So after watching it, sleeping on it, and reading a few other opinions, I think I’m about ready to give my first viewing review. Avengers: Age of Ultron is… good. It’s just not as good as the first movie. And on the Internet, where everything is either the worst thing ever or the best thing ever–remember that time Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield photobombed someone taking a selfie with them in it and, in lieu of actual news, every website did a story about THE PERFECT PHOTOBOMB?–that of course means that the Avengers, Marvel, Joss Whedon, and the material of celluloid itself are now lower than Hitler. And they also all hate women. Naturally.

Anyway, I try to be a little more thoughtful than that and grade on a spectrum. I can say, for instance, that Spider-Man 3 is uneven and misguided, while the Amazing Spider-Mans are full-on dreck. There are shades of gray, even if perceiving them means we need to take more than three seconds and a picture of a cat. But let’s delve in then, shall we?

The biggest problem for me, and somewhat emblematic of the movie’s (I can admit it) problems is that the action scenes aren’t as good as the first time around. Remember the scene in The Avengers where the camera flew around Manhattan, showing what all the Avengers were doing, climaxing in a great gag of the Hulk punching Thor for no reason? Here, there are maybe seven sequences like that, where we’re seeing Black Widow on a jeep with Hawkeye while Captain America is on a motorcycle and Iron Man is flying above them and they’re all zapping Germans, and I’m sure it took a great deal more planning and choreography and CGI than the first movie did, it’s much more elaborate and even impressive in a way, and it does capture the big SPLASH PAGE of a good comic book–but it’s also not as exciting when we can’t really follow what’s going on? Everything’s happening so fast, it’s at night or in a darkened building, there are five people to keep track of at once. It’d be cool once in a while to show how crazy things are, but having it be the default mode is just overwhelming and wearying. When the movie calms down or splits the team up and is like “Black Widow is doing THIS to save Iron Man from THIS but she can’t do it without Hawkeye doing THIS and the Hulk has been out of action for a while but it wouldn’t be too much of a cheat if he showed up just in time to do THIS,” you know, the Furious 7 kinda action sequence, then it’s fun. When it’s ‘look how much of a CGI budget we have!’, I’m no elitist, but it’s hard not to check out.

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Tony’s “yay” when he finds that secret door was exactly what I needed in my life.

okay so just to preface, this is probably going to be like two thousand words of various iterations of ‘??????’ that can be summed up with this picture:

so if you’re still going to click the read more, you’ve been warned.

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like, watch me be extra salty about this

you can rationalize that monster scene all you want - and you might even make a very compelling argument. but the thing people take issue with isn’t with NATASHA for saying that she’s a monster (which is an understandable reaction to trauma like that) but with WHEDON for writing that line the way he did, without bruce even saying a throwaway ‘you’re not a monster’, for equating being forcibly violated by other people resulting in an inability to breed with killing thousands of people and saying, essentially, that because she couldn’t have children that means she cares less about killing people in the field, as if a woman’s empathy is intrinsically tied with her fertility 

but ultimately people are pissed that he took what should have been a backstory that STOOD ON ITS OWN and used it to have her prop up bruce’s storyline and saying some elopement bullshit, it’s an external critique of the AUTHOR not an internal critique of the narrative what the hell part of this is hard to get

also its incredibly ridiculous that they’d make her kill someone but the graduation ceremony is sterilization. like can you imagine if hydra’s most evil deed was to give bucky a vasectomy like who are you even kidding