fifty frenchmen can't be wrong (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
some_stars) wrote2012-05-08 06:43 pm
some_stars) wrote2012-05-08 06:43 pm
I need so many icons, WHY IS NOT DVD YET
I rewatched a crappy cam of Avengers to plan bathroom breaks if I decide to go again, and I have been confirmed in 1.) my pairing choices and 2.) my initial impression that this movie is really not that great. Let us take them one at a time.
1.) I was wondering if maybe I had overplayed Tony/Bruce in my head, but: no. No I did not. "Where's Banner, has he shown up yet?" "Banner??" "Just keep me posted." AND THEN HE DOES. "He's here...Just like you said." Which Bruce totally gets to overhear, btw. And then Bruce saves him, and roars him back to life (which is so patently stupid but I can't care), and they drive off together. IT IS TRUE. Science boyfriends 4-eva
--I mean I honestly feel weird about Tony in this movie, because Iron Man 2 DESTROYED his character arc by chickening out and completely cheating--he doesn't become an alcoholic and destroy his own life and nearly kill himself because he secretly knows he'll be dead soon, he does it because he's fucked up inside. The whole point of the end of the first movie--actually I'm just going to copy and paste from my original post about IM2 here: Iron Man was so great because the ending didn't eliminate, in fact suggested, the possibility that Tony's whole process of self-destruction, then hitting bottom and choosing a new kind of self-destruction based on obsessive guilt, then finally stabilizing, was only going to repeat itself bigger and bigger, because there's something deep in him that drives it and won't let him get past it.
Which is why giving him a valid external outside-his-control reason to self-destruct completely breaks the story. So I don't really know how to relate to him here because I can't accept a lot of his pre-movie development as legitimate or believable. There were moments when I felt like the whole "endless series of downward spirals" pattern was still being developed, and I really want to think some more about how the idea of heroic self-sacrifice here might work with and/or contradict his established pattern of self-destruction. But overall he felt...better. Fixed. And I can't see why, because IM2 didn't convince me in the first place.
But when he's with Bruce, he worked for me. And a couple of his moments with Steve clicked--the biggest being "everything special about you came out of a bottle," delivered with more raw emotion and lack of control than any other line up to that point, because, god, that need to stand alone, to know that everything he is, good and bad, is what he's made himself (whether or not, of course, that's true) and that it's all in him, under his control...that really came into focus for me there. I am not explaining it well. --BUT my main point is, his relationship with Bruce made sense to me. The person he was in those scenes made sense to me as the person he would be now, different than in IM1, having grown in some ways but still with that essential damage.
And oh, I loved the way Bruce reacted to him--and the way Tony reacted to those reactions. They both respond to each other in a way that nobody else quite responds to them, and when there's other people around you can see it. How nobody else gets what the hell Tony is trying to do with Bruce, but it's not Bruce telling him to cut it out, or telling him "I'm not coming back, you're crazy for thinking I will." Their relationship starts past that point. I really want more Bruce canon to feed my feels, but I don't want to watch the last Hulk movie because 1.) it's probably crap and 2.) it's a different actor.
--I should have split this up into subcategories, clearly. OTHER STUFF: it turns out that I missed some great Clint moments during my bathroom break (plus a Thor/Loki scene that DOESN'T HELP with my wrong needs; oh Thor, you just keep trying to love him better, don't ever stop) and I could just generally concentrate on him more now that I wasn't desperately wishing I'd worn a diaper, and--oh god, you guys. Him and Natasha. ALWAYS. In any capacity, Blackhawk (sex) or Bromanovs (BROS). I will take whatever. He calls her nicknames and sees when she's messed up inside, and she is always there for him no matter what, including when being there for him means biting and then concussing him. And then sitting together on a bed, both freshly and differently traumatized but both understanding what the other's been through, pressed up against each other and leaning just a little bit. (Oh I wish I knew more about them both, but I am SO not up for another weeks-long comics-reading marathon right now, it is not 2004 or 2008 anymore and I'm supposed to have my shit together.)
And if they are having sex, I want them to adopt Steve. I want SOMEBODY to give Steve love, okay, he needs it. He is so sad and angry and lost and in mourning for HIS ENTIRE LIFE. I loved the anger and brittleness here; it wouldn't be in character if it was pre-freezing or post-team but at this moment, that's exactly how he'd be. My thing with Steve pairings is that I am literally incapable of imagining some fictional universe where he wasn't in love with both Bucky and Peggy. (And having sex at least with Bucky, probably both.) I ship them all so hard it's ridiculous. So I need that addressed, the tangled combination of griefs for his whole life and everything he knew, and for these people he loved so much and never had a chance to mourn, much less get over.
Not to mention he never got a chance to come home from the war, to leave that way of being and coping and reacclimate, returning slowly to the surface. He just died and woke up, not home, but somewhere inexplicable and foreign. No wonder he wants to start fighting again--and I really, really want to read stories about what happens now that the war is over. Of course there'll be another, you can't have superhero teams without battles--but right now, post-movie, in the months before the next global threat, he finally has to find a way into the world again. And that world is still not his own, but he has a family now. WRITE ME THESE STORIES.
