Friday 27 September 2013

First Age of Ultron teaser!

The SDCC teaser for The Avengers: Age of Ultron is finally online, and it looks...well, see for yourself.


I understand some people might be disappointed by the lack of actual footage in this, but give Disney a break. The movie doesn't come out for two years, and it's still knee-deep in pre-production. Honeslty, I think it's so much the better for not having random flashes of pointless footage or being an endless series of sweeping lens flares - we see Ultron people. Disney's just given us a good glimpse at Ultron. Granted, he looks exactly the same as he does in the comics, but it's nice to see the cinema interpretation of the world-killing android, especially two years ahead of the film's release.

Then, of course, we get to the question of Hank Pym. I've always seen him as an integral part of the Avengers line-up, and just as integral to Ultron's story. However, Whedon seems to have cut him out and made Tony Stark Ultron's creator instead. As painful as it is that they would change such a big piece of comic canon for the screen, I think this works very well; we've seen how crazy Stark is about his tech (remember that 'house party' in Iron Man 3?), so it's only the natural evolution of his story that he would one day create something that went wrong. Dangerously wrong. As in 'destroy the world' wrong. It would take too much time in the new movie to set up Hank Pym and Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver (who I am really excited to be seeing onscreen).

Finally, we get to the titles themselves. And the screams. Lots of screaming. Talk about setting the tone - Disney doesn't want us to forget that in many of the comic runs he appears in, Ultron kills anything from thousands to millions to, in his most recent run (also called Age of Ultron, though totally not worth a read) billions of puny humans. He's a furious killing machine that's more than a match not just for the Avengers, but for the whole world.

So now I'm really excited for The Avengers: Age of Ultron, and that's why. Not that I wasn't excited before, but now we have this teaser as proof of how awesome the movie is going to be. Joss knows what he's doing, and he's doing it right.

Friday 20 September 2013

Why I hate spoilers

Some people thrive on spoilers. They love finding out what's going to happen in a book or movie before it's release, and then enjoy telling people those details just as much.

I'm not one of those people. I hate spoilers. A lot.

A lot of my friends don't understand, so I'll explain. I'm going to use Buffy the Vampire Slayer as an example.

I started watching it recently (a friend's been lending me the DVDs), and everyone told me that series 3 and 5 were the best. So I got through series 1 and 2 and really, really enjoyed them. I was told that they weren't the best of the 7 seasons, but they were still awesome.

Then up came a spoiler. Well, more than one. At college, people started to tell me everything about series 5, 6 and 7, assuming I wouldn't care because the show's been out for nearly a decade. Unfortunately, I do care. I got to series 5, which everyone says is the best, and I realised that I wasn't enjoying it as much as the first two, even though it was supposed to be better. I'm pretty sure the reason for this was because my friends had spoiled every single detail of every plot twist and development that was going to happen.

In conclusion to that little anecdote, spoilers ruin tension. They ruin any kind of suspense. If you know what's going to happen, why watch or read it?

People have been spoiling stuff for years - from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to Charlotte's Web (I kid you not, when I was little, there was this kid at my school who took particular delight in annoying me. One day, he saw I was reading Charlotte's Web...) and I'm fed up of. Not just of the spoilers themselves, but of the nonchalent way in which people spoil things. They assume that nobody minds having something they're reading ruined.

I do.