Avengers: Age of Ultron

I really don't want to review Age of Ultron, for a number of reasons. One being that I'd really rather talk about Ant-Man, another being that I don't want to admit that it's not nearly as good as The Avengers, and finally, because I don't like to think about Joss Whedon losing his touch finally.
Age of Ultron is by no means a bad film. Compared to Fox's offerings in 2015, it's head and shoulders above Fant4stic. No, that's not saying much (The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is good in comparison) but it's still a decent enough movie. Is it a good film on its own? Yes. Is it as good as any of the previous MCU installments? Absolutely not. It's not better than The Winter Soldier, The First Avenger, Iron Man 1, 2, or 3, The Incredible Hulk, The Avengers, Thor, Thor: The Dark World, the first season of Daredevil, or the first season of Agents of SHIELD. It's also not better than any subsequent MCU installment, Jessica Jones, the second season of Daredevil, Ant-Man... We'll have to see how it holds up in relation to Civil War, The Punisher, Luke Cage, the second season of Jessica Jones, and Doctor Strange.
Yadda yadda, spoilers inbound, you know the drill.
From a story perspective it's a great idea, sure. The problems stem from Joss Whedon's direction. Not his writing, his direction. His writing is as good as it's always been, but the timing on most of the jokes is off just enough that it makes them less funny than they should be. Compare this to Whedon's previous work, such as Firefly, Serenity, The Avengers, the first season of Agents of SHIELD Buffy The Vampire Slayer, almost anything, the timing on all of the lines is spot-on perfect, every single one of them hits a comedy bulls-eye you didn't even know existed. These days though, his direction seems like he's going through the motions of what made him great. There's a reason I didn't include the second season of Agents of SHIELD in the list of things better than Age of Ultron, because despite overall having less bad moments than the first season did (We don't get young Ward who doesn't look a damn thing like the adult actor) there are less good moments and more mediocre and bland ones. There's nothing as awesome as Nick Fury and Phil Coulson teaming up to take down a traitorous SHIELD agent, and despite having a really interesting plot, it's not exactly inspiring to watch, especially considering the massive pains they've got to go to to make sure that they let you know that this organized group of people with odd genetic mutations aren't mutants, but "Inhumans" because Marvel is too cheap to just buy the rights to the X-Men back. Not like that's their most iconic team or anything. Not like they're some of the most beloved characters in the comics or anything, not like Wolverine is one of Marvel's most iconic characters. But sure, bring in all these original characters and D-listers nobody knows or cares about, bring in all these Inhumans. Pretend we should care when any of them die.
Speaking of which, this brings me to the big addition to Age of Ultron, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. They're just sorta injected into the story without a lot of buildup, even if you were watching Agents of Shield up to that point. The twins were introduced in The Winter Soldier, which was more than a bit exciting. Not to say that their introduction in this film was a bad thing, and it's nice to see foreshadowing being paid off, but I was hoping they would get their own movie before they appeared in an Avengers film. In The Winter Soldier they were locked up in cages with their powers going haywire, now they're basically just roaming around the Hydra base that The Avengers are laying siege to without much explanation. They were supposed to be fighting The Avengers, but they just sorta slunk off into the distance to return later in the film.
After the opening action-sequence, the movie basically turns into Friends with superpowers for a while. They literally spend about twenty minutes of the film goofing off in Avengers Tower for a while before Ultron (Played by James freakin' Spader) shows up and starts wrecking the place. He "kills" Jarvis, and begins using Stark's Iron Man drones to take over the world. The Avengers go into hiding at Clint's house, and the twins meet up with Ultron to take their frustations out on Stark before going rogue and meeting up with The Avengers when they find out that Ultron wants to raze the planet of all living things and create a world of robots.
Stark puts Jarvis back together from the internet and they track Ultron down to where he's going to try and make his stand and they stop him, but Quicksilver dies and The Avengers go their separate ways. Tony drives off in a car while Steve begins training a secondary Avengers team to fill the holes in the main-teams lineup.
