Review: The Avengers: Age of Ultron

While cleaning up a Hydra cell, the Scarlet Witch, a totally-not-mutant-you-heard-that-20th-Century-Fox? who can do pretty much whatever the script requires her to, puts some bad dreams in Tony Stark (a.k.a. Iron Man)'s head.  So he and Bruce Banner (Hulk's non-green alter ego) decide to use the magic thingy out of Loki's staff to create an A.I., Ultron, that will defend the earth from alien attack, achieving, as Tony puts it, 'peace in our time.'

Now, had Steve Rodgers (Captain America) come into the room at that very moment, this would have been a much shorter film.  Anyway, Tony's project has a similar effect to Neville Chamberland's surrender of the Sudetenland:  aided by his sidekicks Scarlet Witch and her twin brother, Quicksilver, who, despite having the exact same name and ablilities, is totally not the same one from the X-Men, Ultron sets about bringing down his creator and destroying humanity, all the while evolving himself into his ultimate form.  Only the Avengers can bring Ultron down, but that's not an easy task, as they're at odds and on the run (thanks to Hulk's uncontrolled smashing).

Now, I've seen people whinging on social media about how Age of Ultron wasn't as fun as the first Avengers movie, and yes, I would have to agree in a way.  But what Ultron lacks in playfulness, it make up for in maturity, not unlike The Emperor Strikes Back or The Godfather Part II.  Ultron is a lot darker, but also a lot deeper.  In creating Ultron, Tony plays God not unlike another well-known fictional scientist, and, like Dr Frankenstein, his creation also turns on him.  Meanwhile, Bruce's Jekyll-and-Hyde-like dualism is further explored, as, on the one hand, his relationship with Natasha (Black Widdow) makes him more human, but, on the other, he finds it increasingly difficult to come back from his Hulk state.  Futhermore, Ultron rectifies the first film's under-use of Hawkeye in allowing us a greater look into Clint Barton's private life. 

Age of Ultron provides some great cameo moments, bringing in characters from the Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor franchises, plus S.H.I.E.L.D. favourites like Nick Fury and Maria Hill.  But where were Pepper and Jane?  And it didn't seem like Cap and Thor were given very much to do (perhaps understandable, as they've got their own movies coming up).  Anyway, there were some nice character moments showing just how much the Avengers have bonded as a team, including a great sequence when they all try to lift Thor's hammer, which is brilliantly funny with an even better payoff later in the film. 

I just wish Marvel would realise that there are other ways to end a film other than destroying a city.

Future Me: I really have to learn not to review movies the minute I get back from seeing them. On rewatch, it's not as great as I was talking it up here, but it's not awful, either. 

Review: X-Men: Days of Future Past

 It's about 10 years in the future, and evil robots are killing both mutant and human alike.  So Wolverine gets sent back to the 70s to try to stop Mystique from killing the robots' inventor, Tyrion Lannister, because a) this causes the humans to fear mutants even more, and b) she gets captured, experimented on and her DNA used to make the robots invincible.  There's a catch, though:  to get to Mystique, Wolverine has to get Professor X and Magneto talking to each other again.  This is far from an easy task, as not only is the enmity between them strongest, but Magneto's in a high-security metal-free cell beneath the Pentagon for his involvment in the Kennedy assassination, and Xavier has forsaken his powers because 'Nam's such a bummer, man.

Like all the X-Men movies, Days of Future Past delivers highly engaging action sequences and loads of laughs, especially since time travel creates situations where we can laugh at people in the past's lack of knowledge of things to come.  (My favorite--Beast's monitoring system for 'all three networks--and PBS!')  And it was great to see so many of the characters we haven't seen since the last proper X-Men movie--Kitty Pride, Storm, Iceman, and the older Xavier and Magneto, and a few cameos that were awesome but way too spoilery to mention here.  It was a bit of a shame that some of less familiar mutants introduced in First Class were missing--they got drafted or worse--but at least we got to meet Quicksilver as a teenager straight out of That 70s Show. The sequence where he helps break Magento out of jail is brilliant.

The highlight of the film, though is young Xavier's struggle to become the man we all know he'll be.  Massively depressed due to the closing of the school (students and teachers alike were being drafted in too great numbers), feeling betrayed by Mystique and Magneto, and unable to use his powers due to the cure for his paralysis, Xavier seems to have turned into a drunken selfish dickbag.  But we come to realise that what he really has to overcome is fear--fear of all the pain and suffering his powers expose him to.  There is a wonderfully heartwarming moment when young Charles meets older Professor X.  The only way the scene could have been better would be had Professor X told him to 'make it so.'

