Avengers: Age of Ultron [SPOILERS!]

I'm currently too tired to post my views on this, aside from the following:  AWESOMENESS!!!

What did you all think?  Anyone follow the comics before Marvel Madness started?

I never 'followed' Marvel comics, being mainly raised on a diet of Beano, Dandy, Topper, and the blessed Look & Learn. I did come across Marvel and DC comics from time to time, and I thought the latest film did have more of a comic feel to it, and was probably the better for it.

In my experience, the problem I have with comics is that the characters are tortured, with no payoff.  One issue ends with two characters married, the next one begins with a devastating murder.  These movies aren't shying away from devastating realities, but they're presenting them as realities (we've defeated the bad guys, suffered losses, but pony up, because there's more to come, and we'll tackle it together) rather than torture porn.  Zack Snyder is playing strongly to the torture porn in his DC renditions, while Marvel has writers who seem to understand balance.

I won't rip on DC too much, since it's like shooting fish in a barrel.  I grew up on Batman: The Animated Series, and I just wish DC could find itself in the hands of people who care.

I'm thrilled with the emphasis put on relationships, this time around.  Thor was a pretty movie, but I wish they'd give us a reason to care a straw about Jane Foster.  Worst romance in the MCU, and thinnest character development, all around.  Though I admit Hulk never held my attention, so maybe that one was worse.  Age of Ultron was beautiful and the relationships, all of them, were credible.

My son and his ladyfriend allowed me to tag along with them. I made up for it by paying for them. :)

It was fun. I was very uncomfortable at first, and even felt I wanted to leave, because I hate minds being messed with. It gives me a sick feeling inside. I've never wanted to leave a movie before because of that tension, but I know my mom is that way. Wonder if it's something which happens to us as we age? Anyway, I didn't leave, and I'm glad I didn't.

I was sorry speedy boy got it in the end, but I suppose it was inevitable. Being very fast isn't much of a special talent in the comic world since there is already a Flash, and probably someone else I can't remember. I don't follow the comics. When I was young and had money, I bought Archie, Spiderman, Superman and MAD Magazine, occasionally Richie Rich.

I was glad that I spent some time re-watching and watching all the lead up movies and the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. It wasn't needed, but enhanced the experience.

Loved seeing that one of the Avengers, Hawkeye, has a balanced life. It certainly adds to him. I thought he would be mortally wounded and that the nanobots in his skin would bring him back, or that Ultron would get in him and be changed to see the good of humanity. Loved that he stopped the mind girl from messing with his. There was enough of that in the first movie.

The only thing I actually called, besides that the Avengers would win, was the Jarvis/Ultron thingy would be able to handle Thor's hammer. So glad he looked a bit like Paul Bettany. I adore him. Kinda thought his fighting was not so special though. He was built up to be a super something, then, he just did regular fighting like the rest of them. *shrug*

Here's what bothered me a lot. How come, when the Ultron guy "destroyed" Jarvis, Tony Stark was still able to control all his suits? Did I miss something? Maybe when he made a suit for the War Machine, is that when he made them independent of Jarvis? Anyway, it bothered me.

I missed Pepper Pots.

P.S. >2 Cynfelyn: When you said you were raised on Beano, it really gave me pause for thought. The only Beano I'm familiar with is the kind you take after eating beans, to avoid gas.

>4 MrsLee: "raised on Beano"

Another case of nations divided by a common language! My upbringing was similar to Cynfelyn's, but with a 2-week delay (that being the time the mailship took from Southampton to Cape Town). These are all the British kiddie-comics I remember from my childhood. But Cynfelyn, didn't you have Robin, Swift and Eagle at various stages in primary school, too?

Correct me if memory fails, but wasnt the Beano the home of Oor Wullie and his gang?

>4 MrsLee: We're in danger of going off-piste here, but the image your P.S. brought to mind was the camp-fire scene in Blazing Saddles.

>5 hfglen: According to the great and all-knowing Wikipedia, Swift merged with Eagle in 1961, when I was three years-old, so before I was really paying attention. The Eagle, yes, Robin, no. The only Robins on eBay are the BBC's Playhour & Robin, which I assume is something else again.

I can't say I remember 'Oor Willie' from the 1960s and 70s. Oor Willie is mainly a comic strip in the Sunday Post newspaper, published by D.C. Thomson, who also publish(ed) Dandy, Beano and Topper, so I suppose the strip could have been re-cycled in one of their comics.

