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SuperMechagodzilla posted:It's really bizarre that these films contain basically no indication of how any of these weird-rear end organizations actually work, so this idea that they need oversight is like "they didn't already?". I found the politics of the movie to be an utter mess, due to the questions that were already brought up. I guess after SHIELD collapsed, the Avengers have just been private citizens waging war across the globe with no sanction or oversight. They got away with creating a genocidal robot army and destroying a city, but when 15 aide workers died in a shootout with terrorists in Nigeria, that was the tipping point? Every moral/political dilemma that follows is likewise a mess that produced a lot of "Wait, but weren't they...?" moments for me. For example, when Tony is talking to Hawkguy and Falcon in The Raft and he says "It was your choice, you broke the law." Wait, so everything Tony did after he signed that paperwork was legal? Did I miss that UN panel being convened? I have to admit, it stuck in my craw because I'm a Captain America fanboy and his political stance here is like some weird combination of liberal and sovereign citizen. He doesn't trust government oversight, but it's okay for a cabal to wield immense power as long as he's convinced they're all good guys. That said, I was thoroughly entertained by the dialogue and the action direction in this movie. The big hero vs. hero fights were really satisfying, conveying a sense of each character's unique abilities and personality. I like Zack Snyder but I do zone out after the millionth ton of concrete and glass explodes, and this movie was mercifully light on urban destruction porn.
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May 9, 2016 03:45
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Classtoise posted:We have private military contractors. "Private citizens showing up and making a bad situation worse" isn't exactly a foreign concept. It also seems to me like they tried to show both sides of the issue as equally flawed by having the pro-Accords side commit individual acts of oppression (such as putting Wanda under house arrest and not even trying to capture the Winter Soldier) whereas Cap's stance is astonishingly stupid in concept.
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May 9, 2016 04:15
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Fangz posted:You realise that Cap's stance, outside of wanting to protect his friend, was just to retire when the Accords came in? Hodgepodge posted:Anyhow, Thanos is literally an avatar of death. That's his deal. So I guess that's where things are going.
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May 9, 2016 14:31
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My curiosity was piqued when Clint mockingly called Tony a futurist. I immediately thought of Italian Futurism rather than futurism in the vague general sense. Ultron was the logical end-result of the techbro, TED Talk, Silicon Valley liberal communist viewpoint that Tony has fallen into: the world can be perfected if we remove that pesky human element completely. Just thinking out loud.
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May 9, 2016 16:06
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Civilian casualties happen in war and law enforcement. Even the destruction of entire cities for the wrong reasons. For a group of private citizens employed by an energy company to just decide to go fight these battles is definitely a problem in and of itself.
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May 9, 2016 17:46
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They'd have a hard time getting a movie plot out of Vision because that poor guy gets dealt such a crappy hand over and over again. His teammates tend to denigrate his humanity without even thinking about it, then his wife goes totally bonkers.
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May 9, 2016 18:12
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I said come in! posted:Avengers 1 would still have happened so the world would have been destroyed either way.
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May 9, 2016 18:23
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I never bothered to dig into the political/philosophical underpinnings of Iron Man 3, but holding Tony Stark responsible for creating Extremis by not being a venture capitalist funding a tech startup is a pretty nasty Catch-22 to put him in, non?Bob Quixote posted:Also Thanos still exists and as long as earth has at least one infinity stone (like the Tesseract?) then earth was boned anyway.
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May 9, 2016 18:28
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I said come in! posted:Hydra would no doubt fight Thanos but I assume they would lose horribly.
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May 9, 2016 18:40
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Kurzon posted:The aftermath of the Civil War arc was worse. There was this Fifty States Initiative where the government literally press ganged superhumans into a superhero training camp. They press ganged this juvenile girl who wasn't involved in any crime or vigilantism and turned her into a sniper assassin. That was just the weirdest poo poo. Civil War asked a good question but came up with a stupid answer. Thank God the writers of this movie saw sense and lowered the stakes to something more believable. In this movie, Cap isn't really fighting an ideological battle, he just decides he that he has to go rogue this one time in order to save the world. I'm aware the movie was going to have to be radically different from the comic, because a lot of what was in the comic makes little or no sense in a MCU where there aren't dozens and dozens of superhumans running around.
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May 9, 2016 19:35
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I always thought "Stark is Hydra!" was misguided and simplistic, but in the wake of Age of Ultron we see that extinction is a potential result of both the Skull's Futurism and Stark's technocratic capitalist futurism.
