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Friday, May 8, 2015

I haven't seen age of Age of Ultron, but since it's being talked about so much . . . the title has been bugging me for a while

Ever since I've heard the name I've been confused.  The space age is the shortest age I know of.  It lasted a decade.  Most ages are much longer.  Most ages are generations.

"Age of Apocalypse" makes sense.  Time travel was involved so that this new situation had been around for decades.  (Two of them.)  It's short, as ages go, but it lasts for a standard mathematical generation (twenty years) so it can be considered an age.

Ever since I've heard the name I've been confused, how can Ultron have an age in a single movie?  The movie isn't going to follow the six generations of Avengers who formed the backbone of the resistance for all those years.  The movie isn't going to end with everyone aged up by a decade.

I'm betting that it doesn't even have Ultron ruling earth for a single year (though I could be wrong on that point.)

The only explanation I've ever heard offered is that maybe there's great dispute over how old Ultron is.  Has he reached the age of consent?  Can he be tried as an adult?  Did we miss his birthday?

9 comments:

  1. Perhaps the idea is that it's a game-changer that we now live in an age where "things like Ultron" are possible? Given the whole "Civil War" think they're going to do, I could easily see someone in the next film saying something hammy like "Ultron changed everything: we are justified in taking these extraordinary oppressive measures now that we live in an Age Of Ultron"

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  2. ...then everything changed when the AI attacked...

    Your explanation makes some sense. And it will probably not be significantly less apt than The Winter Soldier.

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    1. Have we previously considered the possibility that the original title was Captain America: The Winter Soldier Is Barely In This Movie but they hit the character limit five words in?

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    2. Works for me. Like, Marvel movies lately always have too much plot, some of it crappy... but, could they not find anything more generally applicable? They suck at titles lately.

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    3. whaaattt you can never have too much plot, whatchutalkingabout.

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    4. I need to do a series of posts on the movies I've seen over the past year with too much plot. Don't get me wrong, the opposite is bad too. I remember sitting through an excruciatingly slow pilot episode to a series (the premise was interesting, but really wasn't worth it) and realizing that in the end there was about two minutes worth of plot in the entire episode. It was horrible.

      But too much plot means that everything's superficial because there is time for nothing.

      Consider just the Captain America: The Winter Soldier, you could make a full movie out of any of these things:
      --The Winter Soldier has shown up.
      --Shield has gone way too far and now is a bigger threat to freedom than those the oppose.
      --An attempted anti-Nick Fury coup
      --Hydra still exists
      --A human consciousness preserved from the 1970s is manipulating people in vaguely Nazi-like ways.
      --People with the technological prowess to recreate a human brain on computer in in the 1970s have now, with technology 40 years more advanced than that, put their skills and technology to work on creating an AI with access to the internet at large, an entire intelligence agency, presumably impressive ways to hack everything else, and so forth and given said AI the authority to decide who lives and dies.
      --Shield is at war with itself.

      The second to last one really ought to take up more than a single movie. It would be a good premise for a years long series (but one with a plan so that things did actually progress toward an eventual end.) The other six could each, easily, fill out a movie.

      Try to cram all seven into the space of the movie and you end up dealing with none of them nearly as well as they deserve.

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  3. Yes, exactly, Chris is saying what I meant.

    Though I think chiefly of Thor 2, where a good movie with lots of good plot and character spends way too much time on an antagonist with no personality and no real motivation and raises the stakes to an absurd level for absolutely no reason.

    A lot of action movies lately have this problem, and Winter Soldier was also a glaring example. Also, if they were going to cramp that much shite in a movie they could have spread it out and made a #$%@&*! Black Widow movie.

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    1. In spite of having much wonderfulness, Thor 2 is so bad on this front that there's a point where it seriously feels like they're just checking things off as fast as they can.

      Even more than in the plot it comes up in the characters, there are several characters who show up in the movie where it's:
      Be told to do something off screen, threaten Loki, good, we've satisfied the desire to have that character in the movie, who's next?

      Most of them right in a row where you get the impression that the sequence only too places so that they could say they didn't leave the characters out of the movie.

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