"The Last Jedi" Rant 1: Why Do People Care About Snoke?

This post is about Star Wars: The Last Jedi. If you haven't seen it or don't care, don't blame me for not understanding what I'm talking about. I couldn't be bothered explaining it in detail.

Seriously, why does anyone care about the backstory of Supreme Leader Snoke? A common complaint I've seen about "The Last Jedi" is that Snoke, the leader of the evil First Order, who supposedly seduced Kylo Ren to the Dark Side, was killed off (by Kylo) in this film with no explanation of his origins. People seem to have wanted to know how he came to be such a powerful force user and how he came to take control of the First Order.

Now, I'm not going to make the argument other people have been making: "Well, we didn't know anything about the Emperor!" That doesn't work because we can assume that an evil Empire is ruled by an evil dude who goes by the name of "The Emperor". With something like "The First Order", which emerged from said Empire, I suppose it's natural to wonder about the origins of its "Supreme Leader". Simply by watching The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, here's what we know about Snoke:

1. He runs the First Order as its Supreme Leader.

2. He's an alien (apparently).

3. He's fairly strong with the Dark Side: he can use force lightning and mess around with people over long distances, and what not.

4. He seduced Kylo Ren to the Dark Side, seemingly telepathically: it doesn't seem like he turned Ben Solo's mind in person, but rather whispered to him from afar. Admittedly, I'm interpreting that a bit.

5. He's dead now.

Note that I'm not including anything stated in any supplementary text, like the novelisation of The Force Awakens or one of the Visual Dictionary books or whatever.

So I have two questions.

1. Did we need any more information than that?

People seem to be asking, "If he's so powerful, where was he during the Empire?" Not around, I suppose. The galaxy's a big place. Presumably after the Empire fell he showed up and established control over the remnants, and their descendants, either seizing power over the already-forming First Order, or taking it upon himself to found the First Order. Around the same time he began luring Ben Solo to the Dark Side. What else do we need to know? Again, the galaxy's a big place. Maybe when Palpatine fell he saw his opportunity to rise. Palpatine's rise from Senator to Emperor in the Prequels took all of fifteen years. The thirty years between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens is plenty of time for Snoke to show up and take over. Again, any statements not made in the script of the film about how powerful he is, how old he is or what he was aware of aren't important.

2. Why would any of the characters be interested in it?

As Rian Johnson pointed out, Snoke's backstory isn't relevant to the characters. It may be relevant to the interests of some fans, but it's not relevant to Rey's story, and ultimately it isn't even that relevant to Kylo's beyond the fact that Snoke seduced him to the Dark Side.

This leads to a couple of points.

1. Snoke is a plot device. His characterisation isn't important.

So far, the Sequel Trilogy has had a number of major protagonists: Rey, Finn, Poe, Han, Luke and Leia. It has a major antagonist: Kylo Ren. It also has a number of supporting characters: BB-8, Chewbacca, C-3PO, R2-D2, Rose, Holdo, General Hux and Snoke. Snoke is Kylo Ren's supporting antagonist. He's not really a main character in his own right. This is normal in fiction.

Snoke should be compared to the character of Professor Moriarty. Putting aside years of adaptations which have ludicrously overinflated the character's importance, Professor Moriarty isn't really a character at all. He's a plot device invented by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to kill off Sherlock Holmes. In "The Adventure of the Final Problem", Holmes reveals that he has been working against Moriarty, a master criminal, for a long time, but Watson has never even heard of him. A few days later, Moriarty and Holmes fall to their deaths. He's fiction's first supervillain, arguably, but he's really just a plot device intended to affect a more important character's story.

Snoke only exists as a plot device to serve Kylo Ren's character development. He provides an explanation for how Kylo fell to the Dark Side: Snoke seduced him. He also now provides an explanation for how Kylo became Supreme Leader: Snoke was killed by Kylo, who took his place. Snoke doesn't need some kind of "arc"; he doesn't need elaborate character development. He's an archetype which was created to serve the characterisation of the real antagonist, Kylo Ren.

I will concede one point here, however: the character of Snoke should never have been created. He's a lazy piece of shorthand to facilitate Kylo Ren being where he is, and a more creative explanation for their place on the Dark Side would have made Kylo Ren and the First Order more interesting in The Force Awakens. I never liked the character of Snoke because he seemed like a rehash of Palpatine. This is why I'm glad he was killed off in The Last Jedi, because he's a piece of lazy storytelling and the Sequels are better off without him. This leads me to my second point on Snoke:

2. Snoke doesn't deserve a backstory. He's a crap character.

As I just said, Snoke's entire existence is due to narrative laziness. He should never have been written in the first place, so it's best to minimise how much he dominates the script. He's not "cool" or "badass". People seem to think he is, but I feel like the people with that attitude are often modern-style nerds who have had their imaginations so warped by games that they can only appreciate characters in terms of their "power levels" rather than their characterisation or role in a story. He's just a generic villain presented through impressive but unambitious motion capture. He's a boring video game villain and the Sequels are better off without him from now on.

I'm sure if you genuinely care about Snoke, some shite novel will be written in a year or two explaining his bland and uninteresting rise to power.

"Star Wars: The Force Awakens"

The Force sleeps through its alarm for thirty years.

Holy shit, Star Wars is back! By my own admission, I'm hardly the world's biggest Star Wars fan. At the same time, I may have more affection for them than some. When I heard that Disney was continuing the film franchise with a sequel trilogy, I was pretty sceptical, but now the film's out and I've seen it twice. Is it any good? "From a certain point of view", perhaps, but not entirely from mine. The Force Awakens is not a bad film and it has a number of strong elements, but it's very flawed and rather disappointing. To sum up the positives, I'd say that the performances are pretty strong, there were some good casting decisions and effective characterisations, some of the design choices and uses of practical effects paid off well and it gets one thinking about Star Wars again. On the other hand, as I stated in my first impressions post, the plot is very derivative and elements of it are extremely predictable, there is some unnecessary CGI, the storytelling and world building are often weak and the pacing is inconsistent. Overall, The Force Awakens feels like a lavishly produced fan-film: on the one hand it follows that arguably desirable fannish impulse of "let's avoid what we disliked from the instalments we like less" (ie the Prequels in particular) while also indulging a fannish impulse of "let's do what's already been done but bigger and more quickly."

Why do all mysterious sci fi people do this pose?

The use of the standard opening title and crawl is all well and good, although I think the information conveyed is a little thin on the ground. Luke's disappeared and both a Leia-led Resistance and an evil First Order are trying to find him. There isn't much else about what happened between Return of the Jedi and here. Everyone's looking for Luke and some guy's been sent to the planet Jakku for information on him. That being said, and I know it's a soft option to bash the Prequels, but few opening crawls could be worse than one that begins with "War!" and has a first paragraph including the absurdly juvenile sentences "There are heroes on both sides. Evil is everywhere." Anyway, Star Destroyers are present and a bunch of mannequins in Storm Trooper armour are shuddering inside transport vehicles headed for the planet. Down below is a humble village where Max von Sydow gives a data chip or something to ace pilot hotshot Poe Dameron and his highly marketable 'droid, BB-8. He's about to hit the highway in his distinctive X-Wing Fighter™ when the First Order transports land and a bunch of Stormtroopers all charge out with blasters, blazing the ever-loving shit out of the townspeople. I get that maybe the First Order are meant to be just more extreme and unnecessarily violent than the Empire (although tell that to Governor Tarkin), but I was confused here: are the villagers resisting, or are the First Order blowing everything up and causing mayhem just for shits and giggles at this point? Having gone to all the trouble of doing up his seatbelt and everything Poe returns to battle, only to be caught when a mysterious new dark-berobed red lightsaber wielding chappie with a modulated voice arrives. Max von Sydow delivers some sterling words hoping to convince viewers that this new baddie is Luke before being promptly killed. Poe, by contrast, is captured. Once again, I'm not one hundred per cent sure why they bother capturing Poe alive, especially when black robe man orders the Stormtroopers to massacre the locals. The only one to not join in is some blood-spattered guy whose buddy was smoked by Poe, who turns his neutral Stormtrooper helmet expression into a sad frown.