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May 9, 2016 20:06
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Neurolimal posted:In an ideal world yeah, regulation all the way. But in reality the countries are not rational actors interested in the Greater Good. In a world where Realpolitik dominates every western superpower, "regulation" means "these gods are only guaranteed to help us, the global elite."
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May 9, 2016 20:18
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Cavelcade posted:Also, speculatively, Scarlet Witch canonically messes with minds. Maybe she could work?
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May 9, 2016 20:55
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Gyges posted:Bucky is Sci-Fi programed though. You can't actually say a string of phrases to a person and force them to do things against their will. I said come in! posted:I don't think I would appreciate a scene where Steve Rogers starts playing doctor on Bucky. JonathonSpectre posted:It just seemed they went to the mattresses a little too quick
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May 9, 2016 22:35
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RBA Starblade posted:I didn't use to mind it but now I wish shaky-cam would go away.
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May 10, 2016 17:51
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sean10mm posted:Fixed.
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May 10, 2016 18:20
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There's another relevant part that I just wrote a paragraph about before realized it's at about 4:30 in the same video: even competitive martial artists can have trouble with the cinematic style; the actor playing the bad guy can't adjust to the idea that he's not supposed to charge down his "opponent." (They ended up replacing that guy in that scene with a Jackie Chan Pro Team stuntman in a wig.) Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 18:38 on May 10, 2016 |
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May 10, 2016 18:36
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He just owes her a dance, Jesus
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May 10, 2016 21:29
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anglachel posted:What I don't get is how the gently caress the accords was supposed to prevent any of the "reasons" that was presented that it was necessary. The flaw in the idea of oversight is that the people overseeing them would have the same liberal ideology that Ultron embodies. Steve's objections to the Accords don't address this in a meaningful way, which is why he instantly came across the me as a simpleminded redneck instead of a principled anarchist, even though I'd probably react the same way he did, or very similar to it.
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May 11, 2016 18:08
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Gyges posted:Perhaps instead of a German tactical team they could send the room full of super humans who have the ability to restrain him with non-lethal force? Also, and I know this is super crazy, don't execute a guy because a single camera showed him in the same city at a bombing. I mean, at the very least, if you are immediately sure it was him you'd want to question him for links to other Hydra agents or whoever is pulling his strings this time.
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May 11, 2016 18:26
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Zen Man
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May 11, 2016 18:56
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:That's Zen Man - or, more specifically, Westernized Buddhism Man. Natural ally of Liberal Capitalism Man. Vision, in the comics, is one of those weird B-list character for which I have a soft spot. He's important enough to appear in a lot of issues, but unimportant enough that writers (I assume) have less editorial control over twisting him to suit whatever story they want to tell or ignoring him entirely, and his basic attributes make it easier to get away with transforming, dispensing with, or killing him off temporarily.
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May 11, 2016 19:51
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Atoramos posted:"Reality is... I got all dem stones"
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May 13, 2016 19:49
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Crion posted:This is the plot of Whatever Works (2009). The Woody Allen role is played by Larry David, then 62; the female romantic lead is played by Evan Rachel Wood, then 22 (but the character herself is 19, if I recall correctly). Orson Welles posted:Oh, yes. I can hardly bear to talk to him. He has the Chaplin disease. That particular combination of arrogance and timidity sets my teeth on edge.
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May 13, 2016 20:33
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Stark is Hydra.
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May 16, 2016 16:30
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:I mean, have fun trying to spin 75% good word of mouth as "universally reviled", I guess. Remember: that's what I was originally talking about, the factually wrong notion that the "uneducated masses" hated the movie. Not some dick-measuring contest with Marvel or Deadpool. SuperMechagodzilla posted:The truth is that Stark murdered Jarvis. Stark is Hydra. Perhaps Vision is analogous to the transcontinental mysticism popular with Nazi occultists like the Red Skull? Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 19:12 on May 16, 2016 |
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May 16, 2016 19:10
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RBA Starblade posted:If both Thor and Tony are Hydra, does that make Vision Double Hydra? Is Vision a Quadruple Nazi? I'm confused at the idea that Vision wouldn't buy decent paprika. I'm sure he bought his spices from Whole Foods. Maybe he got the smoked kind and Wanda doesn't like that.
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May 16, 2016 19:24
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His entire costume refuses to obey the laws of physics, not just some dinky shield.
