Nataku’s a real creep, for sure, but Eijiro’s kind of a whiney brat himself. Perhaps they deserve each other.
We often see movies with one of our long time readers, friend, and blood relative to Joe, Slogra (not his real name). Being quite the movie buff, he wrote up some entertaining thoughts concerning this year’s big blockbuster films that reflect my own, so I thought I’d share them!:
I am a heavy consumer of movie previews, teasers, trailers, production stills, information leaks, and the like. After years of diligent service to this media, I’ve become quite good at judging movies before they even come out. Even with my expertise, however, I was fooled this year on two separate occasions within a day of each other.
I watched the breadcrumb trail of Avengers: Age of Ultron in the months leading to its release. I feasted on the slurry of information leaked to the public, ranging from casting decisions to pure speculation. The time came when the movie itself was finally released and I approached the theatre. I garnered all my strength to cease my quaking legs as I walked into the cinema, and the hype pouring forth from my personal aura was palpable, seasoning the popcorn in the equally eager laps around me.
I watched.
It wasn’t exactly like the moment in my youth where I realized my parents were fallible. It was more akin to the moment where I realized I had made a very grave error, all because of my uncompromising belief that my parents never made mistakes, and that I had allowed them to lead me astray.
Yes, I still blame my father for taking me to see Reign of Fire.
But that is another harrowing tale for another time. I’m really amazed at how much good will seeped from the porous, shriveled mess of a movie before me. It wasn’t a bad film; it just wasn’t nearly as good as it should be. It largely rehashed aspects of the first film that didn’t need rehashing. The Avengers once again turn on each other like moody teenagers but learn to work together through the power of friendship and teamwork, only to disassemble by the end so that Marvel can make more money more stand alone movies.
There was a lot of awkward exposition, many witty lines that fell flat, and a really weird scene where Thor slips into a hot tub full of memories. Or visions. Or something. The movie teeters on the edge of being a complete mess, held together only by good acting by good actors and some action sequences that are pretty to look at, even if they are silly.
What really ground my soul into powder was the spirit-crushing nonsense sprinkled throughout the movie. I won’t list all the logical fallacies here, for there are only so many words of hatred that you, dear reader, can ingest before exploding in a bitter bomb of disgust.
But just to give an example of the systemic nature of the movie’s problems, consider Ultron’s abilities and how he didn’t utilize them, even when the movie made it clear on certain points what he could and could not do. Ultron, we are told right away, can exist without a body, and his brain as it were can be copied. This creates the problem of having an enemy that cannot be truly destroyed. The writers of the movie ingeniously get around this problem by ignoring it as the movie goes on. Even when the Avengers are told that they must destroy all the robots, stating that none can leave the arena of the final action scene, no one brings up the fact that if the super-smart Ultron is in fact smart, he will have made a copy somewhere else. Perhaps he did and perhaps the next 8 Avengers film will be about Ultron reappearing like a Saturday morning cartoon villain, always defeated but never caught. Or perhaps Ultron screwed up in not realizing he could copy himself. Or the Avengers screwed up in not realizing that there’s a tablet somewhere possessed by a copy of the evil AI. Or perhaps the Ultron writing staff screwed up and wrote themselves into a corner.
I tire of writing about Ultron, so I’ll have you know that by the time I got around to seeing it, it was the day before opening night for another movie, Mad Max: Fury Road. What’s odd is that unlike the previews for Ultron, Max’s trailers left me uninterested. Cars exploded and characters said lines. There was no creepy Pinocchio music and there was no shared universe with other lesser Mad Max characters, composing themselves in Fury Road in a heroic assembly.
And yet any given moment of Mad Max was more exciting and entertaining than the broken promise that was Age of Ultron. Exposition was given during action scenes because the movie is basically one continuous action scene – not in an exhausting way, but in a fascinating fashion that kept my body consistently at the edge of its seat. Literally, the story is told as the main character is tied to the front of a flame-spewing vehicle, racing through the desert as the blood races through his veins and into another man’s like some nightmare version of the Red Cross, all the while that a one-armed badass traitor drives a fuel truck through a lightning-fire storm.
I don’t even know what the lightning-fire storm was. Age of Ultron would have given me some bullshit explanation that made no sense anyway. Mad Max just gives you the storm, and you either accept it or you don’t have a soul and you don’t accept it. I’m just stating facts.
I won’t list every time my heart lept from my chest and I was forced to retrieve it, no doubt missing some beautiful moment in Mad Max in doing so. There is only so much joy I can express in this prose before I lift my fingers from the keyboard and race off to the cinema, thirsting for more Max.
I will instead leave with the inescapable denouement that one does not always get what one wants when one sees an Age of Ultron, yet one may yet pick up the shards of disappointment and rearrange them into the mosaic of a Mad Max or its equivalent, if one can be lead to believe that Max in fact has a theatrical peer. I’m sure there’s some lesson to be learned in all this, perhaps a message of hope for a recovering drug addict and the life such a person hopes to find, but I am not a person to draw such lofty conclusions. I can only wait for the sequel to Max and devour the inevitable trailers, make hopeful predictions, and likely become disappointed in the sequel that never lives up to the original.
It would seem that I cannot learn any lesson after all.
Published on by Alex Kolesar
