A review kinda thing for Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes episodes 1-22, inspired by/made for/dedicated to after a discussion here:
Captain America: CIVIL WAR TrailerChris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. appeared together last night on the Jimmy Kimmel show, and with them the new Civil War trailer, revealing plot elements and surprises, along with some familiar faces and some new ones...
Captain America: Civil War plot picks up where Avengers: Age of Ultron left off, as Steve Rogers leads the new team of Avengers in their continued efforts to safeguard humanity. After another international incident involving the Avengers results in collateral damage, political pressure mounts to install a system of accountability and a governing body to determine when to enlist the services of the team. The new status quo fractures the Avengers while they try to protect the world from a new and nefarious villain. (source - comicbookmovie.com)
Check out the trailer on youtube here -> https://youtu.be/uVdV-lxRPFo
Along with the trailer itself, here are official promo posters recently released...
What was your favorite part of the trailer?
The character you
. Spoilers ahoy.So I’ve been watching EMH the last days and I’ve arrived at Ultron, having watched S1E22. I have to admit, the first few episodes made it very hard to get into the series. The fact that those were micro-episodes that were then stitched together led to some jarring developments, such as when Cap and the Howling Commandos attack the Hydra base, but as soon as Bucky appears, the Howling Commandos vanish. What was it that they had to accomplish outside? Why couldn’t they enter the caste with Cap and Bucky? Also, knowing Maria Hill only from the MCU where she is a character supportive of the Avengers, here I found her antagonism bizarre, culminating (so far) in the nonsensical „AIM and Hydra are both fighting in the city, but let’s waste time and resources by antagonising Iron Man and Wasp” in S1E21. And the way Black Widow framed Hawkeye? She was standing right in front of Hydra agents (or Strucker? Can’t remember) with the container with Hulk’s blood at her feet, Hawkeye standing some 50 metres away, a SHIELD plane above them having a good view of the scene, and she tells the SHIELD people that Hawkeye is the double agent? Do SHIELD agents have no eyes? Are they not trained to independently analyse, think and decide? Do they blindly follow orders? That scene made me think that SHIELD must have been already infiltrated by Hydra à la Winter Soldier, because highly trained agents can’t be THAT stupid; it had to be deliberate. But then in S1E16 (I think) it turns out that there WERE records of that scene that allowed SHIELD to clear Hawkeye. Why did it take so long? Don’t they have after-battle analyses? Debriefings? It’s all so forced.
Minor nitpick: according to the map with Hydra’s conquest, they started out in the north-western Soviet Union, approximately Arkhangelsk? What?
With „Breakout”, however, the series finally got an overarching story arc. I was reminded of the recent Transformers: Robots in Disguise cartoon, because it has the same basic premise: Autobot prison ship crashes on Earth, Decepticon convicts escape, a team of Autobots gotta catch ’em all! Though why the Avengers seemingly did nothing for a week while waiting for Tony Stark to prep Avengers Mansion is beyond me.
Still, I started to enjoy the show. That’s in no small part thanks to Wasp, who is hands down the best character in the show. She’s clearly designed to be the heart of the team: she’s the first to help Hulk, her getting injured motivates several other characters to break out of a spell or keep on fighting. But she’s just so much fun! And she is the most human and rounded of these characters. Though I thought that she and Hank Pym were together from their introduction on, it turned out in S1E15 that that’s not the case. Huh. In E1S14, when the Masters of Evil try to take down the Avengers, I like to imagine that they took Wasp out first because they knew that with her being the heart and continuously motivating the other heroes to keep on fighting, on the meta level she’s the most dangerous of them all
Again a minor nitpick: Tony Stark’s voice is annoying.