The planet Notooine.

The First Order pisses off while BB-8 has escaped due to his modern ability to move more quickly than the old fashioned R2-D2 prop could. We're now introduce to Rey, who hangs out in crashed Star Destroyers nicking stuff and going for sand dune toboggan rides, before riding into town on a giant floating ice cream. She turns her loot in for packets of dehydrated muffin from giant alien Simon Pegg and lives in an AT-AT, amusing herself as young people do by sitting on the sand with a big heavy space helmet on her head. Then she rescues BB-8 from some alien bloke riding a really slow-moving robot dinosaur thing, and I feel really sorry for Daisy Ridley having to speak the ridiculous alien language she has to shout with in this scene, much like I feel sorry for any actor in these things who has to say the word "Jedi" or talk about the Force. Rey's motivation is that her family ditched her on the planet years ago and she's waiting for them to come pick her up, like a kid abandoned in the endless post-soccer practice pick-up wait of the soul. Rey's a well-realised character in a situation to which viewers can relate: she lives a mundane existence living hand-to-mouth, making do with what little she has and clinging to a nebulous hope that things will be better in the future. Naturally she's the right person for BB-8 to cling on to as they're similarly lost and definitely not just because Rey is a human who speaks English.

Helmets clearly aren't ventilated.

Upstairs on the Star Destroyer, Poe is dragged off for torments most foul, succumbing to the sheer mind-bending terror of Darth Vader-substitute Kylo Ren extending his hand in front of his face. Maybe it's the sight of Ren's rather undesigned hat store style gloves. After spilling the beans that the map to Luke McSkywalker is in a droid down on the planet they leave him be, just in time for our reluctant Stormtrooper of earlier to come to the rescue. He's earlier identified as FN-2187 after he's reprimanded by his superior, Captain Phasma, who, as a Stormtrooper in silver armour with a cape, is essentially an action figure come to life and clearly a minor character intended for kids and fanboys to latch onto. FN-2187's had a crisis of faith and sneaks Poe out to a TIE Fighter so they can escape, but it's absurdly tethered to the inside of the hangar. This was a bit of a stretch to me. That'd be like if a plane tried to take off from an aircraft carrier in a modern navy but it couldn't because all planes were by default tied to the deck with a piece of rope. Also note that while FN-2187 won't massacre the inhabitants of the village, he's perfectly prepared to blow four shades of shit out of all his erstwhile Stormtrooper chums in the hangar. Nonetheless Poe and FN-2187, or "Finn" as he is shortly renamed as being, have a good rapport which is established both quickly and well and the scene of them escaping from the Star Destroyer is a good one. That being said, the Star Destroyer's missile launchers don't seem very "Star Wars" to me. They reminded me too much of the stupid "bigger phasers" that the oversized bad guy's version of the Enterprise had in Star Trek Into Darkness.

Fly, yes.

So the ship crashes and apparently Poe's bitten the literal dust so Finn nicks his jacket and stumbles off into the wastes, and despite the endless desert stretching in all directions he happens to arrive at the settlement where Rey comes to trade for her instant muffins. Simon Pegg's after BB-8 but she's having none of it. Finn sups from a big space hippo's watering hole and tries to come to Rey's rescue when shady characters attempt to abscond with BB-8, but she can hold her own thankyerverymuch. BB-8 points him out and she whacks him with a big stick. To save his arse Finn pretends to be a member of the alleged "Resistance" fighting the First Order who needs to deliver BB-8 to headquarters. Then, of course, the First Order immediately show up with Stormtroopers and TIE Fighters galore and start blowing everything to smithereens, forcing Rey and Finn to seek transport in none other than the abandoned Millennium Falcon. Wahey. Rey flips a bunch of switches to make it fly, Finn sits in the baby seat from the original film to blow up some enemy ships and they go into an extended and honestly somewhat overlong chase sequence in which they outfight and outsmart some dastardly First Order types. Saying "Imperials" was easier. The First Order needed a better name. What's so "First" about them? I think they should have had some grandiose name for themselves (or possibly still refer to themselves as "the Empire") and a different, pejorative name used by the Resistance and people who didn't like them. I don't know, the big armies of Stormtroopers and fleets of ships and what not made sense for a huge organised society like the Empire and the latter days of the Republic before it but it seems a bit unbelievable here for what seems to be more like a really elaborate paramilitary organisation. There's no sense that the First Order runs anything or controls any locations other than the one planet. As other reviewers have pointed out, this is a failing of this film: because the filmmakers are so terrified of reflecting the "boring politics" of the Prequels, they completely ignore any substantial world-building, such that the First Order is simultaneously this immense force against which "the Resistance" is appropriately named, and is a fringe organisation rebelling against the legitimate authority of the established Republic.

Make Indy 5 before it's too late!

Nonetheless, everything up until Rey, Finn and BB-8 escape from Jakku feels more or less like "Star Wars", albeit a little contrived and unnecessarily redesigned in some respects. For instance, I don't mind the redesigned Stormtrooper armour particularly, but I'm not fond of the reworked look of the TIE Fighters and other ships. In any event, I'm more or less on board, even though at times this feels more like pastiche than "real" Star Wars in terms of the design particularly, as if they've gone "Let's make things look the way Lucasfilm did previously, but moreso." Then the Millennium Falcon is captured by some other ship and it's piloted by none other than Han Solo and Chewbacca. While their entrance is rather heavy-handed, it's treated unironically enough, especially Chewie. A more insecure and self-loathing production, like modern Doctor Who, wouldn't treat the characters this way. While this film uses Chewie's reactions a little too often as a source of comic relief in my view, at the same time there's no sense that they're embarrassed by or ashamed of using a character from the 70s who's a big brown hairy guy who talks by making moaning noises. Han cracks out some exposition about Luke disappearing after one of his Jedi trainees turned on him, obviously Kylo Ren. Harrison Ford really just feels like Harrison Ford here. He's a fine actor who owns the screen, but I'm not seeing Han Solo, just Harrison Ford, perhaps because we've far more recently seen him as Indiana Jones than as Han Solo. In any event, Han appears to have regressed: he's gone back to being a smuggler who spends his time truckin' across the galaxy with Chewie making dodgy deals. There's a narrative explanation for this, but it still feels kinda lazy to me, like they couldn't be arsed doing anything more interesting with the character or doing something that logically follows on from where he was in Return of the Jedi, which is to say becoming a leader rather than a lone wolf. Now that Han 'n' Chewie have the Millennium Falcon back they're going to ditch our new heroes somewhere, but then a bunch of affectedly "weird" space dudes show up demanding Han pay them back lots of money. It turns out Han's been spending left and right trying to transport a bunch of bizarre Lovecraftian alien squid monsters to some king somewhere. At this point I feel like the film just turns into some generic 21st century space action flick evocative more of Firefly or indeed Abrams' Star Trek than anything else. You've got weird space dudes in silly costumes with out-of-place accents or languages, giant CGI alien thingies rampaging all over the place killing everybody, and a big murky spaceship full of dark corridors. In a sense I feel like this is inspired by films and shows that themselves took their inspiration from exaggerating the "used future" aesthetic of Star Wars itself, and to me this sequence really doesn't fit. It's pointless CGI action that wastes time and doesn't really serve any purpose beyond keeping Rey, Finn and BB-8 in the same place as Han and Chewie.

Is that thing Rey's bike as a transformer?

