Just the Ticket #97: Agents Of Ultron
Welcome, Holders Of Tickets, to another long-awaited issue of Just the Ticket! Today's installment does the crossover thing, following the Marvel Cinematic Universe into the Age Of Ultron.
We begin with a Critical Quickie of the miniseries (pilot season?) Marvel's Agent Carter. The show picks up shortly after the events of Captain America: The First Avenger, and follows Cap's first love, Peggy Carter, as she deals with 1940's chauvanism and tries to thwart a post-WWII terrorist plot before her coworkers hang her for treason.
Agent Carter continues Captain America's feel of old-world-meets-modern-tech-and-beyond, appealing to young and old audiences alike without becoming another attempt at capturing the cheese-factor of that era's cinema (although the included "Captain America" radio serial serves that purpose along the way).
The series stands alone, but also ties in with other MCU projects by bringing back Howard Stark and the Howling Commandos, and introducing Edwin Jarvis (as in Tony Stark's AI, J.A.R.V.I.S.), Anton Vanko (as in the father of Iron Man 2 villain, Ivan Vanko), and an early version of the Black Widow program.
It ends feeling both resolved and incomplete, but was enjoyable to watch.
A-
Next comes the second season of Marvel's Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. Skye is secretly interrogating Ward, Fitz has brain damage after almost drowning, Simmons is undercover in H.Y.D.R.A., and Coulson is trying to run what remains of S.H.I.E.L.D. while a compulsion to carve alien schematics in every available surface drives him mad. There are new characters who turn out to be mercenaries hired by Coulson to fill S.H.I.E.L.D.'s ranks, but serve no other discernible purpose, even when they have dialogue. Honestly, aside from the introduction of Absorbing Man and Whitehall (who hasn't aged a day in seventy years), the first few episodes suck. Then Mockingbird (Adrianne Palicki) and Deathlok (J. August Richards) show up, and we're back in business.
Through the course of the season, we also meet "the doctor," a.k.a. Mister Hyde, a.k.a. Cal Johnson, a.k.a. Skye's psychologically unstable father (played by Twin Peaks actor Kyle MacLachlan), who wants revenge on Whitehall (played by Franklin & Bash actor Reed Diamond) for killing Skye's mother and appropriating her immortality.
Rayna is back, continuing her agenda to uncover and exploit powered people. There's an alien artifact (yes, it's from the same source as Coulson's hypergraphia) that dusts almost everyone who touches it (except Raina, Cal, and Whitehall), and then throws S.H.I.E.L.D. and H.Y.D.R.A. into an arms race to find an ancient Kree temple with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. Whitehall and a couple of the dimensionless S.H.I.E.L.D. mercs end up dead, Skye and Raina get mutated, Cal goes crazier, Simmons goes on a "let's kill all the powered people" jag, and Mockingbird turns double agent for "the real S.H.I.E.L.D." I fully expected this to turn into a Skrull invasion plot at any given second.
In a slight deviation from Marvel canon, Skye (a.k.a. Daisy Johnson, codename: Quake in the comics) is made an Inhuman, as opposed to just being "powered" like she is in the comics. This, along with hints at a future Inhumans movie, could test Chloe Bennet (Skye), Dichen Lachman (Jiaying, Skye's mother--yes, she's alive again), Luke Mitchell (Lincoln, an electrokinetic Inhuman), Jamie Harris (Gordon, a blind, teleporting Inhuman), Ruth Negga (Raina, who is now basically an Inhuman porcupine who gets psychic visions), and others in their viability as big-screen personalities. There are still four years between now and the forthcoming Inhumans film, so they have plenty of time to up their acting game.
As I had first begun writing this two months ago, the season was not yet over. Baron Wolfgang von Strucker had yet to make an appearance, Simmons was still on her "if it made my life sad or complicated, let's kill it" jag, Coulson's S.H.I.E.L.D. was making amends with "the real S.H.I.E.L.D.", Cal still had an agenda, the Inhumans had an agenda, Ward was in the wind, Coulson and Maria Hill were speculating about powered twins in Russia, and Raina was ranting about metal men destroying the world.
For all its piecemeal ridiculousness, the second season of Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. still managed to hold my attention from one episode to the next. The season ultimately resolved itself in the not-so-ultimately unresolved fashion that we, in this age of serialized media, have come to grin and groan about on a regular basis. I, for one, could have done with less cardboard characterization and more puppy-dogs and rainbows, but to give one critic exactly what he wants would have been positively Inhuman.
