Spoiler; Avengers 2: Age of Ultron sucks.
Two and a half hours reduced to one picture
I liked the first Avenger movie, I thought it was entertaining. It was fun to see a whole bunch of superheroes on the screen. To say it was some sort of masterpiece would be a stretch, but it was a good movie, at least I thought. It was a stand alone movie; if you hadn't seen the other Marvel movies like Iron Man or Captain America, you could still follow along and have it make sense. For the most part.
Unfortunately, it taken the 'comic book' part of the comic book movie to heart. And I'm hear to tell you that comic books are stupid.
Star Wars comics are twice as stupid
This isn't an opinion, it's a fact. It's the same reason why Star Wars is stupid. The same reason I really don't have an interest in watching the fifth season of Game of Thrones. It's a trend that has been rising in the last decade especially. It's the mega-novel problem.
Right now we're clamoring for huge worlds, bigger stories, more characters. We're not satisfied with a stand alone movie, a novel that has no sequel, or anything that isn't a franchise. Comic books have had this problems for decades. Numerous reboots with dozens of different writers have created this bizarre world of multiple universes. This is fine for comics, because firstly, they're idiotic and secondly, they're designed this way because you need a new story every month. That's the format. You're expected to read the entire story arc. A single comic by itself rarely makes any sense whatsoever.
That's where the Avengers 2 fails. If you haven't seen Iron Man, Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, The Hulk (the 2008 version, not the 2003 version), Iron Man 2, Thor 2:The Dark World, Iron Man 3, Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier, well, then the Avengers 2 isn't going to make any sense. If you've missed any of these films, then the chemistry between the characters isn't always going to make sense. Shucks, you might not even recognize some of the characters (who the fuck is War Machine?).
I'm a firm believer that in order for a film to succeed as a movie, it needs to be able to stand on it's own. I shouldn't have to sit and watch fifteen hours of back story in order to grasp what's happening in a film. I can't really blame the screenwriting either. How the hell do you juggle ten different characters? Television can kind of get away with this, Game of Thrones does alright with multiple characters, but even that is starting to get pretty thin. It also has the luxury of the new television format. Ten folks in a two and a half hour span is starting to stretch the limits of a narrative.
Avengers 2 was the exact same movie as the first. The stakes weren't raised (they have to save the world, again!), the plot was the same (team gets together, falls apart, gets together again), and the action was the same (Crazy epic superhero battles!). Aside from the slightly clever little arc with Hawkeye and the lame love story between the Hulk and Black Widow that took up 3% of screen time between the action porn, it was the same movie.
I'll be honest, I was bored to tears through most of it, waiting for it to be over. The whole Marvel franchise was sort of refreshing at first, but has gotten stale. It's the cinematic version of Olive Garden. It loved it when I was a teen, but as I got older I realized it's the same lousy Italian food every time I go. I don't go to Olive Garden anymore, and I doubt I'll go watch another Marvel film.
But hey, Marvel is putting out the new 'Ant-Man' movie this summer. I'm sure that'll be great, right?
Sincerely,
The Illustrious Mr. Charlton
p.s. Seriously, Ant-Man? I wonder if it'll be two hours of Stan Lee scraping the barrel.
p.s.s. I really only wrote this review because I'm going to shit all over the rise of the mega novels in the next post. Fuck George RR Martin.
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