Thread by @xenocryptsite

Rewatching "Age Of Ultron" and it's amazing how you can tell what a messy production it was from like literally the first few shots.

The action is good but it's like "we open...somewhere, on our heroes fighting...whoever".

And if I was playing a drinking game of "spot the likely ADR banter" I'd be dead. It's two minutes in.

Ah fan favorite Avengers Tower...which will be a location for...half of this movie and nothing else...

Still nothing is more comic-book-y than constantly announcing your team lineups and home bases but never quite having them do anything.

I do like the extended bit of "downtime" at Avengers Tower after the opening sequence. That sort of thing really is the bread-and-butter of actual superhero comics but you really don't see it much in the movies etc.

Queen of thankless parts in ill-fated second movies.

I only got like 20 minutes in so I may as well try again.

My immediate reaction was to think of the AI Brain Holograms as silly, but I read about how much work went into them and I appreciate them more now. We should all Normalize Reading Visual Effects Trade Publications, IMO.
fxguide.com/fxfeatured/cas…

Scarlett Johansson is real good in this part, especially since every movie is some other random character zigzag someone else decided at the last minute.

I have to say, one thing I do think Whedon does well is "action scenes as characterization". The fight starts, everyone does different things, things that fit their personalities and abilities etc...

It is also very noticeable that Ultron is not quite "onscreen" with anyone else in the first action scene and they don't really react to anything specific he says. (Poor James Spader, I wonder how many takes he had to do in between scenes of "The Blacklist".)

To be fair you could probably wake James Spader up in the middle of the night and throw a script at him and he could "debonair-but-sinister-but-a-little-unhinged" it.

Wanda and Pietro do not react very strongly to a giant CGI robot who sounds and acts exactly like NBC's own Raymond "Red" Reddington. I do wonder how much the actors even know what they'd be acting off of later.

It's funny, I saw "Romancing The Stone", thought it was a very cohesive movie--turns out a lot of the elements I thought made it that way were reshoots or last-minute changes. Like someone remembered the goal of a messy production is to have it NOT look like a messy production.

Tony and Steve immediately knowing that "Wakanda" means vibranium, which Tony calls "trade goods", I do wonder when "Black Panther" decided to go with the secret-city version.

Oddly the Ultron/Andy Serkis scene is one of the first that seems like Ultron's in the same room as anyone else...but, well, Andy Serkis would know how the other side of the mocap suit feels, wouldn't he...

Remember when Black Widow's ballet school flashback had a prominent spot in the "Age Of Ultron" trailers? First rule of editing, kids--dancing looks cool, so, whenever you can cut in dancing, you cut in some dancing.

(Also, remember when "Red Sparrow" just said "hell with it let's just have our own cynical ex-ballerina Russian spy".)

I liked "Red Sparrow" decently, and moreover, I wish to hell it had done well enough to give us a movie for the third book:

You know, this isn't as bad as I--wait there's an hour and a half left? Doing what?

Again, Scarlett Johansson is really good at selling this random Hulk romance thing with as much character depth as she possibly could...like the difference between these lines on paper and how they're read...

I know she's uh controversial, and has a flat affect in a lot of parts so it might not seem like she's doing much, but she really is.

Meanwhile Elizabeth Olsen has to sell the equally-unmotivated "someday I'll bang that robot".

Ok, I...still did not finish last night, I was working on my article, so...