B
So, now we come to the main event. I could have done what I always do after seeing a Marvel Cinematic Universe production on my birthday. I could have drank a bunch of caffeine before, during, and after the movie, then spent all night covering the internet in spoilers and gushing about how perfect and awesome and spectacular and how much better than any MCU movie before it Avengers: Age Of Ultron was.
Well, it was awesome and spectacular, and thus far it was the best sequel in the franchise. But perfect? Not really.
I'm not saying Age Of Ultron was a terrible movie. It wasn't. The opening fight scene with the core Avengers taking on H.Y.D.R.A. was full of creative choreography that put team lightweights like Hawkeye, Black Widow, and most prominently, Captain America, in the focus they deserve. In fact, any supervillain who watches battle footage of the Avengers and doesn't realize that Cap is the most skilled, versatile, and possibly the most necessary, member of the team is a fool who deserves to get hit in the face repeatedly with a star-spangled vibranium pizza tray.
The Hulkbuster vs. Hulk fight was a new, comedy-infused level of epic. Cameos by Falcon and War Machine were extremely welcome (although I could have done with more Falcon in the final battle). Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch were portrayed well, if not yet fully dimensionalized. And if you get me started on Paul Bettany as J.A.R.V.I.S./Vision, don't expect to be able to stop me. So, I'll stop myself at 4 words: Vision and Mjolnir...hilarious.
What didn't work, however, was Ultron.
I'll watch James Spader in anything. Except Boston Legal. And The Office. But those shows are over, so they don't matter, and I digress. He's brilliant in The Blacklist. I'd even listen to him read the phone book because I know he'd improvise random stories about his encounters with any and every name in it. He has more personality and charisma than any actor has a right to, and he uses it masterfully, But as Ultron, the titular villain in the second Avengers film, he actually seems to have too much personality.
For those who aren't familiar with the nature of Ultron, the beauty of his character--at least, in the comics--is that he is a self-aware artificial intelligence who seeks to erase humanity from the face of the Earth, all the while unaware that he is also self-programmed with a desire to be a superior kind of human and a self-loathing knowledge that he can never achieve that goal.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe incarnation, as (mistakenly) brought to life by Spader, makes superficial allusions to those aspects of his pen-and-paper predecessor, but Spader's performance boils the character off to no more than what it is: Spader pretending to be a robot. If that weren't bad enough, he serves as a Disney spokesmachine by quoting lyrics from Pinocchio like they're a self-help mantra he read in How to Clone Yourself and Eradicate People Without Really Trying (Or Expecting It to Work). Perhaps Spader's Ultron subconsciously knows he's property of Disney, and this knowledge is the source of a mild, diluted-to-the-point-of-glibness "anger" at his creators, both on-screen and behind it. I agree.
B-
Nothing can stop the Ticketnaut!
Except this:
Ticketvenger,
Age of Out-tron!
Uh. I apologize. It's been a long week. Goodnight, you thirty-five thousand Ticketholders, you! Hopefully I can get back into the review swing of things now that one of my other creative streaks has decided to end.
Agent Carter continues Captain America's feel of old-world-meets-modern-tech-and-beyond, appealing to young and old audiences alike without becoming another attempt at capturing the cheese-factor of that era's cinema (although the included "Captain America" radio serial serves that purpose along the way).
The series stands alone, but also ties in with other MCU projects by bringing back Howard Stark and the Howling Commandos, and introducing Edwin Jarvis (as in Tony Stark's AI, J.A.R.V.I.S.), Anton Vanko (as in the father of Iron Man 2 villain, Ivan Vanko), and an early version of the Black Widow program.
It ends feeling both resolved and incomplete, but was enjoyable to watch.
A-
Through the course of the season, we also meet "the doctor," a.k.a. Mister Hyde, a.k.a. Cal Johnson, a.k.a. Skye's psychologically unstable father (played by Twin Peaks actor Kyle MacLachlan), who wants revenge on Whitehall (played by Franklin & Bash actor Reed Diamond) for killing Skye's mother and appropriating her immortality.
Rayna is back, continuing her agenda to uncover and exploit powered people. There's an alien artifact (yes, it's from the same source as Coulson's hypergraphia) that dusts almost everyone who touches it (except Raina, Cal, and Whitehall), and then throws S.H.I.E.L.D. and H.Y.D.R.A. into an arms race to find an ancient Kree temple with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. Whitehall and a couple of the dimensionless S.H.I.E.L.D. mercs end up dead, Skye and Raina get mutated, Cal goes crazier, Simmons goes on a "let's kill all the powered people" jag, and Mockingbird turns double agent for "the real S.H.I.E.L.D." I fully expected this to turn into a Skrull invasion plot at any given second.