Overall, it's a fine film, but the specific details are what drag the movie down. Back in The Avengers they spent a lot of time building up the relationship between Natasha and Clint, but it wasn't exactly a romantic relationship. Then they spent literally all of The Winter Soldier building a romantic relationship between Natasha and Steve. Come Age of Ultron, out of nowhere they're acting like Natasha and Bruce have an established romantic relationship despite Bruce already having a girlfriend, and despite all the development between Natasha and Steve in the previous movie the previous freaking year! This is also despite Natasha having seen Bruce's bad side in The Avengers when he tried to kill her. Not only that, their relationship includes her taking him down from Hulk form when their mission is over. Contradicting everything we know about The Hulk from the last two films he's been in. Bruce spent all of The Incredible Hulk learning how to control his powers, and he'd basically mastered the transformation come The Avengers, being able to transform basically at will. Did they just forget or did they purposefully ignore everything from the previous films because they had a new idea for shipping in mind? Were the writers dueling over who they wanted to pair Natasha with? If so, Joss Whedon was dueling with himself since he seemed totally on-board with the Natash/Clint shipping in The Avengers.
Then there's the generally lazy tone of the film in the middle. I know that it probably had to have a softer, slower tone compared to the original so they could have some non-combat team interactions, basically allowing them to be regular human beings and goof off a bit, but it was also a bit irritating to watch. It seems like the kind of thing they should have a TV miniseries for, rather than devoting a portion of the film to it. I don't know, it's difficult to say what could have been done better when almost everything turned out alright in the end.
Personally, I would have cut the relationship between Natasha and Bruce, and brought Betty in so we could actually get more references to Hulk's storylines than we have been. Weren't we supposed to be getting another Hulk movie with The Leader in it? And what ever happened to The Abomination? I loved The Incredible Hulk, why can't we get another solo Hulk film? Because Universal owns the distribution rights? Bullshit. Disney has enough money to buy those rights back and have more than enough dough left to buy the rights to Namor, The Fantastic Four, and The X-Men back with change left over to buy about twenty more franchises! They'd make the money back on them about the time they released the first movie. I know Marvel basically lives and breathes on playing the waiting game, that's how they got the rights to Daredevil, Spider-Man, The Punisher and others back. The problem is that the longer they leave the rights in the hands of others, there's less you can do to foreshadow those characters introductions unless you decide to take a couple of years to introduce the characters, which I know they won't do, because it was only a year since The Amazing Spider-Man 2 came out before they started referencing Spidey in the MCU, and it's only been a year since they got the rights back that they're introducing him!
Then we get to the biggest problem with the film, Whedon's comedic direction is so far off that what I know would be funny jokes just fall flat. It's not just delivery, it's the editing and the pacing that makes the jokes fall flat.
The performances are excellent, especially James Spader's and Robert Downey Jr's. Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlet Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, all of them are great. The problem is the story they were forced to tell. I like the twist on the Ultron storyline they used, I like the interactions between Banner, Stark, Rogers, and the others. The problem is the sub-plot of Banner and Romanoff's relationship and the fact that the movie is about thirty minutes too short. Tony brings Jarvis back off-screen, there's not enough development between The Twins and the rest of The Avengers, and worst of all, Quicksilver dies at the end for no reason. If anyone was going to die on the team it shouldn't have been someone who was literally just introduced. This is what wrestling fans call "burying" a character. It seemed like they were setting up Hawkeye's death (which would have sucked as well, since he also hasn't had a solo movie) but pulled a fast one at the end. Apparently the original version of the movie didn't kill off Quicksilver or Hawkeye, which would have been a better ending than killing either of them.
All in all, while I was disappointed, it was still a decent film, and I can't really bring myself to hate it, partially because everything is there that makes a good movie, and it's still a good movie, even if it's not a damn good movie.
In the end, I give it a 6.8* rating, it's basically mediocre bordering on greatness. Next week should either be Ant-Man or The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D, one or the other.

