Agents of SHIELD Season Two

Of all life’s big questions – who am I, why am I here, what do I believe in – undoubtedly the one I’ve spent the most time wondering is which super power I would have if I could pick one. Maybe that’s why I’ve stuck around as the guy enjoying the MCU while everyone else got bored and left, only to occasionally pop in just to see if I’m OK. This stuff is important to me, probably too important. And it’s because I care so much that I started watching Agents of SHIELD, though it’s not the only reason I keep watching. That’s because this year saw the show flirt with being truly good, before ultimately settling with being highly entertaining.

That might sound like what a praised the last half of the first season Agents of SHIELD for, but it’s different this time. Those episodes worked because something exciting happened in Captain America: The Winter Solider and we got to see the effects of that play out on TV. With that gone, I was afraid the show would revert back to being as difficult to sit through as it had been before, and for the first few episodes of this season, it kind of looked that way.

It picked up some time after Hydra’s attempt to destroy SHIELD was thwarted, with Coulson directing the new, underground version of the organization toward defeating Hyrda and figuring out the mystery of the alien stuff inside him and Skye. The team added some new members in Bobbi Morse (Mockingbird from the comics) and Lance Hunter (snarky British guy who was annoying at first, then really fun) and spent the early days going on missions and running away before the US government could catch them. It was OK. And then Inhumans started showing up.

Inhumans are people who posses inside them the potential to have super powers as long as they are exposed to magical alien gas. They are a result of aliens interfering in human development a long time ago and it can be argued that every Marvel super hero is technically inhuman. But in practical terms, they are a sub-group in the comic who are due to come to prominence in the MCU, especially since they can’t use mutants. That they debuted on this TV show is a big deal.

Agents of SHIELD is always better when there are more super powers on display, so having inhumans automatically makes the show better. But they also gave the show something to worry about that is important to the MCU without being tied directly to it. While playing off Winter Soldier made the show fun last year, this year Age of Ultron barely made a dent on the show. And that was OK because the show had its own story to tell.

At the center of that story was Skye, the character that needed the most work following season one. Fortunately, the writers put that work in, building Skye up into an agent who could hold her own in the field before revealing that she was really Daisy Johnson, a.k.a. Quake, and giving her sweet vibration powers. More than the cool power scenes though, the show also made Skye a surprisingly tragic figure by linking her “birth” as an inhuman with the death of a member of the team and introducing tons of family drama in the form of her long lost parents. Speaking of which, Skye’s dad is played by Kyle Maclachlan, who is the best thing to happen to this show (sorry, Patton Oswalt).

While the first MCU show, Agents of SHIELD has yet to reach the highs of its siblings Agent Carter and Daredevil (which reminds me, I should write something about Daredevil). But I always looked forward to it on Tuesday nights this year, which was a nice change of pace. I’m excited to see where it goes from here, and happy that ABC decided not to break up the ensemble by doing that ill-advised spin-off. Everything has started to click, the best thing to do is leave it alone.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

I’ve consistently praised Phase Two of the Marvel Cinematic Universe for it’s willingness to use sequels as a chance to explore other genres. Iron Man 3 was a dark comedy crime movie, Thor: The Dark World plunged completely into sci fi fantasy (I think I said it was like Lord of the Rings meets Star Wars), Captain America: The Winter Soldier was a spy thriller, and Guardians of the Galaxy basically was a space adventure movie starring characters who are only technically super heroes. Avengers: Age of Ultron bucks that trend hard, as if writer-director Joss Whedon set out to make the most comic book-y comic book movie of all time. Luckily for us, he’s maybe the only guy on the planet who could actually pull that off.

As someone who has written several comics himself, Joss Whedon understands The Avengers and the kind of stories that people expect from the super team. I am sure that it was Whedon who decided to do a version of the “Age of Ultron” story – because who else could have been pushing for this relatively obscure villain to be the centerpiece of the biggest sequel of all time (until the new Star Wars comes out). More than that, he knows that outside of the fighting and the powers stuff, what people enjoy are watching these characters play off each other. And this movie gives you a chance to see how just about every conceivable combination of these characters would turn out.

