Alkaloid wrote:So, I just got back from seeing this and I gotta say I'm a little stunned.
This is bad, guys. Not like IM2 or Hulk were not great movies but were still watch able/mad some sort of sense. Bad. Really, really bad.
The plot is barely holds together as a stand alone film, as part of the MCU it's nonsensical.
The obvious first, where were the rest of the Avengers? IM3 and Thor got away with not having them because they both took place over about a day and a half (in one case mostly not on Earth) and Stark and Thor had no desire to call anyone for help because they saw the whole thing as a personal issue. That's fine. You can sell them not contacting Stark because they assume that Hydra have eyes on him, but do they seriously expect me to believe that Romanov made literally no attempt to contact Barton? The guy the Avengers established as being pretty much the only person on the planet she trusts? The guy she trusts to the point where she's satisfied he's no longer brainwashed 3 seconds after she looks at him despite the fact he was attempting to kill her 30 minutes ago? Not even an "I'm worried, I cant get word from Clint". I mean sure he might be on a mission or undercover or whatever, but you get evidence the spy agency you both work for is fatally compromised you at least make the fucking effort. (Seriously the only way I see this making sense is if everyone involved in the movie forgot Hawkeye existed or they have decided they don't want him in AOU and are just not mentioning him ever again, but he's contracted for it, so I dunno)
They don't know what is really going on for a large portion of the movie. During that time they couldn't call anyone or risk being tracked. The strike team found them at the computer store in 9 minutes. It wouldn't really pay to try to drop a call to Hawkeye. It's unlikely he'd be much help anyway. Stark might have been able to help and he did come to my mind when they were talking about decripting the flash drive but who knows if he's even some place they could get to him without being caught. The last bit, where it would have been really nice to have the Avengers, they were in a time crunch and who knows how to contact the Avengers other than Tony Stark? Maybe they could have got ahold of Rodey and maybe War Machine/Iron Patriot could have helped.
Hopefully one of the Avengers movies will get them to figure out a quick way to get in touch and get together for emergencies.
Nick Fury. Nick Fury in a reactionary, militant idiot and with the exception of HYDRA plants all of SHIELD is staffed by incompetent boobs. Only conclusion I can draw from that. Fury knows that HYDRA have infiltrated SHIELD and does apparently sweet fuck all about it, but carries on with his plan to build enormous flying battleships that can cleanse the world of undesirables en mass, because that is so obviously not the sort of thing HYDRA want? Or am I supposed to think Fury approves of this plan, and I'm now supposed to think the fact that he's roaming the world presumed dead, entirely unsupervised and with all the resources he hid from SHIELD and who knows how many secret underground cave bases is a good thing?
Nick said that he recognized that Hydra had infiltrated SHIELD. He just noticed too late and didn't get far enough ahead of it. He also probably didn't expect that the guy who got him into SHIELD was part of Hydra.
Fury disappearing and roaming the Earth has been his thing off and on since the 60s. Sometimes he's mostly alone. Sometimes he has a small group. More recently he essentially had his own ex-SHEILD army, complete with a couple of helicarriers. I am really interested to see what they do with Fury and other SHEILD fallout. It could make or break the TV show. After this movie the TV show seems incredibly week to be tied so strongly to the cinematic universe and up until now I'd been enjoying it even if it was only so-so.
Also what the fuck is SHIELD? It has an international oversight committee but US state department personnel can give SHIELD officers orders. What they fuck is that? Who runs this thing?
It would be nice if they clarified what SHIELD was and that it was an arm of the UN or something. It certainly seems like it with an international security council providing oversite.
Howard Stark, Peggy Carter and General Tommy Lee Jones apparently recruited and happily worked with war criminals to start SHIELD. Sure, seems reasonable. Armin Zola managed to recover Bucky and turn him into the winter soldier right under their noses. Not like they knew him or anything. Also the news story reporting Howard Starks death used a photo that was at a minimum 40 years old for some reason.
Zola started working on Bucky twice before Zola was captured in the first movie. First Bucky was being experimented on before Cap busted him out. Then Bucky was found after falling off of the train and losing his arm. Sometime after that Zola was captured but Hydra kept him going after that.