Image from Impawards.com

Jessica Jones: Season One

I wanted to watch Jessica Jones mostly because David Tennant was in it. Same reason I watched Broadchurh or Gracepoint. The fact that it's a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe was just a bonus.

I've been a fan of Marvel Comics for a very long time, but Jessica Jones wasn't a character I was particularly familiar with back when I was still reading comics. I knew a bit about her husband, Luke Cage, and her (MCU) best friend, Trish Walker, but I didn't know much about her. After watching the first season, I might have to go back and learn more about the character.
The show has a pretty interesting setup. The titular character is a super-powered Private Investigator with a mysterious past and an obvious drinking problem. Spoilers inbound.

The season begins with Jessica taking a job from the Schlotmans' who are looking for their daughter, Hope. Throughout the course of her investigation, Jessica discovers that the man who kidnapped Hope is the same one who had kidnapped her in the past. A man named Kilgrave (Played by David Tennant) with the power to control peoples actions. She wants to flee town, but she winds up rescuing Hope and bringing her back to her parents. Unfortunately, the girl still has orders, and she kills her parents.

Jessica's next order of business is to try to prove that the girl was under mind-control when she killed her parents.
This brings me to a massive plot-hole I overlooked while I was watching the series. Nobody believes that Kilgrave can mind control people even though Loki mind-controlled loads of people in The Avengers. We live in the age of the internet, there would have been pictures and video, and stories about that plastered on the internet within seconds. Literally seconds. If people didn't believe the first claims of Loki mind-controlling people, by the time the hundredth, or the thousandth story came out, even if the government didn't comment on it, there wouldn't be many people who thought it was fake, especially after a big green man, a dude in powered armor, a literal Norse God, a walking flag with a shield and a pair of gimmick soldiers fought off an alien invasion coming through a freaking wormhole above New York City. And you know something? That's not even half of what's happened in the past four years. A building disappeared, an army of robotic men dropped a city in Europe, SHIELD was disbanded, helicarriers crashed around the world, Tony Stark's house was destroyed by an army of terrorists, people were literally blowing up all over the world, a man with a silver arm rampaged through a city blowing up cars, Inhumans and mutants have been popping up left and right around the world, and a man in a devil suit has been running around Hell's Kitchen beating up gang-members and taking down a city-wide conspiracy to rule New York. Literally anything is possible. People should know this by now. For how well Daredevil used and acknowledged media coverage of events from the rest of the MCU to affect the story. This is especially odd, since the characters make use of the internet on multiple occasions to obtain information. I know that some of the points the characters make about how people will literally make up any excuse to try and get away with crime, but they shouldn't be dismissing the idea offhand, especially people who know people who have superpowers. 

Jessica convinces her sometimes-boss who's a lawyer, Jerri Hogarth to take the case in exchange for digging up dirt which will let Jerri divorce her (No, the character was not a woman in the comics) wife without giving her any assets.
Meanwhile, Jessica begins a relationship with local bartender and superpowered invincible dude, Luke Cage (Played by  Mike Colter). While Jessica was under Kilgrave's command, she killed Luke's wife.

Eventually, Jessica figures out that Kilgrave's major weakness is being put to sleep, so she steals a bunch of heavy-duty anesthetics to knock him out with. She also teams up with one of Kilgrave's former minions, a cop named Will Simpson to capture him so she can get a confession out of him and clear Hope's name. After a few trials and errors, they manage to get Kilgrave into their trap and on-camera. They locate and bring in his parents to try and talk him into confessing, but that and Jeri disabling the electro-shock system in the cell allows Kilgrave to escape.
Kilgrave commandeers Jeri's car and makes her take him to a doctor to patch up his gunshot wounds from the escape, so she takes him to her wife. Eventually, Kilgrave makes Jeri's wife try and kill her, but Jeri's mistress shows up and kills the wife.

Despite this and other setbacks, Jessica manages to finally catch up to Kilgrave after the situation with Hope is made moot and kill him. She is then left in a position where she may eventually be defended by Foggy Nelson and Matt Murdock.

Aside from the aforementioned massive plot-hole (Which I can only presume must have been a massive oversight on the part of Marvel) this season was pretty good. I didn't even notice it at the time because it's only brought up by a caller on Trish's show and barely mentioned at all later.
I will say this however. The show has no idea what it's going for in terms of plot at times. Will gets hospitalized at one point and starts taking Super-Soldier pills to keep him going after Kilgrave murders a bunch of his friends. The pills wind up driving him crazy and Trish is forced to help Jessica take him down. This is after Will and Trish became intimate, and bonded over their mutual ideals. After they deal with Will, the people who gave him his pills take him away and this is never brought up again.

