Movie Review: Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

At long last, the event initiated in the post-credits sequence of the original Avengers film, helped along by the post-credits scenes in Avengers: Age of Ultron and Thor: Ragnarok and a glimpse of the tyrant's machinations in the first Guardians of the Galaxy has come. The Mad Titan Thanos has come to Earth. The Infinity War has begun.

The Plot

Mere minutes after the ending of Thor Ragnarok, Thanos makes his big move. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) manages to escape to Earth, arriving not long before the first of Thanos's generals. Thanos has already captured several of the Infinity Stones, super-powerful elements forged in the Big Bang, and now he intends to get the rest of them. Ranged against him are the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and the survivors of Asgard, but that might not be enough...

The Good

*The movie moves along quickly and brings in the various characters from the previous films in an organic and intelligent way. Although some of the early reviews I've read claimed the movie was "overstuffed," I never got that vibe at all. It all made sense.

*Thanos's motivation are pared down and less silly than in the comics. Not going to go into detail for reasons of spoilers.

*Thanos (Josh Brolin) in general is a very impressive character, rather than merely being a monster sitting on his throne and getting failed by minions repeatedly as he was in the earlier films. He's as strong (or stronger) than the Hulk, as clever as Loki, and utterly ruthless and driven. He's also capable of quite a lot of pathos for a genocidal space god.

*I liked Vision's (Paul Bettany's) interactions with Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen). He's a genius-level AI, but he's also two or three years old. Some social clumsiness is to be expected.

*We visit Nidavellir, a world of space dwarfs who forged the Asgardians' weapons. That's a nice nod to Norse mythology.

*A character who has been away for quite some time makes a return appearance and has a major role to play in the story. Again, not going into detail for reasons of spoilers.

*There are some well-done fight scenes. Not going to go into details for reasons of spoilers, but my favorite is a battle on Titan.

(There's a theme going here, in case you haven't noticed.)

*Peter Dinklage plays a minor role and I liked it.

The Bad

*The Black Order (who in the films refer to themselves as "the Children of Thanos") don't really have distinct personalities. I didn't even get their names--the wizardy one that Tony refers to as "Squidward" I think is referred to by Thanos later as "Ebony Maw," but that's it. I like the idea of a villain having his own personal posse (in TVTropes they call this the Quirky Miniboss Squad, although that's a little too goofy for this crew) of actual characters, but this was a failed opportunity. They'd be better-developed if Marvel had used some of its previous baddies instead of killing off all but Loki and Baron Zemo--say a single Ultron-bot survived, Thanos' underlings rescued/captured him, and instead of those demon-beast things, it's an army of Ultrons in Wakanda complete with a smart-alecky James Spader voicing them all.

*There's a lot of telling and not showing with the nasty things Thanos does before the movie begins. It might have been better to make Infinity War a trilogy instead of a duology, with the events on Xandar, Knowhere, and Nidavellir as the first movie (there might be ways to get the major characters involved there--say the Guardians are on Xandar and the Asgardian refugees at Nidavellir when Thanos does his thing), this as the second, and the events of the upcoming second film as the third. This would make it especially clear Thanos is the biggest and baddest of them all and ironically make this film, probably one of the darkest MCU films, a Hope Spot. Here's how I would have done it, but beware spoilers.

*The whole thing I felt was kind of underwhelming. Maybe I went in with overblown expectations, having read reviews or spoiler-free comments describing people shrieking in the theaters and the like, but still.

*The film has a pretty significant body-count of major characters, but I can sense a major cop-out coming in the second film.

The Verdict

Don't get your expectations inflated and you'll enjoy it better than I did. 7.5 out of 10.

Summer 2015 Movies I Want To See

The summer is when a lot of really fun movies come out, and so far this summer has been no exception. I really enjoyed Avengers: Age of Ultron and Mad Max: Fury Road, and those are the only two "summer movies" I've seen so far.

Here are some coming out later I'd like to see:

*San Andreas-Something tells me the science involved is going to be highly dubious (think The Day After Tomorrow), but I saw the film Volcano when I was a lot younger and I remember enjoying it. We shall see. I could definitely imagine sitting this one out, but the trailer I saw with Mad Max looks kind of cool.