One thing that annoyed me about the Days of Future Past is what also bothered me about Wolverine:  Origins and First Class:  the massive slightly implausible battle at the end.  Now, all the X-Men movies have one, but in the past setting, they seem even harder to swallow.  It's a big leap of faith to believe mutants caused the Three Mile Island disaster or were involved in the Cuban Missle Crisis.  This time, it's even more bizarre, involving a baseball stadium and the White House.

The other thing I thought could be better was more time with young Xavier and Magneto working together.  X-Men 2 is still my favorite because I love it when they have to team up.  After the break-out, I was hoping to see this, but their time working as a team is shortlived, though, and soon Magneto is back to doing Magneto things.

Other than that, X-Men:  Days of Future Past is 2+ hours (was it really that long?) of solid entertainment.  And it's got pretty exciting prospects for the future of the X-Men franchise.  Without saying too much, the end basically reboots the entire universe.  Which means two things.  First of all, with no future continuity to worry about, we can see more of the retro origin story type films.  Second, with things changed, it means there's a whole new set of present X-Men stories to explore, especially given the reappearance at the very end of some much loved characters.

Imagine if The Last Stand never happened.  Beautiful.

Graphic Novels and the Tradition of Quality

As an aspiring comic book writer, I often browse the graphic novel section of book stores. In the last five or so years, as interest in graphic novels has increased, these sections have increased from one case at the end of the science fiction row to whole walls or more. Now for those of you still wondering, the difference between a graphic novel and a comic book is merely that, instead of being printed on glossy magazine paper, the former is printed on regular paper and bound like a paperback book. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I first heard the term “graphic novel” I pictured a whole book where the story was told in images. There are a few graphic novels out there that have originally appeared in this format, but most of them have first been published as comic books, then later bound in this way once the story is finished. Think of it as closer in format to the Victorian "Novel in Three Volumes" rather than the modern novel. To add to your confusion, the trade editions of comic books—when story arcs or a set number of a continuing comics series are bound and published—are usually displayed in book stores and some comic shops in the graphic novel section.

Of course, “graphic novel” holds another connotation as well. A comic book, well, that’s something you read as a kid. They had superheroes and monsters and generally contained nothing for the intellectual pallet of an adult. A graphic novel, now, that’s sophisticated. It’s Fitzgerald with pictures. In a society which dismisses popular culture as a lower form, graphic storytelling as such can be considered an art. In short, the term “graphic novel” is pretentious.

I’m not entirely against a little pretension now and again. Heck, why not push the boundaries of the visual narrative to see what it can do? There’s nothing wrong with getting a little arty and experimental in any medium. But why must we sacrifice the comic book to do so? We don’t call Agatha Christie’s novels something else just because they’re not as complex as Henry James. So why should comic books’ appeal to a popular audience keep them from being considered art?

Here’s something else: read the titles of any graphic novel section, and you will see a lot of familiar names. Discounting the superhero comics for now—we all know Superman and the X-Men—and you’ll see that a lot of TV shows and movie franchises, from Star Wars to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, use comic books to continue their adventures. This is nothing new—it dates back at least to the first Doctor Who comics of the 1960s if not before—and has done a lot to increase their fan bases and maintain interest in the original product. But keep looking, and you’ll find a lot of titles that are adaptation of novels, movies, and--yes--even a Neil Young album.

I’m not sure if this is a good or a bad thing. A large part of me suspect that this is just publishers’ attempts to cash in on the latest craze, hoping that, for example, people who love Neil Gaiman will buy the graphic novel version of Neverwhere, never mind that he’s a great comics writer and yet didn’t do the adaptation himself. But, I suppose, as is often said of movie versions of things, that people who would not otherwise read the book or see the movie might change their minds once they’ve read the graphic novel. I would like to believe this is true, though I’ve never come across a study that suggests it is so. I do, however, think that people who might otherwise not read comic books because of the assumption that they are for kids and middle-aged men who still live with their mothers would be attracted to graphic novels if they saw a title like Pride and Prejudice on the shelf.

And that’s troubling. In the 1950s, François Truffaut criticized contemporary French cinema for relying on a “tradition of quality.” No, he didn’t think that films should be badly made, rather that they were too reliant on the already proven art of literary texts to legitimize themselves. For Truffaut, these literary adaptations were trying too hard to be novels instead of being films. And this is what worries me about trying to make the graphic novel version of everything. In trying to lure readers into accepting the graphic novel as a legitimate art form by trying to convince them that they’re just like the novels or movies, we run the risk of losing what makes a comic book a comic book.