Then there's Kilgrave. Kilgrave is a great villain, and his moral ambiguity combined with the characters tendency to be a magnificent bastard makes him incredibly entertaining to watch. David Tennant is part of the reason the character is so great. His charisma helps sell the role like nothing else. It's just awesome to see him playing a villain again, and some of his quips are just so freaking funny. The problem is that they couldn't seem to figure out how they wanted to portray the character. They go from mildly sympathetic, childlike woobie who never learned any better to irredeemably purely sadistically evil at multiple points in the season. Almost like there were two writers fighting over how they wanted to characterize him and they didn't have anyone stopping them from mucking up the tone of the show. There's an entire episode dedicated to Jessica teaching Kilgrave how to be a hero, with him taking a liking to it before she betrays him and captures him. This seems to be setting up a situation where she's at least partially responsible for his reign of terror afterwards, but Jessica never appears to care about this, despite feeling responsible for the death of Luke's wife despite being under Kilgrave's control.

At one point, Jessica and company find a bunch of videos of Kilgrave as a child being experimented upon and tortured by his parents. After Jessica finds his parents, they give a story which not only contradicts what Kilgrave told her about them, but also what she'd seen in the videos. Yes, they're pretty much terrified of him, but we have no reason to believe that their story or Kilgrave's is the correct one. Supposedly they were trying to cure him of the virus that made him able to control people (Yeah, that's totally something that could happen. That's not less believable than actual telepathy) but the things we see in the videos make them seem like they were actively trying to encourage this, and Jessica, who's supposed to be one of the least trusting people in the whole MCU, just believes them right off.

That's before we come to Jessica and Kilgrave's relationship. Kilgrave brings up a lot of things he'd done for Jessica while she was with him, and she basically dismisses it as him projecting. He also brings up times when he's let his control lapse to see what she'd do, and rather than going straight with his version of the story, thus making their relationship more complex and interesting, they make it so Jessica actually did try to escape and Kilgrave made her cut her ear before stopping. This seems like a bit of a cop-out when the season so far has done its best to try and make the actions of every other character seem morally grey as opposed to black and white, yet they seem almost determined to make Jessica seem like the put upon hero and Kilgrave the unequivocal villain. I know he's not supposed to be totally sympathetic, but they did their best to make the audience like him without actually paying off his character-arc. I was expecting to see something along the lines of Jessica actually being a willing partner to Kilgrave up until he made her kill Luke's wife and then convincing herself that he was always controlling her all of the time. It would have made for a nice angle on the psychological end, since Jessica is obviously a bit unstable already thanks to the death of her parents and her abusive step-mother. This would have also placed more responsibility onto Jessica's shoulders to justify her sheer levels of self-loathing and guilt. Aside from that though, I don't mind how it turned out. The characterization of Kilgrave and Jessica became massively unfocused by the end of the season, but overall it's still a pretty good show. The other characters however are pretty consistent, which is good.
This brings me to the amazing cast. Jessica is played by Krysten Ritter, who brings across the characters sarcastic self-loathing perfectly. Then there's David Tennant, who's awesome as Kilgrave for all the reasons I've previously mentioned. Mike Colter really manages to sell the "retired hero" sort of thing that I think they were going for with this version of Luke Cage. Wil Traval is good as ex-soldier and current cop Will Simpson. He's a tough son of a gun and seems like he genuinely feels bad about what he did while under Kilgrave's control. It's just a shame he had to be written out of the show.

Rachael Taylor works well as Trish Walker, the former child-star with a traumatic upbringing she'd like to forget. I'm not really sure what else I can say about most of the other members of the supporting cast.

However, there is one specific stand-out that I want to bring up. Eka Darville is in this series as Jessica's Neighbor Malcom Ducasse. Eka Darville is one of my very favorite actors. For those who don't know, Eka Darville played Scott Truman, the Red Ranger in one of my favorite television series of all time, Power Rangers RPM. Eka Darville, like the others in the RPM cast is a tremendously talented actor, who has been criminally underutilized. He's got a great range, and at this point I'm almost convinced that he can do anything and make it great. The sheer gulf between Scott and Malcom is astounding, with Scott being the confident leader type who tries to find the best approach to a situation, and Malcom being this formerly bright and sunny character with noble ideals who was drug into the Kilgrave conflict against his will, forced to become a drug-addict and subsequently forced to overcome it. Malcom does dark things that he knows is right, but it eats himself up inside to the point where it actually causes Jessica's team some trouble, while Scott was the moral center of his team, not because he wanted to be or because he was just there to fill that role in the ensemble like some Rangers are, but because he knew what Corinth needed, and was able to fill that role better than almost anyone else could. For that reason, the characters are basically polar-opposites, as they display different emotions in different ways. Not even just emotions, but also entirely different body-language, tones of voice, method of speaking, gait, and everything. Where Scott had a confident stride, Malcom has a nervous sort of shuffle.