*Spy-Most "super-spy" characters are male and those who aren't are generally conventionally attractive women. This film subverts that trope big-time and, from the commercials at least, looks pretty funny.

*Jurassic World-The most recent trailer looks somewhat disheartening by implying the monstrous Indominus rex can somehow communicate with other dinosaurs (as opposed to being smart enough to break open their cages to wreak havoc), but I'm still going to see it anyway. Myopia: Defend Your Childhood, the movie podcast I'm in, is going to be making this a special event. Plus it's got Chris Pratt training raptors into his personal posse. :)

*Terminator: Genisys: This looks like the one I'm most likely to skip after San Andreas, but some of the concepts like Sarah Connor being raised by the Terminator, Emilia Clarke (Danaerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones) as Sarah Connor, and the warlord John Connor somehow getting sent back the present day infected with a machine virus (it shows up in the most recent trailer) do seem interesting.

*Ant-Man-I haven't missed a single Marvel Cinematic Universe outing so far, and although I certainly complained about the big twist in Iron Man III, they were all good movies. Ant-Man has the post potential to be bad given how unimpressive the titular character's powers are, but Guardians of the Galaxy had the potential to be a train-wreck too and it turned out awesome. The MCU hasn't disappointed me yet...

*Fantastic Four-Unlike many others I enjoyed the previous FF films (the first one more so than the second), but this doesn't look bad. We shall see.

I've gotten more selective in my movie viewing these last few years and since I've got my graduate school comprehensive exams in middle and later June, I'll need to be more careful with my time. I doubt they'll be in and out of theaters in the meantime, but then again, Outlander (the one with the alien-human Beowulf and alien-monster Grendel, not the one with handsome Scots) wasn't in theaters that long either...

In Defense of Joss Whedon (But Not The Marvel Swag Department)

The other day, I learned that Joss Whedon has left Twitter and some people attributed it to attacks on him by feminists and "social justice warriors" (a term I use solely to refer to belligerent vicious cyberbullies who happen to have socially left-wing views, not legitimate opponents of racism and the like). Here's a link to a Storify someone made depicting some of the nasty things they said to Whedon, including possible legally-actionable threats. Their major beef seems to be the Black Widow storyline in Avengers: Age of Ultron, although some are mad about about the deaths of certain characters and Whedon's tendency to throw snark into everything.

Whedon himself has recently said that it wasn't feminists who have driven him off Twitter--he points out how various social movements are constantly attacking each other and him--but because it was proving to be a distraction from his real job, writing awesome stuff. Social media is a massive time-waster, so let's hope he's getting a lot more productive. However, given how feminists have written that dealing with Internet harassment is taxing to female writers and might deter them from writing, surely Internet harassment of a male writer is bad too, though I doubt someone as successful as Joss Whedon is going to give up on his dreams over this.

(According to one article I read people talking trash about Whedon are getting death threats themselves. Given how SJWs often claim their harassment, attempts to get people fired from their jobs, etc. are nothing more than "consequences" of "hate speech," the fact they're reaping the consequences of their own odiousness is quite appropriate.)

And now here's where I dispute the claims that the Black Widow's depiction in Age of Ultron is sexist...

*Natasha Romanoff's reference to herself being a "monster" is not solely about her infertility (sterilization being the final phase of the "Red Room" training program for female assassins), but about how they trained her her entire life to be a killer. The sterilization--to avoid the possibility of something one of their assassins would love more than the mission--is played up alongside images of the young Romanoff using a bound, hooded man as live target practice. It's all part of a greater dehumanizing process to make an ordinary girl into something that exists for the sole purpose of destruction.

*It was Bruce who brought up his inability to father children -- either the radiation bombardment that made him the Hulk has left him "shooting blanks" or he might "Hulk out" during sex, something implied in The Incredible Hulk -- first. She then revealed her own problem as a means of connecting with him.