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May 16, 2016 19:32
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All we get from Rogers with regard to political conflict is "I refuse any oversight because the overseers have agendas." So is he an anarchist? An anti-globalist? A sovereign citizen kook? Mostly he just comes across as a dunderhead. In a series of movies rife with political implications, this is the first one that promotes the idea of (the audience) "taking sides" in a political conflict. And it ends up being a series of emotional reactions based on friendships and hurt feelings. Captain America's depiction in this movie is bleak and depressing. But wait, no, this movie is fun! and BvS is grim and gritty because of the colour palette and Bat-machineguns.
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Jul 10, 2016 21:06
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To me it all comes back to the nonsensical status of SHIELD. I only recently found out that the Pentagon pulled material support for The Avengers because, far from being concerned that they were portrayed negatively, they couldn't figure out how they might be portrayed at all. Was SHIELD part of the Department of Homeland Security? Department of Defense? CIA? Some kind of international jurisdiction which would make no sense at all? The whole time I was watching Age of Ultron I was thinking about the Avengers' status after the collapse of SHIELD. "So are the Avengers just a paramilitary squad funded by the Stark corporation?" Then Civil War says "Yes, but maybe the United Nations will start overseeing them." Okay, maybe? So now I can't stop thinking about it when I think about these movies. Some of the articles publishing the news seemed to think it was absurd that the Department of Defense would be concerned about the portrayal of military bureaucracy in a superhero movie, though they understood why. But if the movies want to establish stakes moral dilemmas and make us give a poo poo about any of it, yes, it really really matters. No one would ever write a movie where MacArthur starts a civil war when Truman fires him, then they shake hands and make up at the end. But that level of conflict, paired with that kind of story logic, is normal in superhero movies. (Especially when you can see the conflict through the lens of a few costumed people having a fist fight without countless soldiers and civilians dying.) I understand character writing is tricky when your characters are living symbols or science-fictional beings of immense power, but Civil War wants to have it both ways by playing up the conflict, without actually owning up to what the conflict means.
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Jul 11, 2016 16:09
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Rogers' arc in the films (such as it is) is that he's a hardcore socialist up until the end of The First Avenger, where his character does an incredible 180 off a cliff. A notion I keep playing around with is that weirdly, Skull is not only not a Nazi, he is specifically a Futurist. He loves technology and violence and wants to literally steal the power of the gods to power things that go pew pew and kaboom. Captain America's mission is to stop him from turning Europe into a big-budget summer blockbuster remake of Victory Over the Sun. Fittingly, Ultron is not only Tony Stark's ideology taken to its furthest logical conclusion, he's also a synthesis of Zola and Skull. Zola's technocratic totalitarianism paired with Skull's megalomaniacal, futurist vision. (Thor is Hydra!) (Seriously, what does Thor represent in these movies? And what does it mean, if anything, that Vision is a product of Tony and Thor?)
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Jul 11, 2016 18:24
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It's actually quite illegal for an American corporation to send a private army into combat in another country.
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Sep 18, 2016 23:51
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Thisashpanash posted:Yeah SHIELD basically makes no sense in the MCU, at all. ashpanash posted:The movie is about Captain America's personal stance on something vs. Iron Man's personal stance, and it's a tragedy (in the greek sense) that they should be able to communicate but never do. War Machine posted:"This is the PARENT-TEACHER ASSOCIATION, Steve. 119 moms have ratified this." The movie is pure nonsense because it's about Captain America and Iron Man's stances on...something. No one watching the movie has a clear idea what. The stakes being personal does not make the stakes themselves immaterial.
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Sep 19, 2016 13:56
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Of course the PTA is in charge of Captain America; he looks like a cyborg Gerber Baby.
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Sep 19, 2016 17:15
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I can't believe I'm saying this, but closely following the premise of Civil War would've made for an actually compelling story. Especially if they doubled down on Tony's agreeing to regulation only because he plans to break it as soon as he feels like it, then implementing all these totalitarian measures out of desperation, because that doesn't work when you're the one running the show.
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Sep 19, 2016 18:10
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well why not posted:Having Thanos win and actually subjugate the planet for a year would be pretty rad. Much better than the 'Age' of Ultron (which was like two weeks).
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Sep 20, 2016 15:48
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If the ideology of the series matches that of the films, it would be a big-budget rendition of If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?
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Dec 5, 2016 03:38
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