annathepiper | Movie review: Avengers 2: Age of Ultron

My household finally saw Age of Ultron last night, along with our pal Jenny. Which means I can finally start paying attention to my various feeds again, since several of the sites I follow have been all AGE OF ULTRON AGE OF ULTRON AGE OF ULTRON. Several of the other people I follow, too.

Picoreview: I enjoyed it, although it didn’t hit me with quite the same hammerstrike of Awesome that was the first Avengers movie, or the sleekly plotted tightness of Winter Soldier. There were bits of it I have issues with, and in places it felt rushed and crowded. Overall, I’m thinking B+ territory.

The spoilers cannot lift the hammer and are therefore clearly not Worthy!

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Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Crossposts: http://annathepiper.livejournal.com/1297470.html

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From:

tiggymalvern.livejournal.com

I hadn't read anything about the specifics of why people were annoyed at Joss Whedon about Natasha, only that they were. And going in completely cold, I read that scene with Natasha and Bruce discussing children completely differently. I didn't come away with 'being sterilised = monster' at all.

What I took away from it was 'This was how I was raised from a very young age, this is exactly the kind of machine-like assassin they wanted me to be, and I was,' and that's why she was a monster. It would never have occurred to me to relate it directly to the sterilisation, only to her newly elaborated depth of back-story.

What you said about Jeremy Renner also makes me glad I don't read celebrity gossip, because I was able to enjoy Hawkeye's story without reservations :-)

The biggest flaw in the film for me was Scarlet Witch. I liked the twins a lot, as you did, but I can't make their plot fit if they are basically good people and she's a mind-reader. At the start they are working with and being trained by ex-Hydra people who want to kill Tony Stark - so far, so mutual goal. But in all that time they spent with the Hydra folks, Wanda never saw in their heads any of the other stuff Hydra were planning to do? The evil take over the world stuff? Or is actually killing all life on earth the only thing evil enough to make her change her mind?

The Widow/Hulk romance - I can see how it worked on paper. I liked the conversations they had about both dealing with being monsters, and the bonding worked well on that score. Unfortunately, once they saw that the actors trying to make it work had NO CHEMISTRY AT ALL, they should have knocked it on the head and just had them be friends. They're both good actors and they were both trying to sell it, but it fell so flat, nobody is buying it.

From:

annathepiper

*nodnods re: your take on Black Widow's backstory* I can see that as an interpretation, but for me, given that the whole conversation led up to the "graduation ceremony" reveal, and ended on her line of "still think you're the only monster on the team?"... it played with a clear emphasis on "voluntarily agreeing to give up ability to breed" == "monster".

I don't normally give any fucks about celebrity gossip; I only knew about Renner shooting off his mouth because the story got brought up on The Mary Sue, which I do follow.

Ooh, good about about Scarlet not having ever read any of the Hydra people. Yeaaaah you'd think she would have clued in at some point!

*nodnods re: Widow/Hulk too* Yeah. I accept that. It didn't really truly fly for me either, although I wanted to be on board with the idea.

From:

tiggymalvern.livejournal.com

It will be interesting to see how that scene plays out for me the next time I see it, now that I know what other people saw. But that won't be a for a long time yet.