Yup, we’re doing two issues at once this time, because when Book Six came out I was out of the country and didn’t have the time or the energy to buy, read and review a comic. Turns out it was kind of a shame, because Book Six was the most important issue of the run so far.
Principle photography for Amazing Spider-Man 2 continues to roll in New York City. Recently, onlookers saw their first look at Jamie Foxx‘s Max Dillon and Andrew Garfield Spider-Man sharing their first publicly filmed scene. Naturally, everyone started getting pictures and video on their cell phones.
While the film crew continued to work with Andrew and Jamie in front of the Hearst Building, filling in as the fictional Oscorp Industries, those around them were busy posting everything they saw to social media. By the look of the flipped car and setting, it looks Spidey saves Max (pre-transformation to Electro) from getting hit by a car.
Meanwhile the people over at celebuzz were able to get a bit closer to the Columbia Pictures set, getting the finer details of Andrew and Jamie rehearsing and shooting their scene together. They nabbed a better look at the new and improved Spider-Man costume. Which, sticks closer to the comic book iteration we all know, and honestly the best representation of the suit seen so far. Jamie Foxx on the other hand, well, I’m getting a Jim Carrey as Edward Nigma from Batman Forever vibe. Not good. Anyway, check out the image gallery below:
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Director James Gunn has been on a roll with the pre-production of Guardians of the Galaxy in recent weeks, most recently casting former Walking Dead star Michael Rooker. There are still some more shoes to be filled, but there isn’t too much time left to round out the cast seeing as how shooting starts in June. In a way he’s literally under the “Gunn” on this one.
All bad puns aside, the director of Marvel‘s “standalone film” took a breather and attended the UK premier of another Marvel franchise, Iron Man 3, in London, England, which is, coincidentally, the same location of Shepperton Studios where James is currently preparing to film. While there between the red carpet and the theater, Gunn took time to have a chat with HeyUGuys. He addressed comparisons to Star Wars, casting choices and how Guardians is different than the other Marvel films. As usual, James answers everything in his own special little way.
Read on after the jump for more.
After weeks of uncertainty, I think this comic has finally hit its stride.
If you’ve read these reviews before, you know that I’ve criticized the pacing, the lack of backstory, and the vagueness of what exactly Ultron did to so completely wreak havoc on Earth. Book Five of Age of Ultron doesn’t solve all of those problems, but it does give them all a somewhat startling and endlessly intriguing new direction, and as such it becomes the best issue of the series so far.
After escaping the carnage of New York and San Francisco, the surviving Marvel Heroes relocate to the Savage Land, where they hope to regroup and find a way to deal with Ultron’s wrath. Things are complicated by the news that Ultron himself is not actually leading the conquest. Instead, he’s watching things from the future while Vision runs things in the present day. With this information, the heroes begin to form a plan, and an old ally returns to galvanize their efforts.
I praised the last issue of this miniseries for the way it seemed to open up the door to the greater plot of this series. I still feel like everything that came before could have been covered in one issue, not three, but that’s a Bendis comic for you. He takes longer than other writers do, and while that can sometimes be frustrating, it also means he can deliver big character moments. Here, in issue five, he not only delivers those moments, but kicks down the door of this comic. Everything is bigger and more ambitious. Everything seems part of a larger whole, finally, and that makes what’s come before worth it…at least, so far.
I don’t know yet where this is heading. I won’t spoil it for you, but parts of this seem awful gimmicky. Other parts, though, look like the stuff of fantastic character building. We’ll see where it goes. In the meantime, I’m willing to brand Age of Ultron Book Five a thrilling, relentlessly plot-filled issue that sets up the rest of the event in marvelous ways.
Earlier this week Marvel was finally able to release the long delayed Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase One box set, containing every “Phase One” Marvel film from Iron Man right up to last year’s highly successful Avengers film. As with most special editions these days, the box set also contains a treasure trove of deleted and alternate scenes many fans have yet to see, unless you’re one of the lucky one’s who are currently in possession of the box set.
Many fans have already seen the behind the scenes footage of Thor: The Dark World which was pulled from the Internet, but this also includes new highlights for Iron Man 2 and The Avengers. There’s Iron Man 2 and it’s alternate ending, featuring Mickey Rourke’s Whiplash kidnapping Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper towards the ending of the film. This ending isn’t quite what you would expect in an Iron Man film.
Forgive the look of the “special effects” though, since Jon Favreau went and had the ending re-shot these clips didn’t quite that polished effects look everyone is used to:
The Avengers, otherwise know as “Joss Whedon is a freaking genius”, ensemble feature is more about deleted scenes cut for time that didn’t really affect the overall aesthetic of the film. Joss shot a lot of coverage for this film, most notably the now famous Shawarma scene added just prior to the theatrical release. The scene was a surprise hit with everyone who stayed through the credits and has taken on a life of it’s own on the Internet. Take a look at the behind the scenes featurette and the deleted scenes after the jump.
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Hey, this thing is actually getting interesting?
If you read the last three reviews I did of this event book (Hi, all two of you!) you’ll remember that I’ve been very skeptical of it from the start. The opening issue didn’t impress me, the second treaded water a bit, and the third only began to show something a little intriguing. I won’t say that issue four kicks Age of Ultron wide open, but at the very least it does present some of the greater story that I’ve been hoping for all this time, and even if I don’t end up liking where that goes, I can finally say I like where it is right now.
NOTE: Spoilers for the last three issues ahead.
So, last issue Luke Cage took She-Hulk to Ultron’s headquarters atop the ruins of Manhattan with the hope of “selling” her to the artificial intelligence and figuring out why Ultron was interested in buying superheroes in the first place when he could just, you know, kill them. Once there, Cage discovered that the being at the center of all that technology wasn’t Ultron, but a ripped-in-half Vision. From there, Cage and She-Hulk learn a secret that could change the whole face of this comic (which I won’t reveal here). Meanwhile, Captain America, Iron Man and the rest of the Manhattan superhero survivors make their way to the Savage Land, and Black Widow and Moon Knight plot their own escape from San Francisco.