The film goes from bad to worse when Han and Chewie take the other three to the planet Takadona. Here they go to some bar which is meant to evoke the Cantina from the original film but is far less interesting and they meet a diminutive orange alien named Maz Kanata who seems to be all knowledgeable about the Force and what not despite the fact that we've never heard of her before. I really didn't enjoy this bit either time. Who's this alien? How does she know all this stuff? Why should I believe her or trust that she knows what she's on about? It doesn't make sense to me; it's like "If in doubt, have the characters visit a wizard." Note that in The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda is introduced very succinctly, but introduced nonetheless: Obi-Wan tells Luke that Yoda is the Jedi Master who trained him. It's simple. Who's Maz? Just some person? She even says herself that she's not a Jedi but just knows stuff about the Force. Okay then. Meanwhile, at the Hall of Doom, Kylo Ren gets all pissy when he learns that our heroes have escaped, indulging for the first time his penchant for carving up the room with his lightsabre while some bloke cringes in the background. He's also not on good terms with the more official leader, General Hux, aka Bill Weasley in an SS Uniform. They have a teleconference with Supreme Leader Snoke, a big hologram of a CGI alien dude who looks like the Emperor's foetus crossed with Voldemort. This is a rubbish character who simply didn't need to be CGI, much like Maz Kanata in fact. He looks obviously fake compared to the two people he's talking to, and simply isn't intriguing. He just seems like some generic Dark Lord dude with a robe and a throne. What is the logical progression after the Emperor? It might actually have been more effective if there was no Supreme Leader and that Kylo Ren and Hux were making it up as they went along in a kind of uneasy duumvirate. "Snoke" is also a particularly stupid name in a whole galaxy of silly-named characters. Sounds like something to do with snooker or snow cones. Anyway, he warns Kylo Ren about the challenges of facing Han Solo, who is revealed to be Ren's father. Well, we saw that coming. I mean, those were the two sensible suggestions given in the lead-up to the film: Ren's either Luke, or Han and Leia's son. Luke was clearly a step too far so there you go. The old Extended Universe narrative already did this with one of Han and Leia's children. It's a bit predictable. It's also odd to think that the whole 'evil relative' thing was done in the Original Trilogy after they'd had a whole prior film and three years of waiting. Here the character is introduced and his familial connections are busted out in all of an hour.

On Jakku, real sleeves were a luxury.

Back at the bar, Finn starts having a massive crisis. I thought that his actions here were too much too soon. Suddenly he's freaking out about how the First Order must already be on their way, how there's no stopping them and how he's going to piss off to the Outer Rim and hide. So was he just using Rey and BB-8 to escape from the First Order? At other times before this it seems as if he actually cares about helping the Resistance. Maybe I'm not paying close enough attention, but it feels a bit out of the blue. He asks Rey to come with him, but she asks him to stay. He 'fesses up about his origins, which doesn't really change anything. It's not like he lied about being a member of the Resistance for that long, really. Rey doesn't seem to be especially fussed either way. Finn decides to skip town nonetheless, while Rey starts hearing funny voices and heads down to the cellar where she discovers Luke's old lightsaber in a box and has a bunch of funny visions about Luke and Kylo Ren and R2-D2 and being abandoned as a little kid and stuff. When Maz Kanata shows up to tell her that it's her destiny or whatever, Rey gives the old orange crone the big finger and runs off to the forest for no discernible reason. I guess she's traumatised by remembering her abandonment and being forced to admit that her family isn't coming back for her, but this is all a bit spontaneous as well. This whole double rejection on the part of our two new characters didn't work for me. They happen within mere minutes of each other and both seem to have little build-up for them. Rey talks about needing to go back to Jakku a fair bit, but also seems to have already more or less given up on that. It's odd. She also realises with Maz Kanata's assistance that an alternative to waiting for her family is to go seeking out Luke, and Rey says "Luke" as if they're on a first name basis and that it's really important that they meet up. I didn't follow this bit.

I bet he really has trouble breathing now.

Elsewhere, on a planet that has a big cannon in it, Dildo Ren sits around meditating in front of Darth Vader's mangled helmet seeking guidance away from the Light. Probably talking to the wrong guy. It's a nice idea I suppose, an evil guy trying to resist the temptation towards good, although I'm not sure that really works. Isn't the Dark Side meant to be the easy path? Where'd he get the helmet from anyway? Endor? Guess so. General Hux gives a big speech to a bunch of troops who don't appear to give a shit about what he's saying before firing the really big cannon, a huge laser in the planet that squirts five big blobs of red light across space that blow up a bunch of planets. It's basically the Death Star on crack. Well, that was unexpected. The Death Star again? There's playing it safe and then there's this. It's so unexplained. Hux gives this big spiel about how the Republic is supporting the Resistance and how this will very conveniently wipe out the Republic's seat of government and its fleet in one go, but I'm a little hazy about what's going on. Not enough work has been done to explain the relationship between the Republic, the Resistance and the First Order. They probably should have just given the Resistance a different name. Supposedly it's all explained in spin off crap like Young Adult fiction, but surely the film is the main event. Can't they at least tell us what's going on here? How does the First Order have such a powerful weapon? If the Republic is the galaxy's government, why are the Resistance called the Resistance when they're clearly on the side of the Republic and therefore the established authorities? Hux's speech almost makes the First Order seem like some pissed-off group within the Republic that has gone rogue. I don't know.

"Meanwhile, the sinister FIRST ORDER will not rest
until the true recipe for Wookiee Cookies has been found."

In any event they're conveniently able to see the explosions from Takodana, and Finn decides to go back. Maz Kanata gives him the lightsaber and doesn't explain to Han how she got it. It's a good question. If it fell out of Cloud City into the atmosphere of Bespin, a gas giant, surely it'd fall towards the surface and be crushed by the pressure. In any event, First Order bad dudes are showing up, I guess because they've tracked our heroes there and because some spy sends messages to them earlier. So it's time for another snooze-worthy laser battle as a bunch of guys in white armour run around shooting red laser beams everywhere and stuff gets blown up. Dildo Ren pursues Rey into the woods while Finn develops spontaneous confidence with a lightsaber, enough to fight off a Stormtrooper with one of those anti-lightsaber weapons that Grievous' bodyguards had in Episode III. Convenient how they forgot about them during the Original Trilogy. Han goes on about liking Chewie's crossbow. They've been together for how long and he's never used it before? Fortunately their collective hides are saved by the arrival of the Resistance, and there's a well-shot scene as, from behind Finn on the ground, we can clearly observe Poe's X-Wing taking out a number of targets with skill and confidence. Unfortunately, Ren catches up with Rey and discerns that she's got the map. Getting a little cocky, he puts her in a trance and absconds with her back to his ship, claiming that it's no longer necessary to secure BB-8. Finn gets all upset seeing Rey get captured and Han's like "Yeah, well."

"I think our son was adopted."

Then the Resistance lands and we're reintroduced to Leia and C-3PO. Carrie Fisher is perhaps even harder to believe as Leia than Ford is as Han. She just looks like someone's grandmother, and that's no bad thing, but there's little identifiable continuity between her character here and her character in the older films. I guess she just mellowed out a tonne. Anthony Daniels sounds a little different as C-3PO as well. I'd forgotten about him so his appearance was a pleasant surprise. Han reveals that he's seen their son, it's all very grim and then they head off to yet another planet where the Resistance has its very Rebel Alliance-esque headquarters. Apparently this planet is called D'Qar: I can see why they never bothered to explain that. Finn discovers that Poe survived the TIE Fighter crash earlier in the film and was rescued. If they were able to rescue him from Jakku, why couldn't they find BB-8? It's deeply unclear. At the First Order base, Kylo Smile-o is trying to get Rey to reveal the map (although surely she'd only have a fairly hazy memory based on the brief glimpse she had of it) but she's too strong with the Force, and this gives us our indication that Ren's not necessarily all he's cracked up to be, lacking training and finesse to get the job done and being overconfident. It's not bad actually, although I think it could potentially be argued that Rey's a little too competent a little too soon here. She also mocks Ren by telling him he'll never be as strong as Darth Vader, and it sounds a little odd given that she's never mentioned Vader before and previously regarded all that history as myth and legend. I guess she just read his mind and was using the terms that would upset him the most, but hearing Daisy Ridley have to say "Darth Vader" with loads of intensity and gravitas is a bit much, obviously meant to be more for the benefit of the audience than the characters. This can be contrasted to a good moment with Han and Leia discussing their son in which Han says "there's too much Vader in him". That works, I think. For his own part Ren sees Rey's visions of an island, which looks towards the end of the film and is something that confused me both times. Without his helmet, Ren just looks like some young guy with longish hair and a big nose. As a fellow big nose haver, I sympathise. One thing that this revelation does succeed in emphasising is the sense that the members of the First Order seem to all be quite young, which creates an atmosphere of insecure, impressionable people being manipulated to evil things by a cynical, exploitative figure. Ren doesn't look much like he'd be Han and Leia's son, though. In any event, he's messed up by failing to get the map once again, and has to go tell Snoke-and-Mirrors that Rey's a powerful Force user who should be trained. I don't remember what Snoke says back, probably just more waffle about Han Solo.