Also I believe more than ever that all six of these people would have sex with each other. You wouldn't even need pollen or aliens.
2.) All of that said: this movie isn't actually that great? I found like eight places where I could safely go to the bathroom because nothing I care about happens for at least the next four minutes. There was just too much summer blockbuster crap. People punching robots is not interesting after the first few punches; people punching buildings, the same. Even people punching other people isn't interesting unless we care about them (preferably about them both). And spaceships punching buildings? ZERO. INTEREST.
The whole fight scene on the Helicarrier left me mostly cold except for Natasha fighting Clint, a couple good Tony and Steve moments, Natasha trying to keep Bruce from changing and then the transformation, and of course Coulson (although that could have been a little less blatantly manipulative and made a little more sense). Everything else, blaaarrrgh, whatever, bathroom break. It was like this giant and extended letdown after all the awesome emotional plot. Whoops, too many human relationships and facial expressions, CGI break!
And the robot fighting went on WAY too long, and the lengthy glamor shots of the robot ships arriving, and just--all the glamor shots. All the Big Action stuff that's just about showing off the CGI and the scale of the fake destruction they can wreak. I DON'T CARE.
I love the action that reveals character, that's actually exciting. There were some wonderful moments during the robot fighting, when you could actually see people close up and they reacted to things--especially Natasha and Steve--when the fighting was on a human level with human reactions and sometimes they even talked to each other. And I love watching people fight each other when they have a reason and/or a relationship. But like, Thor and the Hulk on top of an alien ship pounding on stuff? Like I was just going to forget they were in this movie? NOT NEEDED. Also, he way Thor and the Hulk fight is inherently boring because they're so strong and they just hit things. Them fighting each other and actually being challenged was great for about 45 seconds, then it settled into just more might-as-well-have-been-anonymous pounding.
And the pacing felt so weird, everything felt like bits and pieces smushed together. Some of those bits were FANTASTIC, but the movie ended up being less than the sum of parts. I've heard that even more got cut than usual, so probably the original version flowed more. And I mean, Joss did a pretty great job of getting this many stories and characters to hang together, given the time and content constraints. But--given those constraints--it was never going to be good enough.
My gold standards for comic book movies, btw, are Iron Man 1 and X1/X2. Captain America was very good, though it also had pacing/consistency problems and it could have been a lot more complex--emotionally, not logistically--than it chose to be. XMFC was a hot mess but at least it understood that stories are about people who have feelings. You could always see somebody's face.
1.) I was wondering if maybe I had overplayed Tony/Bruce in my head, but: no. No I did not. "Where's Banner, has he shown up yet?" "Banner??" "Just keep me posted." AND THEN HE DOES. "He's here...Just like you said." Which Bruce totally gets to overhear, btw. And then Bruce saves him, and roars him back to life (which is so patently stupid but I can't care), and they drive off together. IT IS TRUE. Science boyfriends 4-eva
--I mean I honestly feel weird about Tony in this movie, because Iron Man 2 DESTROYED his character arc by chickening out and completely cheating--he doesn't become an alcoholic and destroy his own life and nearly kill himself because he secretly knows he'll be dead soon, he does it because he's fucked up inside. The whole point of the end of the first movie--actually I'm just going to copy and paste from my original post about IM2 here: Iron Man was so great because the ending didn't eliminate, in fact suggested, the possibility that Tony's whole process of self-destruction, then hitting bottom and choosing a new kind of self-destruction based on obsessive guilt, then finally stabilizing, was only going to repeat itself bigger and bigger, because there's something deep in him that drives it and won't let him get past it.
Which is why giving him a valid external outside-his-control reason to self-destruct completely breaks the story. So I don't really know how to relate to him here because I can't accept a lot of his pre-movie development as legitimate or believable. There were moments when I felt like the whole "endless series of downward spirals" pattern was still being developed, and I really want to think some more about how the idea of heroic self-sacrifice here might work with and/or contradict his established pattern of self-destruction. But overall he felt...better. Fixed. And I can't see why, because IM2 didn't convince me in the first place.
But when he's with Bruce, he worked for me. And a couple of his moments with Steve clicked--the biggest being "everything special about you came out of a bottle," delivered with more raw emotion and lack of control than any other line up to that point, because, god, that need to stand alone, to know that everything he is, good and bad, is what he's made himself (whether or not, of course, that's true) and that it's all in him, under his control...that really came into focus for me there. I am not explaining it well. --BUT my main point is, his relationship with Bruce made sense to me. The person he was in those scenes made sense to me as the person he would be now, different than in IM1, having grown in some ways but still with that essential damage.
And oh, I loved the way Bruce reacted to him--and the way Tony reacted to those reactions. They both respond to each other in a way that nobody else quite responds to them, and when there's other people around you can see it. How nobody else gets what the hell Tony is trying to do with Bruce, but it's not Bruce telling him to cut it out, or telling him "I'm not coming back, you're crazy for thinking I will." Their relationship starts past that point. I really want more Bruce canon to feed my feels, but I don't want to watch the last Hulk movie because 1.) it's probably crap and 2.) it's a different actor.