*Even if she views herself as a monster due to being unable to have children, that doesn't mean Joss Whedon thinks women who can't or won't have kids are monsters. S.M. Stirling put it well when he said there was a term for someone who thought a character having an opinion meant the author shared it--idiot. That obviously doesn't hold true in all cases--see obvious Author Tracts like neo-Nazi The Turner Diaries or most stuff by Ayn Rand--but Joss Whedon is not one of those people. A character hating herself for something that's not her fault is called a character flaw. Someone doesn't have to be perfect to be a strong female character. There was an article I read online yesterday I can't find at the moment (maybe it's on my phone) that points out this latest wrinkle is further building on the character we've seen several times before.

*Although being infertile obviously sucks for her, it made her relationship with Hawkeye's family and how his children (especially his daughter) view her as a beloved aunt all the more poignant. She might not be able to have (biological) children of her own, but she has found a family.

*Her getting kidnapped by Ultron does not make her a Damsel In Distress. She could have escaped from that dungeon at any time--in The Avengers she's tied to a chair with three big strong Russian mob types standing around her and she takes all of them apart--but instead she stuck around to get hold of a radio and transmit Ultron's location to the rest of the team. Her remaining "imprisoned" prompted Bruce to "rescue" her himself, thus allowing her to "trigger" the Hulk (by shoving him off a cliff). Knowing how Bruce fears that side of himself to point he attempted suicide sometime before the first Avengers film and how before she was terrified of the Hulk, the fact she was willing to trigger "the other guy" for the sake of the mission shows a lot of strength on her part. Furthermore, during the Red Room flashbacks, her trainer comments on how she "pretends to lose." There's a TVTrope for this--Wounded Gazelle Gambit. She uses people's (or snarky robots') notion that because she's a woman she's not a threat to her advantage.

*I'm not the only person who's seen Romanoff as a feminist character in all this. See this article here. This article here also defends the baby-issues plot and Romanoff as a character.

However, there is at least one legitimate criticism to be made on feminist grounds. Something I noticed in the stores is that the Black Widow has not been included in Avengers merchandise; this is something that's been going on for years. According to the Legion of Leia, only three out of the sixty promotional products for the movie at present feature her at all.

Ahem? In terms of seniority, she's got most of the team beat. Based on her dialogue with Loki in the first film, I'm guessing Hawkeye was the first member of the modern Avengers and he recruited her after he "made a different call" when sent to Russia to assassinate her. This would have probably been before Tony Stark became Iron Man, or possibly soon afterward given that her first appearance in the Marvel movies is in Iron Man II. Although The Incredible Hulk was the second Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, he did not become an actual Avenger until the events of the 2012 Avengers film. The same with Thor, even though he was introduced earlier. So basically she's either the second or the third member of the team, before Thor, Hulk, and Captain America.

Do the powers that be in the realm of merchandise think that boys won't play with Black Widow toys or want Black Widow on their backpacks? Or do they think people will complain about the tightness of her clothes? I admit I was rather sexist back in the day, but that was in the early 1990s. From my observation of little kids these days, boys and girls seem much more willing to play together--and even if boys still disdain Barbies, they'd still love the Avengers. And social conservatism has been in decline, so I don't think there'd be as many complaints as there might have been in the 1990s or 1980s.

In any event, as female geek organizations like the Legion of Leia, Heroic Girls, etc. have pointed out, there're a lot of girls who'd love a Black Widow toy or Black Widow swag who aren't happy campers. See these two disappointed little munchkins here. Furthermore, Mark Ruffalo (you know, the Hulk) agrees.

So yeah, SJWs need to lay off Joss Whedon himself, but it looks like whoever's in charge of marketing needs a bit of a kick in the pants. Lack of action-girl/geek girl role models for little girls who haven't drunk the princess Kool-Aid strikes me as a much bigger problem than whether or not the Black Widow mourns the fertility the Communists (or, given that she's depicted as a teen in the Red Room and Winter Soldier states she was born in 1984, the Putinists?) stole from her. Here's a petition you can sign to help let Marvel know they need to do better. Lest anybody disdain signing petitions, Change.org has racked up some big successes over the years. And Marvel is already listening.

