Just got back from the new Avengers. It feels like I walked out of a 2 hour long stick figure fight animation, in kind of a good way. The action was good, and the fight choreography was good, so I feel good enough about it that I'll go see the sequel. One thing I don't understand about it though:
Why does everyone say you need to see every movie to be able to understand what's going on? I saw Thor, Thor 2, the first Avengers, Iron Man, and Guardians of the Galaxy. There aren't any specifics you need to know to enjoy this movie because the story. If you use any kind of social media or have any knowledge of Marvel characters at all you'll get it, because the characters constantly shove the past events in your face. "Well, Bruce, me and Steve Rodgers don't really get along these days due to the events of Captain America: Civil War." "My name is Thor and my family is fucked up! Here are some examples from Avengers and my other movies!" "Wait a minute, we know where Knowhere is! We went there in one of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies!" Even if there were anything you needed to understand from any of the previous movies to enjoy this one, they'd be sure to rub it in your face.
Also, while I liked the action and choreography, the writing was pretty laughable. Most of the dialogue in the non-fighting scenes just comes off as bad-fanfictiony (these two characters are angry at each other because that will drive the tempo of the scene) as well as the writing in the overall story(no, main character! Don't do that incredibly dangerous thing not directly related to the main story! There's no way you won't make it out alive and totally okay!) (I think i'll kill off half the characters now, that will make people on tumblr masturbate to it more). This is on top of the fact that characters say things like "Peter, don't you make one more pop-culture reference" unironically. The dialogue writers did a bad job.
It says something about your conflict if the end result is exactly the same as it would be if none of the characters had done anything at all. This is pretty largely due to the fact that the writers seem to keep accidentally shooting characters with the "temporarily very stupid ray". It's pretty dangerous! I mean they hit Starlord and he fucked up their entire plan to subdue Thanos, they hit Captain America and he decided it was worth risking half of the life in the entire universe to try and destroy the Mind Stone without destroying Vision, they hit Red Witch and she agreed with him even when Vision repeatedly begged her to do it, they hit Dr. Strange and he gave up the Time Stone because "we're in the endgame now" (so I guess this is either part of his plan, in which case why did he lie to Tony about it, or he was hoping for the best, which is very stupid) and they hit Thor and he decided to inflict a non-fatal blow to the chest instead of to Thanos's head (which is so stupid, even Thanos points it out).
Still, despite all this, it was a really enjoyable movie, if you just like watching fights. There's nothing of any intellectual substance here, but it is just a superhero action movie, so I don't feel like I got ripped off.