Poe's ultimate weapon: flipping the bird.

At the Resistance Base, Finn reveals that he knows where they've taken Rey: Starkiller Base, which is like the Death Star only bigger and capable of firing more shots. Now I kind of get what they were going for here: the First Order don't have the resources to build an entirely artificial station capable of generating its own energy like the Death Star, so instead they've hollowed out a planet and turned it into a kind of crude improvised weapon which gets its power from sucking up fusing star matter. That's interesting, but the justification for its existence is based largely on implication. It's more just presented here as "There's another Death Star we've gotta blow up," and that's pretty tired after the original film, Return of the Jedi and, if you think about it, the Droid Control Ship from The Phantom Menace. Finn says he needs to go there in person, and it's clearly just a trick so that they'll help him rescue Rey. There's an interesting thing here about how Finn lies a lot in order to try to do the right thing, which could be important later. As usual there's a weakness: take out the shield generator and you can blow up the oscillator which keeps the star matter under control. It just feels a bit Star Trek to me: I'm not sure we need to know how Starkiller Base works, just that it does. Stuff about sucking material out of stars and so on feels like something that belongs in other sci fi properties that are more concerned with how things work than Star Wars traditionally is. It basically only exists to stop Starkiller Base from feeling even more like the Death Star, and they could have handled it differently. Don't ask me how, but they could have. So Han, Chewie and Finn are off to take out the shield, rescue Rey and maybe bring Kylo Ren back to the light before the X-Wings fly in to blow up the weak spot. The one arguably nice thing about all this is we get to see some old favourites like Admiral Ackbar and Nien Nunb. The rest of it feels a lot like "new Star Wars film, better have a bunch of people in a control room talking about how to blow up a big superweapon." As it has nothing to do with the plot's main thrust, finding Luke, it seems like an arbitrary obstacle placed into the film for the sake of a climax. It would have made more sense if, instead of having this fake Death Star and gaining the map at the beginning, they only knew where the map piece was and had to try to get it and get out before the First Order did. Yeah, look at me coming up with my good ideas. Take that, Hollywood.

Only $19.99 at Toys R Us.

Rey escapes by tricking Stormtrooper Daniel Craig into releasing her, showing her Force powers once again developing at a prodigious rate. I wonder why Craig did this cameo. In any event Kylo Ren gets pissy again and we get a mildly amusing moment as two incoming Stormtroopers turn around and walk away rather than risking walking by. The Millennium Falcon arrives and there are a couple of other amusing moments when Finn, revealed as having no idea what he's doing, says that they'll just "use the Force" and Han Solo says that's not how it works, while Chewie complains about being cold. They go into the base and force Phasma in her one other role in the film to lower the shields. It's pretty simple. Apparently she can just lower the shields and no one like Ren or Hux or any of the other high ranking officers are alerted. Then they see that Rey's already escaped so they run into her and concoct a plan to blow up the building they're in for some reason. Maybe to stop the shields going back up or something? It might be to give the X-Wings an easier time. The odd thing is that Kylo Ren tells them to lock down all the hangars to stop Rey from escaping, yet the TIE Fighters are released to attack the X-Wings anyway. It would have been more interesting if they were thrown into confusion.

I wonder if it burns your hand at the top of the grip.

While setting the charges, Han realises it's time to confront his son, revealing that Ren's real name is Ben. Han steps out onto a big thin bridge over a crevasse and we know he's going to die, especially when he asks Ben to come back and Kylo Ren says he needs help to do something - of course he means to kill him, that's what they've been going on about for ages: Ren's struggle is not to go back to good, but to fully embrace evil. So of course Han gets snuffed and after thirty years Harrison Ford gets the resolution to his character that he wanted. I suppose that makes sense, but it's obviously very similar to Obi-Wan getting killed in the original film. Furthermore, it's not the most glorious exit for the character, getting duped by his rogue son into getting killed. Then again, a stereotypical self-sacrifice may have been a little banal. It would probably have been too much of a stretch to have Ren convert back this early, but it might have been more effective if he'd been wracked with Hamlet-like indecision and rendered impotent as a result (not in the reproductive sense). There's an okay cutaway to Leia obviously being affected "through the Force" or what have you but the best part of this is when Chewie shoots Ren in retaliation. The survivors high-tail it out of there, but somehow Ren gets ahead of Finn and Rey, despite being shot, and fights them, firstly engaging Finn in a lightsaber duel. Gone are the over-the-top lightsaber battles with loads of jumps and flips of yesteryear. Here it's just people whacking the shit out of each other's lightsabers, which confused me at first, but I guess it's a more back to basics approach. Finn's able to hold his own surprisingly well, which either makes Ren look inept, or is meant to show us that Ren is inept, basically a Darth Vader cosplayer with delusions of grandeur. I'm not keen on Ren's lightsaber. I get that it's meant to be something cobbled together by an inexperienced guy, but it just looks like them trying to do the "Darth Maul's unconventional lightsaber" thing again. Finn is overcome, however. When I originally watched this I foolishly thought that Luke was going to arrive to save the day, but of course Rey steps up to the plate and with the aid of her immense Force powers overcomes Ren and gives him a bit of the old stabby-stabby. Then with the planet disintegrating due to the successful X-Wing attack, the ground absurdly splits open exactly between them, separating the combatants in time for Chewie to come to the rescue in the Millennium Falcon. Back at base, R2-D2 wakes up so that he can combine his map of the galaxy with the missing piece held by BB-8 to show where Luke is. Why do they need the map? I get that they seem to have lost a lot of space knowledge with the collapse of the Empire, but it still seems pretty contrived. Couldn't it just be coordinates? In any event Finn's still out for the count so Rey heads off with Chewie after a perfunctory "May the Force be with you" from Leia. They go to a watery type planet, Rey walks up some steps and beholds the sight of craggy old Mark Hamill, now going down the Obi-Wan route with the cloak and beard, but not speaking any lines. Thus endeth the film.

On the poster, Rey's positioning makes
her look like one of the bad guys.