Unfortunately the US, UK and the USSR were more than willing to use the expertise of former Nazis in real life. I expect that "General Tommy Lee Jones" was a complete dick to Zola, but he alway seemed very pragmatic to me. Howard was probably interested enough in Zola's ideas that he got over the Hydra stuff, for the most part. Peggy probably kept a wary eye on him. Plus, in the first CA movie, Zola seemed much more into being able to do his scientific stuff and not so much in being a Nazi or a hard core member of Hydra. I guess he was interested in Hydra beyond what they allowed him to do.
Tony Stark refuses to build weapons for anyone but himself and his best friend because he doesn't trust anyone else to use them, but he's happy to consult on the design of their floating pre emptive execution platforms. He got over the whole "I nearly died because SHIELD got panicky and tried to nuke Manhattan" thing, apparently.
That tends to bug me too. I think they tried to work around that by Fury's comments about working around the comments Stark made after getting a close up view of their turbo fans (or whatever). I'm not sure how much Stark really contributed to what they built. He's had a habit of saying or writing some genius stuff and thinking nothing of it and it proves useful to other people. That was a big part of Iron Man 3, and it also bit him in the ass in Iron Man 2 when Vanko took his advice about upping the cycles, so I can see something similar coming out of him spouting off about what he would do if he wanted to keep a flying fortress of death in the air.
Also, for fucks sake writing staff. Stark telling a senate committee to fuck off because the "I no longer make weapons for the US government, you have no way to make me legal or otherwise and you can't take what I have because you have no way to stop my supersonic flying laser tank short of nuking my Miami home, also the public love me and I haven't really done anything wrong yet" argument, while not really being good or sensible at least makes sense in context. Romanovs "OK mistakes were made and our entire organisation was secretly the exact thing it was supposed to be fighting against, but we're the only people good enough to stop them so neener neener" does not.
She kind of had them over a barrell at the time. Plus she's the one that sent all the information out. Technically she also helped save several hundred million lives. I'm betting it had more to do with them having way too much on their plate to stop her at the time. Presumably they were using all of their assets rounding up actual Hydra agents and trying to deal with that whole mess. Otherwise I think their response would have been to lock her up and then settle on what to do with her later. That certainly seems to be the US' m.o. these days. It would be nice if they used this in some future film, maybe a Black Widow film, where it does come back on her.
Using Sitwell like that was a waste. He's a fairly well established minor character in the shorts and in Agents of SHIELD who appears in this movie behaving entirely differently to how he has in every other appearance and is killed. I'm pretty sure the only reason he was involved at all is to try and convince people that Agents really is part of the same universe.
I'm undecided on that. I really liked him in the One-Shots he was in but I was spoiled as to him being a Hydra agent. I'm leaning slightly more towards I didn't like it. Speaking of the One-Shots. I'm really hoping that the Abomination makes another appearance. Hopefully looking more like his comic self. If he's all jacked on the power now he sure as hell could be an easy Hydra pawn if they can get him out of The Freezer.
The first half of the movie was good, but it smells to me like this was supposed to be the Hawkeye and Black Widow movie everyone was saying they wanted that was re scripted to a Cap film for some reason. Seriously, you change Cap to Barton for pretty much everything up to the bunker it still makes sense, then carry it on from there as a Bourne style spy/action thriller with them trying to expose the corruption in SHIELDS ranks rather than flying battleship warfare and it makes a lot more sense.
I disagree. I liked Jeremy Renner in his Bourne movie but I don't see that working for Hawkeye. He makes more sense to me as a member of the strike team (where was he!). In the comics Cap has a fairly significant history of political intrigue and doing what is right no matter what, so this works for me.
The one thing I didn't like is that they overdid it with The Falcon flying around through all the flack and stuff. I thought he was cool and all but I think they went overboard with it and to me it just screamed, "here's the cool 3-D part for those of you who wanted 3-D".
I got a kick out of Jenny Agutter kicking ass. I was so pleasantly surprised that I was not expecting it to be Black Window and not her, which is pretty sad on my part.