The creepiest thing about Age of Ultron (spoilers)

iwantthatbelstaffanditsoccupant:

prettyarbitrary:

Okay, I’m sorry, my aim is not to trash this movie because even if it wasn’t great, it was fun. BUT. I have to get this off my chest, because it is that creepy.

You know the creepiest thing that Age of Ultron did? It’s not the misogynistic Black Widow stuff, or even the two previously Romani/Jewish characters getting whitewashed and signing up to voluntarily get experimented on by Nazis. (Although that…wow, that does reach a special place.)

No, it’s the part where the creative team sets up the whole movie with, “Let’s take a look at how non-privileged people actually hate the Avengers because they come crashing in, drop a house on your relatives, Tony pays for a building he wrecked like that’ll fix everything, and then they get adored in the international press for destroying your life while punching bad guys in the wreckage of your cities.”

And then the movie (and the kids who represent that storyline, whose horrific loss and suffering drove them to this extreme to get the plot rolling) drops it.

I mean. It’d be one thing if we saw a single person in this whole damn movie come away having learned a lesson. But there is no redemption arc here. There’s no sense that Tony’s learned from this or is even sorry (in fact, he and Bruce try to do the exact same thing again–that is the exact opposite of regret). There’s no sense that any of these characters–not our red-blooded hero Cap, or Nat who understands intimately what it’s like to be the person who’s suffering, or Thor who’s worthy of Mjolnir–have a desire to hold their own accountable, or that Wanda forgives in the end because she’s come to understand how her own anger fed into what happened, or even that perhaps, any of them has wisely looked deeper into the chain of culpability to realize how wrongs build on each other and that somewhere it all needs to end.

(Considering the fuss made about the virtue required to wield Mjolnir, that’s pretty ironic.)

Take your pick whether that is superlatively awful on storytelling grounds or political ones, but one way or the other, this movie went horrifyingly wrong.

“even the two previously Romani/Jewish characters getting whitewashed and signing up to voluntarily get experimented on by Nazis. (Although that…wow, that does reach a special place.)”
Yeah. Yeah, that. I missed that little bit, and still had more than enough to be unhappy about. It took me a bit to realize these were Magneto’s kids. Or are they? See, I am so confused. If they are, in fact, Maximoffs anymore. I adore Magneto. This was, rather painful. And yeah, symbolism, that Stark bomb is gonna explode in Civil War, and Cap is worthy and Tony isn’t. I see what’s coming here. But now we have this mess where everyone wants in Natasha’s pants and she’s sad because all she ever really wanted was to be a mommy. If I was a spy on missions being sterile would be a fucking blessing. Oh, and the dinner party where they talk about who has the better invisible trophy girlfriend who isn’t there. You know who should have had the worst most messed up Scarlett Witch hallucinations? Banner. Because Banner is so messed up he created a split personality. Did we see it? No. We saw him get to do his loner thing with a pining Black Widow. Just. Weird choices. Still watchable.

And I must have liked it or else I wouldn’t be so goddamned picky. But. This is like when Joss had Angel turn evil right after sex. It’s right and wrong at the same time.

Well, the thing is that there was so much potential there. Really obvious potential, because Whedon’s a good enough storyteller to have his ducks in a row when it comes to laying out the plot threads he wants to follow. And we do have them all lined up. We’ve got:

Tony basically manifesting his own doubts, control issues and self-hatred into a metal Frankenstein’s monster

Bruce staggering through the shadowed valley of love and self-trust, wondering if he can be trusted with the family he’s found

Nat tentatively opening her heart to test out whether she can be human after all, as she finds a man who is, in some ways, a mirror of her own fears about herself

Steve trying to figure out where he belongs in the world

a bunch of damaged lone wolves who got lucky once and are now doing the hard work to try to become a real team (and, apparently, failing, at least for now)

Two kids willing to sell their souls for power – and we don’t even know why: for revenge? for justice? to protect their people from ‘superheroes’ whom they see as monsters?

the question of superheroes in general: what right do they have? where is the line? how do you hold them accountable, and who are they accountable to? – no, this isn’t just a rehash of the Iron Man plotline, but it’s not a coincidence it focuses on Tony, because he’s a poster boy for unaccountable power. He was, in a way, a superhero before superheroes even existed, wielding the power of a small nation and, by and large, able to do whatever he liked with it and mostly blind to the amount of suffering it caused

and a mirror to all of them: an AI so damaged that he seriously believes that he wants to help people, when he’s so angry and in so much pain that underneath what he really wants is to destroy everything

I’m pretty sure that’s not even a comprehensive list. And I mean, those are FUCKING AMAZING plot threads. Any single one of them would be enough to carry a movie.

So like…we get that far, and then it all falls apart. We get a dose of Hollywood racism with the Maximoffs–yeah, the twins are the Maximoffs. Are they Magneto’s children in the MCU? I dunno, I’m not sure whether Marvel’s got the ability (or the desire) to throw him into this mix. To be fair, I think we need to remember that we’re only assuming they’re NOT still POC. I mean they look white (and their actors are…) but outside the US, skin color isn’t the only deciding factor, and you have a heck of an ethnic cocktail kicking around the eastern European nations. (On the other hand, it’s Hollywood, so yeah, probably white.)

And then Nat and the sexist stereotypes. Admittedly, while the line was jackass, I read it as a poorly worded attempt to get at a different concept: that Nat doesn’t feel like a human being. She doesn’t feel like a monster because she can’t have kids. She feels like a monster because she’s been denied the ability or right to forge almost any human connection in her life. She feels like a monster because, in the cold absence of any expression of love, she was taught to kill like a machine, and she’s still learning the courage to care on that fragile human level and make choices that AREN’T based on pragmatic ruthlessness.

But again, that is indicative of a problem laced throughout the movie, and pertaining to all characters, not just sexist stereotypes. After we got the plot threads laid out, the movie got so loaded down with stuff that they didn’t have time to do development so they just turned everybody into stereotypes as shortcuts. I mean the guys actually became stereotypes of themselves, with “language!” and “mad scientists” and 99% of Thor being the hammer. Nat, being a woman, got to become a stereotype of a woman. (And even then, she got more development than almost anybody else in the movie.)

They just…basically lost it partway through. But you can still see the bones of it. It’s clear what they were TRYING to do, and what they were trying to do is rock-awesome.

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