The more I think about it the more I think that The Force Awakens isn't a bad film but it could have been better. It's certainly not the masterpiece that many, but not all, viewers and critics are hailing it as being. My "initial (bad) impressions" as linked above are more or less my main ongoing criticisms of the film. I don't like the middle act on Takodana, I don't like Maz Kanata or Snoke and I don't like the plot's lack of ambition. On the other hand, the returning characters are welcome if a little unimpressive (apart perhaps from a few particular moments in which Chewie gets to shine), the new protagonists are pretty likeable and the whole thing looks quite nice (apart from the aforementioned unnecessary CGI). More world building would have been useful, less generic sci-fi crap like the stuff on Han's other ship would have been appreciated and a more original plot wouldn't have gone astray. Oscar Isaac also should have received more screentime as Poe Dameron. I wonder if much was left on the cutting room floor and, although I daresay Disney would perhaps consider this too similar to the widely-disliked Special Editions, if there's room for a Director's Cut of this film to introduce some valuable material that might have been omitted for cinemas. Kylo Ren is okay but I found him a bit predictable and he seems to really exist to maintain the Vader cachet in the unavoidable absence of that character, which is something Lucas at least avoided with Dooku if not with Maul. For me the standout from this is Daisy Ridley as Rey. John Boyega's good as Finn but I think has to do a little too much comedy; it's not that he's bad at the comedy, but it makes his character as a man trying to discover his identity amid a world of confusion and horrors (note that he trades the certainty but tyranny of the First Order for the freedom but confusion of life outside it) less prominent and at times makes Finn seem more like a bit of a buffoon. Considering the returning cast, hopefully there's plenty of Luke in the next film, but I'd like something a bit more true to form from Mark Hamill than Harrison Ford's routine performance in this as Han Solo. Carrie Fisher's Leia really seems to just be there for the sake of it, and I can't help but wonder if the film would have been more successful if they hadn't bothered with returning characters. Abrams balances a lot of new and returning characters by doing something familiar with the plot, and arguably that pays off, but a somewhat more ballsy effort in the writing department could have transformed this passable film into a truly striking new direction for the franchise. As it is, this is a competent piece of filmmaking and a reasonably well-handed sequel to some beloved films, but they do little to rival the originality and significance of the films they try to evoke. The direction, dialogue and acting are all probably stronger than the prequels, but that's no great achievement and the very limited involvement of Lucas makes them feel inauthentic and fan-service-focused rather than completely natural developments of an existing narrative. I should also mention that, apart from the use of existing pieces, the soundtrack is wholly forgettable. I can't remember a single new tune from it. People talk a lot about Star Wars viewing orders and how the parts fit together, but really I think this film, like the prequels before it, is a product of its own time, and is probably best appreciated when viewed as having a kind of nebulous connection with the originals rather than having a hard-wired link to them in an artistic sense. Nonetheless, I'll be interested to see the next one, and that suggests that they did at least some things right.

"Spectre"

Not "SPECTRE" apparently, because here the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion seems to have no acronym and just be a bunch of people called 'Spectre' who aren't very nice.

Now Blofeld's back, surely Baron Samedi
is next on the 'villains to revive' list.

My review of Skyfall seems all too applicable to Spectre in some respects. I've yet to rewatch Skyfall (and I have little desire to do so, to be honest) but my primary objections to it haven't mellowed over time: I think it's fundamentally a rather pretentious film which absurdly expects me to take the character of James Bond seriously and care about his problems. As I stated in that review, I think treating Bond like a drama is inherently nonsensical, because it's a genre franchise about a larger-than-life character in almost wholly unrealistic situations, and therefore his feelings, thoughts and inner life fundamentally offer little for the audience to reflect upon.

Bond 25: Bond Has A Nice Cup Of Tea

The writers and directors of modern genre films need to realise that they are not writing the next great English/American novel, and that the nature of their medium innately precludes such aspirations from being sensible. The same delusions of dramatic grandeur affect current British television properties like modern Doctor Who and Sherlock, shows which similarly offer pointless masturbatory ruminations on the nature of unreal and unrealistic characters as if they have to compete with "literary" art.

Spectre is not as egregious in this as Skyfall was, but it suffers from many of the same problems: it's slow and dry, it's boring-looking, with a grey- and brown-dominated colour palette, and it's not shot or designed in a particularly interesting way. It feels more grounded in its own action than Skyfall admittedly, with a less dreamlike tone, but this accentuates its dryness. This is also emphasised by the fact that the plot is extremely unoriginal.

"Yeah, I'm all right."

Large parts of the plot of Spectre are extremely similar, if not identical to, 2014's Captain America: The Winter Soldier, another dry and unexciting film. Consider this: in both films, the security agency (SHIELD, the Joint Intelligence Service) has a new headquarters in the nation's capital (by a body of water, even). It's revealed that the head of said agency (Pierce, C) is in fact allied with or a part of a nefarious secret organisation (HYDRA, Spectre) which wants to use the legitimate organisation to take over a massive surveillance network (Project Insight, Nine Eyes) to get up to mischief. A rag-tag team of surviving "good" members of the original organisation (Fury/Widow/Falcon/Maria Hill, M/Moneypenny/Q/Tanner) must infiltrate the new, compromised headquarters while the protagonist has a "personal" showdown with the film's other main antagonist with whom he has an almost fraternal connection (Bucky, Oberhauser). I felt like I'd seen a good deal of this before. Bucky and Oberhauser are both meant to have died in the snow only to have actually survived, for goodness' sake.

Good thing we all wear these suspicious rings
with this very retro-looking logo on them.

Now let's get to the main attraction: Spectre itself and Blofeld. I didn't think these were handled effectively. Having finally regained the rights, they shoot their bolt almost immediately by introducing the whole shebang: Spectre is this evil organisation which manipulates world events and their mysterious unseen leader is a man named Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Note that in the original Bond films, SPECTRE and Blofeld were dealt with over no less than six films. SPECTRE is first introduced in Dr. No as the titular villain's employer. In From Russia With Love they try to exacerbate tensions between East and West. Following an unrelated diversion for Goldfinger, Bond then deals with the second-in-command of the organisation, Emilio Largo, in Thunderball. It's not until You Only Live Twice that Bond finally meets Blofeld himself, and it takes that film and two more, On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Diamonds Are Forever, to finally deal with Blofeld and put an end to the entire situation. In fact, apart from Goldfinger, the entire Connery/Lazenby era involves SPECTRE in some shape or other.

"Seat belts on, please!"

That's a hell of a lot of story, and it makes SPECTRE seem appropriately sprawling and mysterious - octopoid, like its logo. And while some of SPECTRE's and/or Blofeld's activities are very over the top and have become clichés, like the volcano lair and the laser satellite, generally their motivations were fairly clear: to play the superpowers of the Cold War against each other for money and power. That's what SPECTRE is, essentially, in those films: a very elaborate criminal organisation. Yet at the same time it functions as a reflection and even a parody of the very powers it is playing: all of Bond's spying and all of the espionage and struggles between Western governments and the Soviet Union for political and economic supremacy are ultimately little different, in those stories' eyes, to the actions of criminals manipulating affairs for the sake of profit and control. Note that in Blofeld's fish tank in From Russia With Love, all three (the West, the USSR and SPECTRE) are the same creature.

Not so here, of course. The Cold War's long over (arguably), or has at least transformed, which leaves one wondering what SPECTRE's purpose really is. What do they get from the human trafficking, from the fake pharmaceuticals they apparently sell, from the elaborate surveillance network they intend to take over? It's all very unclear, and it seems as if the film can't really come up with a good reason for Spectre's existence in the "post 9/11 world", as opposed to the world of the Cold War, much in the same way that HYDRA's role in The Winter Soldier in my opinion lacked impact. Spectre seem menacing with their elaborate Rome meeting, but we don't have enough time to really see them do anything. The film tries to do far too much. Their most threatening element seems to be this bulky henchman with no neck who is apparently immune to punches, who seems to be intended as comparable to Red Grant or a similar figure but feels like an arbitrary stooge for Bond to have a difficult fight with.

"James, don't you remember how you shot my face off during The War?"

Let's turn finally to Blofeld himself. It's this which gives Spectre similar levels of pretension and delusions of grandeur equivalent to that of Skyfall. In that we saw Bond under siege in his old family home; here Blofeld is the pseudonym of Franz Oberhauser, who knew Bond as a child when his father looked after Bond for a couple of years when his parents died. Oberhauser apparently murdered his own father out of jealousy and faked his own death, before renaming himself Blofeld and establishing Spectre.