In a slight deviation from Marvel canon, Skye (a.k.a. Daisy Johnson, codename: Quake in the comics) is made an Inhuman, as opposed to just being "powered" like she is in the comics. This, along with hints at a future Inhumans movie, could test Chloe Bennet (Skye), Dichen Lachman (Jiaying, Skye's mother--yes, she's alive again), Luke Mitchell (Lincoln, an electrokinetic Inhuman), Jamie Harris (Gordon, a blind, teleporting Inhuman), Ruth Negga (Raina, who is now basically an Inhuman porcupine who gets psychic visions), and others in their viability as big-screen personalities. There are still four years between now and the forthcoming Inhumans film, so they have plenty of time to up their acting game.
As I had first begun writing this two months ago, the season was not yet over. Baron Wolfgang von Strucker had yet to make an appearance, Simmons was still on her "if it made my life sad or complicated, let's kill it" jag, Coulson's S.H.I.E.L.D. was making amends with "the real S.H.I.E.L.D.", Cal still had an agenda, the Inhumans had an agenda, Ward was in the wind, Coulson and Maria Hill were speculating about powered twins in Russia, and Raina was ranting about metal men destroying the world.
For all its piecemeal ridiculousness, the second season of Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. still managed to hold my attention from one episode to the next. The season ultimately resolved itself in the not-so-ultimately unresolved fashion that we, in this age of serialized media, have come to grin and groan about on a regular basis. I, for one, could have done with less cardboard characterization and more puppy-dogs and rainbows, but to give one critic exactly what he wants would have been positively Inhuman.
B
Well, it was awesome and spectacular, and thus far it was the best sequel in the franchise. But perfect? Not really.
I'm not saying Age Of Ultron was a terrible movie. It wasn't. The opening fight scene with the core Avengers taking on H.Y.D.R.A. was full of creative choreography that put team lightweights like Hawkeye, Black Widow, and most prominently, Captain America, in the focus they deserve. In fact, any supervillain who watches battle footage of the Avengers and doesn't realize that Cap is the most skilled, versatile, and possibly the most necessary, member of the team is a fool who deserves to get hit in the face repeatedly with a star-spangled vibranium pizza tray.
The Hulkbuster vs. Hulk fight was a new, comedy-infused level of epic. Cameos by Falcon and War Machine were extremely welcome (although I could have done with more Falcon in the final battle). Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch were portrayed well, if not yet fully dimensionalized. And if you get me started on Paul Bettany as J.A.R.V.I.S./Vision, don't expect to be able to stop me. So, I'll stop myself at 4 words: Vision and Mjolnir...hilarious.
What didn't work, however, was Ultron.
I'll watch James Spader in anything. Except Boston Legal. And The Office. But those shows are over, so they don't matter, and I digress. He's brilliant in The Blacklist. I'd even listen to him read the phone book because I know he'd improvise random stories about his encounters with any and every name in it. He has more personality and charisma than any actor has a right to, and he uses it masterfully, But as Ultron, the titular villain in the second Avengers film, he actually seems to have too much personality.
For those who aren't familiar with the nature of Ultron, the beauty of his character--at least, in the comics--is that he is a self-aware artificial intelligence who seeks to erase humanity from the face of the Earth, all the while unaware that he is also self-programmed with a desire to be a superior kind of human and a self-loathing knowledge that he can never achieve that goal.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe incarnation, as (mistakenly) brought to life by Spader, makes superficial allusions to those aspects of his pen-and-paper predecessor, but Spader's performance boils the character off to no more than what it is: Spader pretending to be a robot. If that weren't bad enough, he serves as a Disney spokesmachine by quoting lyrics from Pinocchio like they're a self-help mantra he read in How to Clone Yourself and Eradicate People Without Really Trying (Or Expecting It to Work). Perhaps Spader's Ultron subconsciously knows he's property of Disney, and this knowledge is the source of a mild, diluted-to-the-point-of-glibness "anger" at his creators, both on-screen and behind it. I agree.
B-
Nothing can stop the Ticketnaut!
Except this:
Ticketvenger,
Age of Out-tron!
Uh. I apologize. It's been a long week. Goodnight, you thirty-five thousand Ticketholders, you! Hopefully I can get back into the review swing of things now that one of my other creative streaks has decided to end.
Comments
Post a Comment