All in all, the story is pretty good and the characters are good as well. While they could have done with a lot tighter characterization of Kilgrave and Jessica, the show is still entertaining to watch, and interesting as they try and unravel the many mysteries within.
In the end, I give the first season of Jessica Jones an 8.1* rating. It has some troubles towards the end, but if you look past them you've got a dang good Neo-Noire series.

Image from impawards.com

Chronicle

Chronicle is another example why 2012 is a really good year for movies. I heard about it from CinemaSins (Proceeding to not watch the video because I wanted to form my own opinion) and reserved it at my library. Then I saw that it was a movie shot from the perspective of one of the characters cameras. Yeah, that kinda almost turned me off of the entire film. But I decided to sit through it anyways, because I was tired of sitting over at my computer doing nothing every day.
So Chronicle is a movie made from the perspective of a single camera throughout most of it. The first character we're introduced to is Andrew Detmer, a kid from Seattle who's decided to start recording his entire life. Like a self-made reality show.
Anyways, Andrew's mother is dying and his father has decided to take a nosedive off the deep-end in response. As such he's become an abusive jerk. Or maybe he was always like this, I don't know.
So Andrew goes to school with his cousin, Matt Garetty. Andrew records his life at school and we find that he's bullied there.
In 2012? Seriously? Nerds being nerds is cause for bullying? Maybe Seattle is different from the rest of the country.
I don't know, I've never been there. Or maybe the world hasn't changed as much as I would have thought.
So Andrew gets invited to a party by Matt to try and bring him out of his shell, but some morons at the party decided to mess with him for trying to document his life. So he leaves the party and sits in the yard doing nothing for a while.
I like how the film moves from run-of-the-mill drudgery to whoosh-crikey awesomeness fairly quickly.
So they develop super-powers and start honing them to perfection. They develop a close bond, as anyone who developed superpowers with or near someone else probably would.
So they enter into the school talent competition to show off their powers as a magic trick, and Andrew becomes extremely popular overnight. His cousin, Matt films it all, along with another student from their school who also films stuff.
So afterwards, Andrew gets drunk at a party and proceeds to vomit. Afterwards he's treated just as bad, if not worse then he was before.
What follows is a series of events that put Andrew through a series of hardships that are entirely of his own making. If he'd spent any time talking to his friends, the people who can best relate to being a godlike entity with tons of power going through highschool in Seattle Washington. Seriously, there are two other people in the world who know what's going on and he completely ignores them!
While Matt could have been a little less accusatory towards Andrew, Andrew could have solved all of the problems in this entire movie if he'd spent more time talking about the stuff he's going through with Steve and Matt.
Or even if he'd looked around on the internet, the repository of all the worlds knowledge. You know, like every teenager in this day and age does!
Ugh.... Anyways, while I did really like the film, it got a little wonky towards the end. While it kind of makes up for it with how awesome the climax is, the way they got there is highly questionable.
To be perfectly honest, it seems like they wrote a really awesome climax, but forgot to figure out how to lead into it, so they just derailed all of the characters so they could serve it. Not that it's a bad climax, it's entertaining to watch, and is about the only time that it actually seems like a real movie rather than a student film project. The problem is that the way they got there isn't entirely believable.
I can think of a hundred ways the movie could have ended better, but only one of them is funny.
All they need is Nick Fury and Charles Xavier. Fury to whip them into line and Xavier to teach them how to use their mutant/whatever powers.
Hold on, I've got a script treatment to write.....
To me, personally it seemed like they just wanted to get to the awesome climax and forgot to make the characters get into the mindset for it in some sort of believable way.
So now to the special effects. For the most part they're really good. The flying looks fairly realistic, but the green-screening for one of the skyscraper scenes looks like they laid a satellite picture of Seattle behind the actors and didn't bother adding any depth to it. The buildings never shift around the way they would in real life if you were actually filming in a city, as opposed to a set in South Africa.
So all in all, it was a good movie I suppose. I mean while it was good it was really good, but the ending wasn't how I'd have figured it would have finish off.
I give it a 7.7* rating. It loses a lot of points for throwing its characters off the rails towards the end, but gains some back for how awesome the climax was.
So, I'll see you next week with To Kill a Mockingbird!