--I should have split this up into subcategories, clearly. OTHER STUFF: it turns out that I missed some great Clint moments during my bathroom break (plus a Thor/Loki scene that DOESN'T HELP with my wrong needs; oh Thor, you just keep trying to love him better, don't ever stop) and I could just generally concentrate on him more now that I wasn't desperately wishing I'd worn a diaper, and--oh god, you guys. Him and Natasha. ALWAYS. In any capacity, Blackhawk (sex) or Bromanovs (BROS). I will take whatever. He calls her nicknames and sees when she's messed up inside, and she is always there for him no matter what, including when being there for him means biting and then concussing him. And then sitting together on a bed, both freshly and differently traumatized but both understanding what the other's been through, pressed up against each other and leaning just a little bit. (Oh I wish I knew more about them both, but I am SO not up for another weeks-long comics-reading marathon right now, it is not 2004 or 2008 anymore and I'm supposed to have my shit together.)
And if they are having sex, I want them to adopt Steve. I want SOMEBODY to give Steve love, okay, he needs it. He is so sad and angry and lost and in mourning for HIS ENTIRE LIFE. I loved the anger and brittleness here; it wouldn't be in character if it was pre-freezing or post-team but at this moment, that's exactly how he'd be. My thing with Steve pairings is that I am literally incapable of imagining some fictional universe where he wasn't in love with both Bucky and Peggy. (And having sex at least with Bucky, probably both.) I ship them all so hard it's ridiculous. So I need that addressed, the tangled combination of griefs for his whole life and everything he knew, and for these people he loved so much and never had a chance to mourn, much less get over.
Not to mention he never got a chance to come home from the war, to leave that way of being and coping and reacclimate, returning slowly to the surface. He just died and woke up, not home, but somewhere inexplicable and foreign. No wonder he wants to start fighting again--and I really, really want to read stories about what happens now that the war is over. Of course there'll be another, you can't have superhero teams without battles--but right now, post-movie, in the months before the next global threat, he finally has to find a way into the world again. And that world is still not his own, but he has a family now. WRITE ME THESE STORIES.
Also I believe more than ever that all six of these people would have sex with each other. You wouldn't even need pollen or aliens.
2.) All of that said: this movie isn't actually that great? I found like eight places where I could safely go to the bathroom because nothing I care about happens for at least the next four minutes. There was just too much summer blockbuster crap. People punching robots is not interesting after the first few punches; people punching buildings, the same. Even people punching other people isn't interesting unless we care about them (preferably about them both). And spaceships punching buildings? ZERO. INTEREST.
The whole fight scene on the Helicarrier left me mostly cold except for Natasha fighting Clint, a couple good Tony and Steve moments, Natasha trying to keep Bruce from changing and then the transformation, and of course Coulson (although that could have been a little less blatantly manipulative and made a little more sense). Everything else, blaaarrrgh, whatever, bathroom break. It was like this giant and extended letdown after all the awesome emotional plot. Whoops, too many human relationships and facial expressions, CGI break!
And the robot fighting went on WAY too long, and the lengthy glamor shots of the robot ships arriving, and just--all the glamor shots. All the Big Action stuff that's just about showing off the CGI and the scale of the fake destruction they can wreak. I DON'T CARE.
I love the action that reveals character, that's actually exciting. There were some wonderful moments during the robot fighting, when you could actually see people close up and they reacted to things--especially Natasha and Steve--when the fighting was on a human level with human reactions and sometimes they even talked to each other. And I love watching people fight each other when they have a reason and/or a relationship. But like, Thor and the Hulk on top of an alien ship pounding on stuff? Like I was just going to forget they were in this movie? NOT NEEDED. Also, he way Thor and the Hulk fight is inherently boring because they're so strong and they just hit things. Them fighting each other and actually being challenged was great for about 45 seconds, then it settled into just more might-as-well-have-been-anonymous pounding.
And the pacing felt so weird, everything felt like bits and pieces smushed together. Some of those bits were FANTASTIC, but the movie ended up being less than the sum of parts. I've heard that even more got cut than usual, so probably the original version flowed more. And I mean, Joss did a pretty great job of getting this many stories and characters to hang together, given the time and content constraints. But--given those constraints--it was never going to be good enough.
My gold standards for comic book movies, btw, are Iron Man 1 and X1/X2. Captain America was very good, though it also had pacing/consistency problems and it could have been a lot more complex--emotionally, not logistically--than it chose to be. XMFC was a hot mess but at least it understood that stories are about people who have feelings. You could always see somebody's face.
no subject
This is a GOOD QUESTION!
no subject
man, we're like polar opposites. the summer blockbuster crap and the one-liners were what actually made this movie fun to me. i wasn't really feeling the characters and their "connections" (it's making me sad, like i'm missing out). i can count the number of scenes that resonated with me on an emotional level in one hand:
- did you mourn
- the first natasha and bruce scene (do they start at that age/i did)
- natasha and clint
- tony and bruce at the lab (exposed, like a nerve) and how it connected to the end there (tell him to suit up). theirs was the only "developed" relationship.
it's funny to say this because i've watched it twice in theaters and had a great time, but this movie had no real heart to me.