Hmm...

I've been on the fence about going to this one, partly because I haven't actually seen any of the Marvel films since, well, The Avengers. I'm not sure why, I mean, I have all four! I just haven't watched them. Partly, I was very not whelmed by the trailers for Iron Man 3 and the first episode of Agents of SHIELD, and I kind of resent that very-comics-like assumption the series is making as it gets bigger and bigger that of course you've seen all the others. And the TV show. And the other TV show. And the other other TV show, or actually it's not a TV show, have we even figured out what we're calling stuff that's only online, bearing in mind that we'll be stabbed if we start throwing around the word "webisodes"?* Anyway. That was, ironically, part of the beauty of the thing in the beginning, was that it was like reading comics except without all the baggage. :)

Mainly, though, I think I can't get around the fact that when I went to see The Avengers, I was conscious of a markedly nonzero chance that it might actually be the last movie I ever saw, and... well, it would've been OK in that role. Y'know? There would have been many things to regret, but "The Avengers was the last movie I saw" wouldn't have been one of them. So on some level, it seems like going back to the franchise would kind of be... I don't even know what. This train of thought turns out not to really go anywhere, sorry.

Anyway, that was three years ago and it wasn't the last movie I ever got to see, so I should probably just move on.

More immediately, I know two non-spoiler, in-the-ad-campaign things about it and neither one is really all that interesting to me:

- It's about Ultron (obviously); and
- Oh good, the Maximoffs, that's what I needed to make my day complete.

(Plus, it's fairly obvious from the sting at the end of the first one that the next one's going to be some variation on The Infinity Gauntlet - bleh - and I read somewhere that Captain America 3 is going to be sonofabitching Civil War? Colon-q-fuck-that. It's time to start looking for the cord that stops this train.)

However!

Yours is a recommendation I respect, and for some preposterous reason my mother wants to see it, so I probably will end up going sometime once the semester is over.

Which leaves me with a question that only someone who has seen it (and probably them) can really answer: Before I do that, should I set aside eight to ten hours of my life and watch Iron Man 3, Thor 2, Captain America 2, and Guardians of the Galaxy first? (I'm not watchin' two seasons of Agents of SHIELD, that's not even on the table. :)

--G.
* EXCEPTION: The judges would grudgingly accept that a Spider-Man online "TV" series could justifiably be called "webisodes".
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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