The teenager and I are working our way through the Marvel Comics Universe, watching the film in what is reportedly the order of events.

It certainly gives me more depth to Tony Stark, as the Avenger movies seem to hinge a lot on him.

The teenager adores Hawkeye.

And we both enjoy Joss Whedon’s and James Gunn’s humor in the scripts.

But these three films, though completely occupying space as Marvel movies do, with crazy action scenes, internal bickering and often violence among the team, tenseness and humor, fell flat for me.

Why?

Because these movies are based on comic books— comic books from an age where the science fiction of it was wild and the world still had so much unknown. Many of these characters/heroes predate space travel.

Captain America eludes to that when he says he misses the days when he was the biggest monster science had made, or something like that.

So to believe that Hawkeye has a family hidden on a farm that no one knows about in the 21st century seems unbelievable to me, primarily because I have to ask where those kids go to school.

And the larger the cast, the bigger the threat has to be, and the more the story is less about people and more about danger. The solutions in many of these scripts make no sense and the amount of civilian destruction is insane.

And to me, a Generation Xer, Age of Ulltron recreates September 11 (specifically the scene where Tony Stark asks how quickly he can buy a building and throws the Hulk into it, causing its implosion and a giant plume of dust through a major though fictional city). Also, the very idea that Ulltron infiltrates the Internet and represents artificial intelligence gone rogue, is very pertinent for the time period but has lingering air of the late 1990s panic that the opposite would happen—computers/operating systems weren’t smart enough to survive the Y2K date change.

In the Guardians series, the plot just never develops in proportion to the characters. We have these quirky misfit characters that have flimsy plots, and themes that don’t really go beyond their two dimensional comic book origins.

And this business with the infinity stones better have a satisfying conclusion. The idea that these mysterious power sources may all have some sort of intelligence/life map coded within them is fascinating.

Does each stone have part of the blue print to create the next incarnation of the universe? Or do the stones if reunited serve as a self-destruct mechanism?

Anyway, Ant-Man is next.

And I’m intrigued. Can we really trust Vision merely because he can yield Thor’s hammer? Or can he hold the hammer because he was forged by the hammer?

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