Re: Spoilers about archery, aircraft carriers etc - Edit 2
Before modification by Sidious at 05/05/2012 08:32:29 AM
In short, I was right about the ridiculousness of an archer on a superhero team, but they kept it from dragging down the movie or the character. His other weaponry is no more effective, such as his deployment of the world’s most useless hand grenade. Based on the proximity of an ordinary human to it upon explosive, that grenade has an effective lethal radius of about six inches.
Agreed, I found him useless too. I was particularly scandalized by his arrow that plugs into a mainframe and hacks it. That made me groan out loud. They tried to add a superhuman component subtley ... at one point he shoots backwards and kills an alien flying by. It was impressive but actually beyond his capabilities. At best, he's a superb marksman but he still has normal human senses.
You should add black widow to this by the way - she was equally useless. This time she was a master interrogator too, but ultimately a well trained operative with fighting skills is as useless as hawkeye. She was totally unimpressive shooting aliens with her guns in the street while Thor was conjuring up lightning storms and Hulk was destroying aliens en masse. Captain America comes close to this level of uselessness, but he barely evades criticism.
Then there is the issue of energy. You can’t help but wonder, given how much of the dialogue in the film is given to the discussion of new sources of energy, whether being able to take a carrier into the stratosphere is cost-effective. With all the aerodynamic qualities of a brick, the engines on that thing must provide 100% of all the lift AND thrust. Whatever they are using to power THAT, is what they should be reverse engineering to civilian and industrial specifications, rather than poking away at dangerous interdimensional-warping, alien-invasion-inviting, tesseract cubes for cheap or clean power sources down the road. Also, it’s one thing to lose a nuclear reactor on the bottom of the ocean when your aircraft carrier sinks. When your flying carrier crashes, what is that power source going to do? Go all Hiroshima on whoever is unlucky enough to be living under their flight path? Leak glowy crap all over the local environment?
The cloaking device bothered me more than the flying aircraft carrier. Apart from that when I saw it fly I assumed they'd extrapolated an energy source from the tesseract. Red Skull managed it by using the tesseract to directly power his flying superfortress.
Another minor quibble is that in attempting to convey to Captain America that someone is very smart they tell him he’s like Stephen Hawking. When Steve Rogers draws a blank, having been frozen for most of Hawking’s career, the other party is at a loss for words and ends up saying just that he’s smart. First of all, most people don’t use Stephen Hawking as a touchstone for intelligence. The name that is still used as synonymous with genius is that of Steve Rogers’ contemporary, EINSTEIN. Who in the world thinks of Stephen Hawking as the most recognizable genius in human history, and decides that a man who lived in Einstein’ day would not know the name of any others?
I hated this too. Most of the world's great physicists agree that if you had to name the top twenty physicists alive, Hawking would not be on the list. Of course, Rogers might have known about Einsten so they needed a substitute and were low on world renowned geniuses.
Finally, the Hulk ran into a problem that the first Ghost Rider film had, IMO. Namely his human alter-ego seems to believe that releasing the super-powered version is the worst thing in the world and on a par with playing midwife to the Antichrist, without adequate evidence to the contrary. For all that the Hulk seemed to be out of control initially, whenever the plot required it, he was perfectly well behaved and not at all inclined to humorously sucker-punch teammates.
To be fair, he is utterly uncontrollable and massively destructive. They also wanted to show Banner's struggle with control, and it seems like he only mastered the Hulk at the end.
I still think its one of the best superhero movies ever made, if not the best. I have very little to say about it that is negative. I think its a masterpiece, and the humour was exceptional. I thought Iron Man was so funny.