Tony Stark is still definitely the star of this franchise, slightly more than even other-guys-who-got-sequels Captain America and Thor. Avengers-only characters like Hawkeye and the Hulk are given more fleshed out subplots – I especially like that Hawkeye got some cool moments after the first movie shafted him – but don’t expect much screentime to be given to anything that doesn’t tie into the whole saving the world thing. Even at two and a half hours, there are so many characters that it still feels like there was a lot left on the cutting room floor.

Much hoopla has been made about Age of Ultron‘s portrayal of Black Widow, which to me is a bit of a mountains out of molehills thing. There definitely seems to be reason to worry about the way that Disney and or Marvel feels about female super heroes, but I don’t think that’s anywhere on screen here. Black Widow kicks as much ass as anyone else on the team, and her romantic subplot is compelling – another tragic chapter in this woman’s story about wanting to be a good person. Plus, Black Widow isn’t even the only female super hero in the Marvel Universe, there’s Peggy Carter (on a TV show no one watched, apparently), Agents of SHIELD‘s Mockingbird and Quake (that’s a TV show definitely no one watches), and Scarlet Witch (who spends a decent chunk of this movie as a villain)… Let’s hope that Captain Marvel movie gets here real fast.

Speaking of Scarlet Witch, she’s in this and OK. So is her brother, Quicksilver, who my dad called Speedo which is pretty good. The third new Avenger is Vision who is great but barely in the movie. I guess they didn’t want to get you confused between him and Ultron? Oh yeah, Ultron. He’s an evil robot who wants to save humanity by destroying it, I guess. Kind of like Skynet, but if it was more pulpy and melodramatic. But the end result is about the same: super heroes get to fight basically an infinite army of terminators.

The one kind concerning thing about the first Avengers movie was how the big action sequence at the end was like a well-done version of the end of a Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Age of Ultron is full of big fights and none of them feature a giant sky laser, so I’m happy to report that we don’t have to worry about that comparison this time. In fact, I would say that, in general, the action in this movie is some of the best we’ve seen in the whole franchise – even if it was a shift back to the CG violence which made me miss the more brutal style of fighting from The Winter Soldier. Really, the only action problem I had was that there was so much of it. You will see every single Avenger kill hundreds of robots over the course of these 150 minutes, which disarms the admittedly limited tension of these battles.

That’s another thing – we all know there are so many movies in the pipeline that pretty much everyone is safe. More than that, Ultron starts the movie as a terrifying monster, something that seems impossible to defeat, but the more time I spent watching him get beaten up, make jokes, and come up with weird plans, the less threatening he felt. I get that he’s supposed to be like an evil mirror image of Tony Stark, but he’s also an alien AI – why wasn’t that more reflected in his behavior? Ultimately I was disappointed by the character, and I do worry that Marvel still has yet to find a good villain who isn’t related to Thor.

Whedon cut his teeth making beloved, nerdy TV shows and I’m just now realizing that’s why he is so great as part of the MCU, because Marvel has brought the serialized delight of television to cinema. Phase Two wraps up this summer with Ant-Man, the twelfth Marvel movie, and Phase Three is supposedly 10 more movies that will keep testing everyone’s super hero fatigue through 2019. I’m not saying super hero movies need to stop at that point, but I hope that all the creative people involved remember that the best TV shows knew when to call it quits and the endless nature of comics is what makes them so damn impenetrable for everyone else. Avengers: Age of Ultron concludes on a message of change, new adventures, and hope – don’t ignore that.

While We’re Young

Apparently the only way to move on from a new Fast and Furious movie is visiting the worlds of Noah Baumbach. I guess it’s appropriate to check in with storytelling that is pretty grounded after watching some of the preposterous stunts you’ll ever see. After Fast and Furious 6‘s counterpart Frances Ha showed us a slightly different side of the writer-director, Baumbach once again wields Ben Stiller as a weapon for and against ageism in While We’re Young.

This is the story of an uptight, narcissistic documentary filmmaker called Josh (Ben Stiller), who gets swept off his feet by Jamie, an aspiring documentarian (Adam Driver), and his wife Darby (Amanda Seyfried). Josh and his wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts) have been going through a rough patch – Josh is into the eighth year of his latest documentary with no end in sight and Cornelia is being fazed out by her friend who recently had a baby – so they find the young couple’s exuberance rejuvenating. But will they be able to change their ways or would it be better if they acted their age?