Movie Review: Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

I saw the first Avengers movie many moons ago, a movie I loved so much I gave it a 10/10 on my blog, the only movie to have earned that coveted ranking. Now the sequel, Avengers: Age of Ultron is upon us. The 1992 Ultron card was one of my first comic-book cards as a child, so this is especially cool for me. Here we go...

The Plot

Soon after the defeat of one of the last known HYDRA outposts, Avengers Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) decide to create a peacekeeping program to handle the responsibility of protecting the world. Unfortunately, said peacekeeping program transforms into the malevolent, genocidal AI named Ultron (James Spader), who takes control of Stark's Iron Legion (think a bunch of autonomous Iron Man suits under the control of the computer JARVIS) and plots to destroy the Avengers in alliance with a couple HYDRA science projects, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch...

The Good

*The movie starts out with a bang, with the Avengers attacking the last major HYDRA base. All of the Avengers, including a Hulk who's much more in control of himself than usual, are absolutely devastating. It's a hoot to watch. There's a good tie-in with Agents of SHIELD in the form of the evil Dr. List, one of the HYDRA villains from the current season.

*I liked how at the Avengers' victory party, there are lots of elderly WWII veterans. Steve Rogers hasn't forgotten his war buddies, those still left. :(

*James Spader does an excellent job as Ultron. I have never seen a genocidal AI who is that much of a smart-aleck, nor one that shows occasional moments of pathos and, well, humanity. Given how on some level he's Tony Stark's "son," the snark is to be expected. He's got some really good lines--I'd never seen a robot actually exasperated before. And although he's a monster, he's a very lonely monster based on a couple comments he makes and his relationships with a couple human characters. He's also incredibly physically powerful and dangerous, plus he makes Biblical allusions. :)

*A new character who's kind of a foil for Ultron is introduced in the film as well, and he's pretty cool. I liked his interaction with the other Avengers and with Ultron. I like the good and bad side of the artificial-intelligence coin they both represent.

*The movie spends a lot of time on Hawkeye, who was a borderline extra in Thor and didn't do a whole lot in the original Avengers. We meet family members and learn more about his relationship with Romanoff. It's funny and sweet and, when you combine it with my next point, rather poignant. I'd gotten a distinct vibe Hawkeye and the Black Widow were an item (based on their interactions in The Avengers and her wearing an arrowhead necklace in Winter Soldier), but this situation is a lot less cliched.

*The movie provides more detail on Romanoff's back-story as a product of the Soviet "Red Room" espionage program, which just got a fair bit sadder.

*Although Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch are imports from the X-Men--in the comics they were the estranged children of Magneto--they work just as well in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the products of HYDRA experimentation. The rare willing products, I might add.

*There's some good foreshadowing of Captain America: Civil War (shooting now in Atlanta) and the upcoming Infinity War duology in both the events of the film and some characterization our heroes--in particularly Captain America and Iron Man--get. There're also some nods to the events of Winter Soldier.

*Although this movie isn't nearly as funny as the original and significantly darker, there are still some good jokes in this one. Not going to give away my favorites...you'll just have to see.

*War Machine, who wasn't in Winter Soldier, is back and ready for mayhem.

The Bad

*The movie gets kind of slow toward the end, before everybody returns to Sokovia for an epic throw-down.

*The first one functioned just as well as a comedy as an action film, but there're a lot fewer jokes this time around. That might be an artistic choice on the creators' part -- according to one review I've read, the first film is about how great it is to have superpowers and the second is about how isolating these powers are. That last bit would apply especially to the Hulk I imagine, given the events of the film and some things we learn about him.

*The Incredible Hulk and The Avengers imply that Banner has learned how to control himself as Hulk and we see him fighting as a functional team member early on, but he still for some reason needs the Black Widow to calm him down like some kind of hot lion-tamer. There's a romantic subplot involving the two of them that this helps set up, but it's still a continuity problem.

*Where's Banner's girlfriend Betty Ross? Given the romantic plot with Romanoff, that's a bit of an elephant in the room.

The Verdict

Not as good as the first film, but a darn good movie. 9.5 out of 10.