In my opinion, it's all far too personal. We learn all this "backstory", but nothing actually substantial about this new Blofeld, apart from the fact that he's clearly a patricidal psychopath. What else does he want? Why did he establish Spectre? What's he been up to for all these years? Most of all, how did he, as he claims, manipulate events behind the scenes in Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and Skyfall when all of those films already explained themselves? Spectre tries to establish itself as some kind of shocking resolution to the "Daniel Craig tetralogy", but does so by simply telling us that it is and expecting us to believe it. We constantly hear references to past characters: Vesper, Le Chiffre, Greene, Silva and the like, but Spectre has no way of actually establishing any of the narrative connections it claims because they don't exist, which gives Blofeld's claim to being "the author of all your pain" (Bond's, that is) no substance or profundity whatsoever. Oberhauser even states that he only started going after Bond because he got in his way, which makes the plot revelation of their shared past completely unnecessary and irrelevant; it doesn't provide either of them with motivation, and is only there to shock the audience with the largely meaningless concept that Bond and his traditional arch-enemy knew each other for a couple of years as kids. So what? The film does nothing with it, so why should we care? But we're meant to care simply because the connection exists, and in this way the film treats the audience like gasping idiots who will swallow any twist, no matter how trivial, purely because it is a twist.

Land, no.

The older films were from an age where everything didn't have to be "personal" and Hollywood action films weren't incompetently striving to involve novelistic characterisation and discourse in modes for which they were completely unsuited. Blofeld was there characterised perfectly well: as a ruthless, cynical man who toyed with the lives of the whole world simply for his own personal profit. In Spectre it's simply not clear what Blofeld wants or why he is the way he is: he describes himself as a "visionary" of sorts but we're never informed of his vision; I don't know why he particularly cares to torture Bond the way he does unless he's simply some kind of sadist. The weak "personal connection" element and the need to rush through the character wastes Christoph Waltz in an admittedly rather unimaginatively cast role, in which the character and his organisation seem to exist not for the sake of the story but so that Bond fans will recognise the names and be titillated. While I think the "personal connection" aspect was unnecessary and doesn't really work for Bond in any event, there was no need for either the Spectre organisation or Blofeld himself to have a role in the film. The character is simply not very interesting, being not as visually striking as Donald Pleasence's Blofeld, not as effective a foil for Bond as Telly Savalas', and not as amusing as Charles Gray's (my personal favourite).

Everything else is fairly bland, as I've already stated. The most visually interesting part of the film is the Day of the Dead sequence in the beginning. There's nothing else that is particularly glamorous in terms of location or activity. The script contains a few chuckles, but not much. Daniel Craig puts in a workmanlike performance as Bond, but he's not especially interesting to watch for most of the time. Bond girl Madeleine Swann is okay as this instalment's "reasonably competent female deuteragonist" but nothing too memorable. Ralph Fiennes as M mostly has to do a lot of the grouching and grumbling that I thought was subverted as the best element of Skyfall. The final capture of Blofeld by Bond simply shooting his helicopter (something which consistently fails to succeed in almost every Bond film) was a little anticlimactic.

For your cool, cool glasses only.

In terms of good parts, the pre-titles sequence in Mexico City isn't bad at all, featuring characterful location work and a frantic punch-up in a helicopter. I don't mind the song for this one, and the title sequence itself was okay, even if the octopus motif was rather laboured. I was glad that they used M more effectively towards the end. As I said before, there are a few humorous moments, including from Craig himself. Other than that I didn't find much that was particularly engaging about it.

Assuming Daniel Craig doesn't do another Bond, it's disappointing that he's essentially three for four in terms of mediocre films (although admittedly a lot of people thought Skyfall was good for whatever reason). I think the explanation for this, however, almost lies in the fact that Craig was cast for Casino Royale, which is in my opinion a good film which worked perfectly well on its own terms, and in which the chemistry of Craig and Eva Green was ideal for a striking standalone Bond film which didn't need and couldn't benefit from sequels or follow-ups. It's possible that the tenets established for Casino Royale, such as a more serious tone, arguably more realism, more emotional drama and the like, have in fact burdened the rest of the Craig era because they were invented for the sake and success of that single film and not for an entire sequence of films. In that sense it's possible that the last three films were doomed from the start.

"Well, if we destroy Kansas the world may not hear about it for years."

Daniel Craig may be departing, but the great success of Skyfall and the relatively substantial success of Spectre mean that we're probably likely to see more of this kind of thing in the future, unfortunately. It would be appealing if the Bond franchise could recapture a little of the colour, glamour and energy of days gone by but I doubt they'll bother. It's disheartening to say it, but it seems unlikely that we'll see that kind of Bond film made again. "Blofeld" may have been spared, but it's possible that Bond is, in many ways, dead.

"Avengers: Age of Ultron"

Joss Whedon's accommodation, provided by Disney.

I once attempted to give the first "Avengers" film the OCBW treatment but I gave up because I got bored writing it. Put simply, I think "The Avengers" is... eh... an okay ish film, with lots of emphasis on the "ish," which I described in my 'Why You Shouldn't Be Excited About the Casting of Doctor Strange' article as

a bland and badly-paced film where Iron Man and Captain America spend about ten hours sitting around frowning at each other in a flying conference room and then they have a giant Transformers battle at the end which is resolved in the same manner as the invasion of Naboo in Star Wars Episode I.

"Age of Ultron" is arguably better paced and has a severely reduced amount of conference room frowning, and in some respects it's superior to "The Avengers." In other respects it is not superior to "The Avengers." I'll sum up my grievances here, spoilers beware:

1. Ultron is introduced too quickly and his characterisation is rushed.
2. Black Widow in general is used badly.
3. Elements of the plot are too similar to "Iron Man 3".
4. Other elements of the plot rely too heavily on the plot of "The Avengers."
5. It feels like a middling instalment killing time before the third Avengers film.
6. Quicksilver's death is meaningless because he's only just been introduced.
7. The film is visually uninteresting because of the overdesigned costumes.

"Iss my ahksent conveenssing enough, do you zink, Ultron?"

So the team has reassembled offscreen, and they're in some fictional Eastern European country which definitely isn't Latveria hunting down a HYDRA base belonging to Baron Strucker, who was also seen in the post-credits sequence of the second Captain America film. They're trying to recover Loki's sceptre which apparently slipped through their fingers after the last film. How did that happen? Anyway, Strucker's used it to create Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, who can't be mutants in this film because Marvel Studios don't have the rights to the characters as mutants, just to the characters in general. So in this they're "enhanced," given powers by Strucker because they want revenge on Tony Stark because his weapons killed their parents. Just for your information, in the comics their parents are actually none other than Magneto himself and his wife Magda, but obviously they can't reference that either. In any event I believe their parentage was a retcon made in the Eighties so it doesn't really matter: while they were originally created as mutant allies of Magneto in X-Men in their original comic appearances, they later joined the Avengers before it was ever established that Magneto was their father. In any event they serve to muck up the Avengers' plan: Hawkeye gets injured and Iron Man has a traumatic vision of failing to save the world.

It's the mayor I feel sorry for.

I thought this sequence was okay, although I took some objection to the sequence where Black Widow calms down the Hulk and gets him to transform, because I thought it was pretty crap that they took the route of making Black Widow, who so far has been a mostly practical-minded character, take on what felt like a weirdly maternal role: "she's a woman so she can calm down the big raging man." Seemed kind of cliché to me and a bit sexist: why does the only female member get put into that spot? I also didn't really like the fact that they were hunting down the sceptre and HYDRA were using it, because I feel like that plot line has been done to death - it wasn't even that good in "Captain America: The First Avenger" in my opinion, using alien artefacts to fuel "super science." In any event back at Avengers Tower everyone gears up for a massive party and Tony Stark and Bruce Banner discover that the core of the sceptre contains an extremely advanced, alien artificial intelligence. Then Iron Man springs on us that this could be used to run "Ultron."

"...did you just fart?"

Well that was quick. The film goes down the route of having Iron Man conceptualise Ultron already. He doesn't come up with the idea now, he already had it. He wants "a suit of armour around the world" or equivalent in case aliens and their ilk return. I found this quite similar to "Iron Man 3": wasn't the whole point of that meant to be Tony Stark learning that he couldn't do everything through technology? Obviously in this film it's motivated by the vision Wanda put in his head, but it still seemed repetitious to me, especially because after making a big show of destroying all his suits in "Iron Man 3" he now has a small army of suits working for him. In any event they put JARVIS to work on the AI and go off to have a party.