I was a sporadic comics reader (translation: I read random issues with my cousins whenever I got the chance because my mom thought they were immoral) and it's interesting to see how much I actually remember, and how much they're changing the specifics, but keeping the overall feeling consistent with the stories and characters created in those old golden-age comics.

I adore Bettany, especially his voice and cadence; he could read me the phone book and I'd swear undying love. Getting to see JARVIS embodied as Vision is everything I ever wanted in life - and that's only slightly hyperbole. Vision is a great character, like the Marvel version of Superman. He's a nice change from all these egotistical macho men, and I hope Bettany got a really lovely raise for being "in" the movie instead of just voicing it.

I love the Whedon style dialogue and the snappy running jokes, but the only one that didn't feel right was Ultron saying that he wanted to "throw up in his mouth" which to me just seems such a very current catchphrase - it's already odd and dated, so it's only going to get worse with time.

I'm also dying of curiosity about the other hour of movie that got filmed, finished, and then axed for time - it's supposedly going to be cut back into the film on the home release, and I'm looking forward to more character building and interactions. I especially want to see what they did with the scene with Loki. (Tom Hiddleston could ALSO read me the phone book and I would be happy to hear it.)

>6 Cynfelyn: Ah. In the mid-to-late 1950s when I was in primary school, Robin was for ve-ry lit-tle be-gin-ning read-ers, and one outgrew it after about six months (in evidence, note that the grating style but not the content continues to stick, 60 years later). Somewhere about Standard 1 (third grade) one graduated to Swift, and then after a few years to Eagle. But in or about 1962 I moved on to Knowledge magazine, which was great.

I loved the movie - thought it was a great continuation of the franchise and I think Whedon did a good job of managing the 'huge' characters screen time (Iron Man, Captain America and Thor) letting them shine without overshadowing. I'm only coming to the comics now, in the light of the movies, so it's interesting for me to see which bits of different story lines have been adapted. My education on that front is also a little sporadic in that they're not readily available and so I'm a little haphazard on trips to the UK in terms of what I manage to track down or when I indulge with Amazon.

Like RowanTribe I love Paul Bettany and Tom Hiddleston's voice - there's no way I'm letting go of my audio book of Octopussy and the Living Daylights read by Tom as it's wonderful. I'd also be very interested to see what else they filmed - I hope it makes it into all the home releases and doesn't only come out in Blu-Ray as sometimes is the case with these things.

>6 Cynfelyn: LOL, that movie was the first non-animated one which I went to the theater to see without a parent. Good thing, they would have marched me right out!

My favorite funny line, of the whole movie, was when Captain America called (was it Fury? or someone else) a son of a bitch (or similar) after all the ragging through the movie when he called Iron Man on his language, then Fury said, "Do you kiss your mama with that mouth?" This from Samuel L. Jackson made my day.

I read a terrific review of the movie on Tor.com today, also a little article from a link somewhere about the extra scene in the credits. That article made it very clear that it will be even harder for me to endure these movies in the future. Yikes. I'm already feeling the tension.

It seemed that this weekend was dedicated to MCU movies on the premium channels. I finally got to see Champions of the Galaxy which was too cute for words. "I am Groot!"

>4 MrsLee:  "Veronica" was in charge of the suits, this time.  Always good to have a backup plan.  We won't be seeing The Flash in these movies, though, since that's DC.  The problem one of the previous X-Men movies (run by FOX) had with Quicksilver, is that his speed can be a magic bullet for all problems.  I heard that FOX took the character out of the third act just so the bad guys would have a believable chance (and FOX only shoehorned the character in when they found out Marvel had the rights to Pietro and Wanda Maximoff).  We were a little concerned that it might be a problem for this story, too.

I'm hoping that SHIELD will give Pietro GH 325.  Make him an agent while his sister is an Avenger.

For giggles.

I enjoyed it. Mostly. The twins were great, I liked Vision a lot, Ultron was kinda goofy. I liked Clint's family, and him finally having a bigger role, that was fun.

I could have done without the rape joke and the insinuation that women who can't have children are monsters, but, well, it's Joss. I wasn't exactly surprised.

>13 bluesalamanders: ...the insinuation that women who can't have children are monsters...

She's a monster because of the people she's murdered.  The people who took the option to have children away from her are monsters.  Nothing insinuated that she's a monster because she can't have children.  She was assuaging Bruce's concern about raising a family, and trying to convince him that he is not a monster.