It’s concerning that I found myself relating much more to the 43-year-old Josh than the pretty-much-exactly-my-age Jamie. Josh is selfish and sometimes says pretty shitty stuff, especially to his wise father-in-law (Charles Grodin), but mostly he’s a guy who wants to make something great without really knowing how to do that. He’s someone who wants to be better than he currently is, but without the discipline to really do that either. He’s one of Baumbach’s best characters and a pleasant reminder that Ben Stiller is pretty good.

Not to undersell the rest of the cast, but it’s definitely Josh’s story. Cornelia gets plenty of screentime but I’m not sure I ever figured out what her story was about. She seemed to just be along for the ride. Jamie starts out as a sort of Bohemian, New York, artsy, dude which I guess is pretty much Adam Driver’s ally. Sadly he and Amanda Seyfried kind of devolve as the movie goes on, with Seyfried’s character seemingly getting written out of the movie in time for the third act. It’s a shame, Seyfried brought a lot of intrigue to her character and it would have been nice to get to know her better.

The reason for that is a kind of frustrating detour the story takes into Broadcast News territory. While We’re Young starts out as a story about a couple dealing with not having had a kid and getting old, with Josh, Cornelia, and Jamie’s careers in documentaries tying into that. However, the movie eventually decides to just straight up dive into that world, with our characters talking about the right way to make documentaries as well as history’s greatest documentarians and the precarious state of the form in an age when everyone already videotapes and shares everything online. This is not a subject I’m an expert on, and the namedropping of famous old documentarians goes right over my head. I don’t get it, but maybe I’m an idiot.

I guess I’d put While We’re Young on about Greenberg‘s level – it’s not as triumphant as Frances Ha nor as resonant as The Squid and the Whale. It’s not hilarious or profound, but it’s easy to enjoy and laugh at and complex enough to get you thinking about the modern era, technology, aging, mortality, and art. We’re all headed in the same direction, you know? We’re all going to get older and die. Might as well try to figure that out while we’re still young enough to deal with it.

Saints Row: Gat out of Hell

With a new Fast and Furious movie out, I had to go back and check out this year’s new Saint’s Row game. After all, both franchises are about street-level criminals that rise in prominence thanks to their love for over-the-top stunts and each other. Saints Row: Gat out of Hell, which came out in January, shows how tight those bonds are as our characters literally go to the underworld to save one of their own. It’s more of what made Saints Row IV so fun, just not, you know, that much more.

So, spoilers for the last game: your character (the president) and the rest of the Third Street Saints are celebrating a very special birthday while adrift in your spaceship. Earth is still destroyed, which has created some overpopulation problems in Heaven and Hell, which somehow gives Satan the inspiration to grab the president and force them to marry his daughter, Jezebel. He successfully captures the president, so Johnny Gat and Kinzie go to hell to save them. How will the two of them accomplish that goal? By taking over New Hades, the new open world for this game.

New Hades feels a lot like the digital Steelport from the last game, even though it is a new city with a new layout and a hellish aesthetic. Instead of civilians there are miserable, suffering husks. Instead of water there are lakes of lava. The skyscrapers are still skyscrapers – corporate America fits right in Hell. But Saints Row IV felt like a splash of paint on Saints Row The Third and this feels like that dipped in fire. Saints Row The Third came out in 2011 and I hope the developers spend some time working on something really new for wherever the franchise goes next.

This game doesn’t really rehash anything gameplay-wise, however. Johnny gets powers that are similar but different enough compared to the ones the president had in the last game. Most notable are Johnny’s wings, which become the driving force behind several minigame types as well as the obvious preferred means of getting around. It’s a nice upgrade to the super jumping/gliding thing from Saints Row IV and it felt good to fly, for the most part. Johnny also gets access to some demonic weapons which aren’t really that exciting, at least the ones I found. The shotgun fires stakes, for example, and the grenade launcher shoots exploding toads. It sounds fun and looks good but doesn’t feel that different.

The real problem with Gat out of Hell is how short it is – I beat it in around five hours. That’s not a lot for a $20 game, and it’s even worse when you find out that there are only a couple story missions and that most of the game is made up of going around completing minigames and challenges. That’s fun and all, I don’t regret my purchase, but I’d like so much more… Maybe the series will be radically retooled for the next installment and this is kind of the bow on top of the gift that was the last couple games in the series. If that’s the case, great job guys! Don’t get cocky.