"Uh... it was you."

The party is essentially the "let's remind everyone of who's in our Marvel Cinematic Universe" scene. In addition to Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, the Hulk, Black Widow and Hawkeye we see appearances from Maria Hill, War Machine and Falcon. The last of these gives us also a small reminder of the ongoing search for the Winter Soldier, which I fear will dominate the rest of Cap's narrative. There's also a Doctor Cho introduced in a confusingly prominent role early in the film. Then there's all this flirting between Bruce Banner and Black Widow which is our weird romantic subplot. Hulk and Black Widow? No thanks. The other thing which bothers me about it is that the first Avengers film didn't have this element, and no other character in this film really has one. "Black Widow's a woman, better pair her up with one of the male cast members." Or maybe don't? I didn't like this element. Besides, what happened to Bruce Banner's love interest from the Hulk film which no one really counts as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Another issue with this of which I was just reminded was that in this bit Cap saunters over to make some ambiguous remarks towards Banner about Black Widow. I also didn't like this element because it made Cap seem like a dick, and the whole point of Cap is that he's not a dick.

"It wasn't me."

Once things are winding down we get our humorous moment as everyone tries to lift Thor's hammer. I liked that it moved a little bit when Cap grabbed it, because in the comics as we know Captain America can lift Mjölnir and has done so on at least one occasion. Meanwhile something's gone screwy in the lab because a deformed Iron Man robot arrives speaking with James Spader's voice. A bunch of psychotic robots fight them and fly off with Loki's sceptre. So this plot is still going. Ultron "escapes through the internet," whatever that means, and builds himself a fancy giant body back at Baron Strucker's castle. He then recruits Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver - although I wasn't sure how he did this - because he knows they want revenge on Iron Man. Iron Man really drives the plots of these films, doesn't he? I'd even go so far as to say that they're over reliant on him. One thing I will give this film credit for is that they established firmly that the real "boss," aka the proper leader of the Avengers, was Captain America, because he's actually a tactician.

"Well you can't have heard me all the way over here in this field."

The Avengers go through a bunch of old files they have lying around and somehow figure out that Ultron is after vibranium, the miraculous metal from which Cap's shield is made. As such they both head off to track down Claw, in this "Ulysses Klaue," played by Andy Serkis as a typical "never met a nice" South African who's stolen tonnes of it from Wakanda. So they're foreshadowing the introduction of Black Panther here. Klaue even gets his arm cut off in a nod towards his claw arm in the comics. So then they have a big fight with Ultron in a ship for the vibranium, but the Avengers get taken out when Wanda gives them all visions. I thought this part was okay, although I most liked Cap's vision, probably just because Cap's my favourite. Hayley Atwell has a brief cameo as Peggy Carter, and Idris Elba gets one as Heimdall in Thor's vision, which also looks towards the Infinity Stones and later Marvel films. We also get a nod towards Black Widow's origin, which has otherwise gone largely unrecorded in the films save for her informing Loki "I'm Russian" in an American accent in the previous Avengers outing. Then in a largely offscreen moment Wanda also traumatises Hulk, who goes berserk.

Avengers Diving Board: $99.99 from Hasbro.

What follows was probably one of my least favourite moments of the film: a now-stock CGI urban brawl where Iron Man in the Hulkbuster Armour, which he deploys from orbit, fights against Hulk. They leap all over the place wrecking everyone's property and knocking buildings down. Man of Steel already took this kind of urban mayhem as far as it could possibly go, and there's nothing to see here which we haven't already seen. I always just end up feeling sorry for the people who would have to organise all the cleaning up and repair work, and the probably scarred-for-life civilians. Ultimately Iron Man pummels the Hulk into submission and they all piss off to lick their wounds. It kind of feels like a waste of time, especially with the back-to-back "vs Ultron" and "vs Hulk" action sequences, both of which are frantic CGI extravaganzas.

The bank's about to break.

Needing somewhere to "lie low" as they say, Hawkeye leads them off to a farmhouse in the country which turns out to be where his wife and kids live. So Hawkeye has a family. It's a vaguely clever twist but in all honesty despite spending a bit more time with him I didn't really find Hawkeye any more interesting in this film than the one before. Thor immediately leaves again so that Stellan Skarsgård can get his cameo, somehow being able to immediately lead Thor to some underground pond where he takes a dunk to recover his dream. Captain America and Iron Man argue with each other like the last film while chopping wood, and then Nick Fury comes back. Ugh. He gives them a pointless pep talk, Black Widow and Bruce Banner continue to experience awkward sexual tension, and they head off to track down Ultron. Obviously this is meant to show them being proactive, as opposed to what Ultron accuses them of being: reactive and static. Then again, Captain America argues that people start wars by trying to prevent them. So what is it, let the bad guy go first, but then hammer him as much as possible? I guess so.

Release the Kraken.

In any event Ultron and his "enhanced" chums have tracked down Doctor Cho and mind control her with Loki's sceptre: more reptition of the previous film. They get her to use her super duper advanced cellular technology with vibranium to create some kind of 'ultimate body' for Ultron. I wasn't really sure why this happened, but in any event they do it, using the stone from inside the sceptre. What does he want this body for? I wasn't really sure, but in any event he does. Nonetheless the organic brain of the new body is getting Ultron's mind transferred into it, and thus Wanda is able to read the mind, discovering that Ultron intends to destroy all life on earth. She's naturally concerned, so Ultron and a couple of his Iron Man cronies chuck the new body in a lorry and they head off, but not before Cap shows up and has a fight with Ultron where he's repeatedly zapped off the roof of the truck and onto the windshields of the cars behind, apparently consistently forgetting that his main gimmick is that he has a shield he can raise to defend himself.

"My wig doesn't match my eyebrows."

Nonetheless Black Widow recovers the body but is captured by Ultron: damsel in distress much? Logically in my opinion it should have been (somehow) Tony Stark who gets captured. Back at the tower Iron Man and Bruce Banner decide to put JARVIS' AI into the body instead, and while Cap turns up with Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, now enemies of Ultron, to stop Iron Man from constantly building killer robots that go mental and try to destroy the world, Thor arrives and uses his hammer to put in enough juice to complete the process, thus forming classic Avengers character, the android known as the Vision, here played by Paul Bettany. He was a welcome character to have introduced and I would have actually liked him earlier. Thor also reveals that the stone from the sceptre, now in Vision's head, is the Mind Stone, one of the six Infinity Stones. Well there you go then. Vision says he wishes to protect life and encourages them to go fight Ultron, so off they go, after a mild gag where he is shown to easily lift Thor's hammer.

"They didn't get theirs finished in time."

Now we're back in Eastern Europe again as Ultron enacts his diabolical plan to lift a huge chunk of the countryside off the face of the earth. He wants to slam it back down like a meteor, believing it will encourage "evolution" on the planet, which has become stagnant because of humanity. Later he says that afterwards only metal will survive. So what does he want, evolved humans or a world of robots? I have no idea. In any event he has some bollocks device to achieve all of this, so when the Avengers show up they have to get to that, which is very, very similar to how they had to get to that thing which Loki was using to open the wormhole in the first film. What's more, the landscape Ultron's rendered airborne is partially city, so they have to evacuate as many people as they can and protect civilians from an army of Ultron's killer robots, which is also extraordinarily similar to what happened with the alien Chitauri in the first film. In fact this whole plan reminded me a great deal of an issue of Fantastic Four from the Eighties which I read recently which featured Galactus' rogue herald Terrax lifting the whole of Manhattan from the surface of the earth, and I almost wonder if, had they not used Manhattan for the climax in the previous film, they would have used it here.