I absolutely agree that the people who sterilized her against her will are monsters, but that's not what she said. She said: "Neither can I. In the Red Room, where I was trained, where I was raised, um, they have a graduation ceremony. They sterilize you. It’s efficient. One less thing to worry about. The one thing that might matter more than a mission. It makes everything easier. Even killing.” (Pause) “Still think you’re the only monster on the team?"

She was sterilized so killing is easy. Killing is easy, so she's a monster. If a = b and b = c, she's saying that she's a monster because she's can't have children. Which is a fucked up thing to say.

I loved the movie! I have been a superhero fan since I was a kid. Not comics, TV. I grew up watching the old Batman series and Spiderman cartoons. I loved Wonder Woman and Superman and The Hulk. I love the idea that someone can come in and kill the bad guys. This movie was the perfect blend of humor, action, and character development.

I didn't know they made extra that was cut! Oh, I hope it makes it into the home releases!

>15 bluesalamanders: I think it's implied that having children to care about is something that can make doing the mission, which involves killing, harder, but you can't turn that around and say that not having children makes killing easier. It's her other training that turned her into a monster, the sterilization just removed something that might have kept her from being one.

I didn't turn anything around, though. She literally says "it makes everything easier, even killing". That isn't paraphrasing, that's the actual line in the movie.

18> Yes, in her specific circumstance where she is trained in this particular way it makes killing easier. That doesn't mean that not having children would make killing easier for any old person.

18 - there's also the difficulty with taking what Widow says about herself and her situation as an objective measure of the reality involved. She's fighting a lifetime of brainwashing and indoctrination, to think of herself as a monster, as an "other" as a non-person - remember the "ballet teacher" in her flashback/vision who encouraged her to think she was nothing, because that's what they wanted. The Red Room taught her that not having kids makes killing easier, and she doesn't know any alternative (not having had kids, she can't prove a negative) so she believes them. Just because a character says something and it's something they believe, it doesn't make that sentiment true in reality, or even in the reality of the film. Look at the hairy eyeball Banner gives her during that scene - he doesn't believe that she's right.

It's been a theme of Widow's character in all of these movies that she is VERY hard on herself, and doesn't give herself the grace and forgiveness that an objective observer might.

That's what I felt was the point of the scene with Banner - these two very damaged, very self-hating individuals are trying to show that they find value and lovability in the other person, but don't want to admit that they deserve value or love themselves. Self-hate is a real thing, and I don't think the scene was meant to imply that either of those two opinions was a true reflection of reality - just showing how both of them judge themselves much more harshly than they judge others, and how that self hate can keep people from finding happiness and healing.

>19 jjwilson61: We interpret it differently. I wish I could see it the way you do, but I, and a lot of other people, actually, find that scene really disturbing.

>20 RowanTribe: But, see, she's not a real person, she's a fictional person and someone made her say those things. Joss wrote it and thought it was appropriate to include in the movie when women who choose to or are unable to have children are already treated badly in both fiction and real life. If the scene was Natasha and Bruce talking about being unable to have a "normal" life or a "normal" relationship, it would have had the intended effect without the rest of this being an issue.

>21 bluesalamanders: Someone once asked me to help with a program on an old POS computer.  She was trying to give me as much information as possible to make my job easier, and she said something that negated what I saw on the screen.  This made things a little confusing, so I clarified, "You didn't think this was working," in reference to what the pixels were telling me.  She flew off the handle and dismissed me from the room because she keyed in on the words "you didn't think".  For some reason, she didn't want to interpret what I said as, "You think this isn't working."  This sounds like a similar situation.

Ahh. I'm sorry that you found it offensive, but I have to say that I took exactly the opposite interpretation out of that scene: the scene appears to me to be set up to show both Widow and Banner as unreliable narrators of their own "monster" qualities, with the intent (from my perspective) that the audience would want to reassure each character that of course they are misguided in their thinking, and that they are not monsters.

I thought it was purposeful to use a very real concern that many women live with; making Widow's fears and despairing self-image REAL and pertinent to real women, instead of some hokey in-universe superhero thing, or a generic "no one is normal" empty commentary.

I'll have to watch it again with your comments in mind.

I rarely read marvel comics. I prefer watching their movies than reading their comic series.

I preferred Batman: The Animated Series to the comic books.  Still do, actually! ^_^