super quick guy breaks some of them by just punching them, and he isn't super strong! Are they made out of old Storm Trooper armour?
The final humiliation for me comes when Ultron steals a plane to attack the good guys. No he doesn't take it over with his evil machine powers. He just gets in the cockpit and pilots it. Ultron can fly and fire energy from his hands...but needs a plane with a gun to fly around and shoot at people.
Ultron is pretty big, like about seven or eight feet tall, so I don't really know how he fits in the cockpit, but he looks delightfully hilarious sitting in there. Something about a machine piloting another machine always cracks me up. It's like on the old Battlestar Galactica when they had three Cylons flying each bad guy fighter and sometimes they would look at each other when they were worried or things were going to shit. Or on the Jetsons, where you build a robot to operate the vacuum cleaner for you...rather than just having a vacuum cleaner that does it itself.
To sum up this whole stupid movie, the Avengers created the problem, then they solve it, but solving it wasn't super difficult.
And that's the entire movie.
Oh Black Widow and Hulk have a romance subplot, which is as embarrassingly stupid as you would imagine. I guess she wants Hulk to smash.
The fast moving kid dies, which I guess is meant to imply some kind painful loss, even though he was only introduced in this film and was a bad guy for most of it.
There is an entire middle section to this movie that I can't remember at all because nothing of any interest or consequence happens.
The movie is a special kind of bad, in that its not JUST total crap (though it absolutely is total crap) but just so boring and pointless. All this money and effort went into producing something utterly meaningless. We feel nothing and learn nothing.
Poor Joss Whedon was hounded off the internet by an angry twitter mob and for what? To produce something of no value at all.
Anyway in the end Vision cuts Ultron off so he can't go through the internet to get to new bodies and after a bit of fighting Vision blows him up.
Probably for the best.