1080 Waterboarding.

So Bruce Banner rescues Black Widow, she rather oddly forces or tricks him into becoming the Hulk, they have a big fight with lots of Ultron robots, the flying conference room from the first film shows up with Nick Fury, Robin Scherbatsky and War Machine on board to rescue the civilians, and Iron Man comes up with some bullshit method I didn't catch to negate the whole "Ultron dropping a huge piece of rock back onto the earth" issue. In horrific Joss Whedon post-modern fashion we have it extremely heavily, unsubtly foreshadowed that Hawkeye is going to die now that we've met his long-suffering family, so of course he doesn't - instead Quicksilver does to save his life and that of a small boy. It's basically the postmodernity singularity: it's a Joss Whedon "thing" that a main character dies in his films, but he plays upon that so that we expect it's someone else. The problem is, we've only just met Quicksilver, and because of this film's enormous ensemble cast, we haven't had that much time with him, so his death has very little impact. They wreck Ultron and his robots, Iron Man does... something which causes the "meteor" to explode into apparently harmless fragments, and they all go home for tea.

"So at 'Opinions Can Be Wrong' they say that 'Captain America:
The First Avenger' was the best Marvel film. What have you got to say to that?"

Our final sequence is basically just a set up for what's going to happen next: Captain America and Black Widow are going to run a new "Avengers facility" to seemingly train and coordinate their new set of Avengers: War Machine, Falcon, Scarlet Witch and Vision. Iron Man pisses off to probably go build even more killer robots or something and Thor heads off to the nether regions or what have you in order to figure out what's going on with all the "Infinity Stones" that keep showing up: one in Vision's head (formerly Loki's sceptre), one inside the Tesseract, one in that corruptive black and red stuff Christopher Eccleston was using in "Thor: The Dark World" and one I haven't seen that's apparently in "Guardians of the Galaxy." Meanwhile Hulk has deliberately sent himself off to the Pacific, Banner believing that he and Black Widow shouldn't be together or whatever. Yawn. So ends "Avengers: Two Hours and Twenty Minutes of Ultron."

In my article on the "Age of Ultron" teaser last year, I mused that

The thing is, apart from Ultron I can't help but feel like this is just the same old song and dance. Our heroes are shown in a comfortable place, something goes wrong, they have a big punch up with the bad guy and it ends. So the real challenge, then, is for 'Age of Ultron' to not live up to its teaser, to do something different, to surprise me.

Studio execs confuse the villain and the female lead.

I'm afraid to say that "Age of Ultron" didn't surprise me, at least any further than superficial elements like Hawkeye's family and Quicksilver getting killed. I argued that "Age of Ultron" needed "to not live up to the teaser where it seems to be a generic angsty action film" but I think it lived up to the teaser very well. We've got the Avengers doubting their purpose and fighting amongst themselves, plus some navel-gazing introspection on behalf of Hulk and Black Widow. Even Ultron didn't serve too great a purpose as a reflection of the heroes, really just being a nutcase who wants to destroy the world. The problem with adapting Ultron to a film is that Ultron, as the character was originally invented, is part of a very personal story: the story of his creator in the comics, Doctor Hank Pym, the original Ant-Man, who isn't even going to be in the Marvel Cinematic Universe until the film after this one, and even then not in the role of Ant-Man. Otherwise this just seems to be fairly run-of-the-mill. Despite the fact that there are several geniuses on the team, no one ever intellectualises what's wrong with Ultron's argument, either philosophically or scientifically: that "evolution" has no mutual relationship with peace - if anything it has an antagonistic one - and that "evolution" is not about a species becoming better per se, simply more competently equipped to survive in its environment. This is of course confused by the fact that it's not actually very clear what Ultron does want, and I think in its efforts to make Ultron amusing and foibled, the film makes him seem ineffectual and non-threatening. Ultron ultimately seems too facetious and confused to pose a serious challenge, and as a result I didn't find him very interesting.

"How dare you claim 'Thor: The Dark World' was
'even more forgettable than 'Iron Man 2'!'"

In general I felt like the plot was rushed and didn't make itself abundantly clear a lot of the time. I didn't like the way Black Widow, as the only female Avenger, was given a very trite "emotional" and "romantic" role. I thought the battle between Hulk and Iron Man was a waste of time. I felt that the plot, rather than being a logical continuation of what's come before, seemed simply like a re-hash of it. The death of Quicksilver had no impact. Hawkeye's character is developed awkwardly. Like the first film, Thor's role felt very perfunctory. There was also some dreadful technobabble, with absurd concepts mentioned like some place in Oslo which is supposedly "the hub of the internet" or something equally ridiculous.

¡Arriba!

That being said, I liked the Vision and I thought the film kept up a reasonable pace. I didn't think they did too badly of including Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver up until the end. There were some decent lines and action sequences and stuff to appeal to a Marvel comics enthusiast. One thing I will take issue with, as I did in my list at the beginning, is the design. I think it was this film which really forced me to acknowledge something I find very objectionable about modern superhero films in general: I don't like the way they look. Captain America's costume in particularly is horrible, with an ugly Avengers logo on the shoulder and in a weird shade of deep blue which looks almost purple. Incidentally, whose sneakers did Quicksilver nick from Avengers tower before the final battle? The stupid glowing lights on Black Widow's suit were fairly risible as well, almost evoking the DC Comics New 52 style "let's stick big contrasting lines all over everyone's costumes" aesthetic.

The last thing seen by whoever mandated all this egregious
exploitation shots of Black Widow in this film.

Y'know what one of Marvel Comics' main strengths was back in the Sixties when the majority of these characters were either invented or, in Cap's case, revived? They had artists, particularly Jack Kirby, working on them, who had a talent for distinctive appearances. Give me Cap in swashbuckler boots with little wings on his head, Black Widow with a bright yellow belt, Quicksilver with light blue spandex and pointy hair, whatever. Superheroes don't need to look "realistic" because they're not. As I get older and more cynical, I come to believe more and more than superhero comics always work better when they're "fun" and embrace the absurdity of the premise: not because I'm happy for them to be meaningless, but because I think it makes them more meaningful, a more effective contrast to reality which helps to highlight the issues they raise and the eras they represent. Drab HYDRA goons, gunmetal-grey Ultron robots, the Vision covered in blocky lines, hairy, sallow-green Hulk: they're boring to look at, and make their narratives correspondingly boring. Sadly I think Superman Returns was the last we'll ever see of that kind of film for a long time (and even that one was a little overdesigned, what was with that weird dimple pattern on his costume).

"I really don't want to go back to the gym."

"Age of Ultron" is just a workmanlike piece of product, as I so often describe these things, "well-presented mediocrity" as I called them in the Doctor Strange article. Other than that it's just part of the Disney/Marvel money printing machine, treading water before Phase 3 and "Infinity War" where maybe something interesting will happen. It's not a film I can see myself rushing to see again, not particularly memorable nor especially effective. I wonder if Joss Whedon is sick of this rigmarole, because he's said he's not coming back, and to me at least I felt like in this film he must have already been mentally exhausted. If you want Avengers, read the original comic books - it was pretty groundbreaking, at the time, to run a comic featuring multiple heroes with their own books in a team setting. If you want to watch Avengers, I heartily recommend The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, the 2010 cartoon series, and particularly its first season. For what is notionally a children's cartoon it's got a pretty complex ongoing narrative and rich characterisation, along with more characters (especially Ant-Man and Wasp, who I feel are badly missed in these films) and its own take on Ultron. Maybe it's because I'm such a devotee of that cartoon that I felt like "Age of Ultron" was showing me something I'd seen before and therefore it didn't especially grasp me, but it's worrying to think that that show achieved in two twenty-minute episodes of a cartoon what this big budget Hollywood film struggles to do in nearly two and a half hours. In less time than this film takes the cartoon series even established Ultron over several episodes as an initially benevolent force, which this film doesn't have time to do. This leads me to wonder how constrained Joss Whedon's vision was, if you'll pardon the pun, a fear I raised in my article on the teaser. No strings? Only the purse-strings, Ultron.

"I phase through your bedroom walls at night."