The Kang storyline was enjoyable: good build-up in an early episode, good pay-off in episodes 17-19. Visually it’s great that Kang and his henchmen retain their very Kirby design, though it clashes with the design of both Ravena? (I don’t know how his generic beautiful love interest’s name is written), the Damo-Cleese (misspelling intentional), the saucers and the scarabs. And Kirby dots in blaster beams! So retro! All the action and excitement made me actually forget that the Avengers would win anyway and that all the mooks in this show went to the Stormtrooper Academy of Marksmanship, where you learn to stand around for up to ten seconds 5 metres away from your immobile target with unobstructed view and don’t shoot or if you shoot, patently miss. I’ve lost count of all the times some guns on those Hydra skull-tentacle-things took their sweet time to finally power up and allow the heroes to have a small chat with someone else or reboot their systems or whatever. The EMH universe is clearly rigged in the Avengers’ favour. That’s lazy writing.
Anyway, Kang. After all the action and excitement and destruction and surely hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties all over the worlds the fact that Wasp is pleading for the life of one woman she projects her romantic fantasies into (aforementioned Ravena) was quite jarring. Clearly someone was missing the bigger picture.
And for someone who is so desperate to eliminate Cap, Kang goes about it very clumsily. S1E4 showed very clearly that he can travel to any point in time deliberately and float around (almost) unnoticed. So why didn’t he wait at the point where Cap would hit water after falling from the rocket and kill him a second before the impact? Problem solved. Obviously this would make Cap being a part of the Avengers impossible, thus ruining the series. Which means the writer chose and constructed a very bad motivation and circumstances for it for Kang. Which reminds me of an episode of Transformers Prime (S1E19 „Rock Bottom”) where Megatron is trapped in a mine, Arcee has him at gunpoint and could end the Great War then and there, but hesitates because „that’s not how it’s supposed to be”/”not this way” or somesuch nonsense. Clearly someone missed the bigger picture. What do we learn from this as writers? Don’t create situations in your story that could derail your story fundamentally and then to save your story make an awkward saving throw. This doesn’t build tension, it only frustrates the viewer, because you as the writer create an opportunity you’re not obliged to create and then out of fear don’t seize it. Better not to create the opportunity.
Anyway, I’m going off on tangents. In episodes 17-19 Kang has at least three opportunities where he could kill Cap, but then waffles on how he will kill Cap, thus allowing someone to save the situation. This and similar situations, like Strucker reaching for the Cosmic Cube in S1E21, where he hesitates in the last second, thus allowing Hawkeye’s arrow with Antman on it to hit his hand away, are also problems of the animation/pacing. In so many cases the animators chose/were forced to animate the hesitating of the bad guys (and it’s always the bad guys), like with Strucker’s hand stopping mid-air above the Cosmic Cube for half a second before the arrow hits it. It’s like they did animate the two sequences separately from each other and then put them after each other: „Okay, so let’s animate Strucker reaching for the Cube. Then let’s animate how the arrow hits his hand away. Then let’s stick one after the other, because animating them combined is too much effort.” That’s bad animation and is part of the cause for the „world rigged in the Avenger’s favour” feeling mentioned above.
After Kang with the build-up and pay-off there’s Malekith [I like to imagine that in a mirror universe he has a good counterpart named Benekith] with no build-up and no pay-off. A shame.
Clearly the writers have no idea how psychiatry works: from the Ultrons spewing generic psychiatric-ish phrases in the early episodes that seem to be written to amuse, for they are shown to have no effect on the villains to Hank Pym’s generic „let’s talk it out” in S1E22 that also is shown to have no effect, the efforts to rehabilitate the villains are sadly on the laughable side. My psychiatrists communicated differently with me, but then again I’m no super-villain. Hank Pym isn’t a psychiatrist either, more an omni-disciplinary scientist with a specialisation in biology and robotics, but it really wouldn’t have hurt if Hank actually employed learned psychiatrists in his Big House prison and didn’t leave it to his creepy Ultrons designed NOT to build trust programmed with his autodidactic understanding of psychiatry. It’s nice that they included the idea of actually wanting to try to help the villains psychologically, but the execution... This shown ineffectiveness of psychiatry, the breakout in episodes 6 and 7 and the title „Assault on 42” from an episode in season 2 which implies to me another breakout build up to the implication that villains are neither rehabilitatable nor containable, leaving death penalty as the only solution to protect society from them. Which is a problematic message.
To sum it up: a show with not the best writing, not the best animation, but on average enjoyable.