This is my favorite issue of the event so far, not just because it shows our heroes being more proactive than reactive for the first time, but because it sheds light on the Ultron story in ways we hadn’t seen before. I was worried, especially after the “Look at all the carnage that’s already happened” vibe of the first issue, that this would be a very simple, single-layered Ultron tale. Ultron wants to destroy humanity, humanity fights back, one side wins and one side loses. But after the revelations of the last two issues it’s clear that something bigger is at work here, and that’s, if nothing else, comforting to me. It was easy for me to get excited about something like, say Avengers vs. X-Men or even Fear Itself (because the concept of the nemesis intrigued me more than most Marvel event books), but this one had me skeptical. Ultron is a great nemesis in the right hands, but it’s hard to make a killer robot (in any context) more interesting than “Hey, look out for that killer robot!” With this issue, Brian Michael Bendis seems to be proving that he’s capable of overcoming that.
Not that we’re out of the woods yet, mind you. We still have six more issues to get through, and at any time we could fall victim to deus ex machina or a surprising and completely ridiculous twist, neither of which are new to Marvel event books. Still, if you were waiting for things to really kick in with this comic, Book Four is the one that did it for me. Now I’m not just ready to be impressed, but I’m convinced that I can be.
Now that Marvel has gone full force into their “Phase Two” development and franchise hits Iron Man 3 and Thor 2 are on the way, what is the state of Captain America: The Winter Soldier? The studio’s super hero sequel has been rounding out all their casting choices recently and with filming only a few weeks away may cast their biggest import since Robin Sparkles.
According to the Latino Review (and their infamous “insider”) the Anthony and Joe Russo directed feature has cast arguably the greatest pound for pound fighter in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, Georges St-Pierre.
The current welterweight champion, recently coming off a strong victory against challenger Nick Diaz, has been reportedly cast as villain Batroc the Leaper, a mercenary and master of the French form of kick boxing known as Savate. Here’s a portion of his character description from the Latino Review:
“Batroc is an experienced thief and smuggler, who also speaks French and English. Although, as a mercenary, he does not hesitate to perform any number of criminal acts for his clients, Batroc has, by his own rights, a strong sense of honor, and he will turn against any client whom he feels has unfairly deceived him into committing crimes to which he might not otherwise have agreed.”
Considering they share the same first name and are both masters of kick-boxing, St-Pierre is about the closest thing to the real life Batroc we might ever see. And while considered more of a B-list villain to many, Batroc has fought the likes of Captain America, Spider-Man and the Punisher throughout his criminal career.
Disney and Marvel have refused to comment on the casting, but seeing as how Batroc is more of a “villain with a conscious” he may not be the bad guy everyone is suspecting him to be. Expect an official statement from the studios in the next few weeks once Captain America: The Winter Solider begins filming later on in April.
Captain America: The Winter Solider hits theaters everywhere April 4th, 2014.
Source: /Film
So, could the second issue of this massive Marvel movement (see what I did there?) impress me more than the first one did?
You might remember from last week that I was a little bummed that Brian Michael Bendis and company decided to begin Age of Ultron after Ultron had already unleashed his wrath on Earth. We saw superheroes hiding out, desperate, scared, vastly outnumbered by killer robots, but we didn’t see any real conquering on the part of everyone’s favorite evil AI. But you know what? That’s fair. After all, the title suggests that Ultron’s “age” has already begun, so maybe I shouldn’t have expected to see the devastation. My other gripe, though, was with the pacing. It just felt like the whole point of the issue was “look how desperate our heroes are,” which to me isn’t enough material for a full issue. That said, there was still enough about it that intrigued me as I picked up issue two, so Bendis at least succeeded on some level. But what about issue two? Could it improve on the shortcomings I saw last week?
The first page shifts locations from Manhattan to San Francisco, where Black Widow and Moon Knight are living pretty much the same existence that their New York counterparts are: they’re hiding out, they’re scrounging for anything they can find on the streets, they’re wounded, they’re certain they’ll die. But they’re determined to die fighting, which seems to be the big theme of the book so far (not that it’s a bad theme, mind you).
Meanwhile, in the tunnels beneath Central Park, Spider-Man is being interrogated by the other heroes left around (which include the likes of Iron Man, Doctor Strange, She-Hulk, Captain America and Hawkeye, and several others) after his recent rescue. The question is raised: Why were supervillains kidnapping heroes to sell them to Ultron? Why does Ultron need human help? Why does he want someone like Spider-Man?
It’s there that Age of Ultron stopped being a scenario and really became a story for me. Bendis has a way of doing that, particularly in his event books: he raises a single question that will ring through the whole series, and it sticks with you as a reader whether you like it or not. These questions have varying degrees of effectiveness (just look back over the nearly a decade’s worth of event books he’s written for proof), but in a universe where so many things (arguably all things ) are possible, it’s definitely a valid way to kick things off. Sometimes it’s a “what if?” question (like, for instance, Secret Invasion), and sometimes it’s a “why?” question, which is where Age of Ultron seems to be headed. We know Ultron hates humanity. We know he wants humanity gone, and we know he’s doing a pretty efficient job of achieving that this time. So why the bargaining with other supervillains?
There are a few easy guesses that could answer this question, but the point is we have a catalyst now. We have something that propels our heroes. We have movement. I acknowledged in the last review that Bendis’s unique sense of pace doesn’t always jive with me, and that’s one of the reasons why I felt the first issue was weak. The second issue takes a bit too long to get to this hinge point for my taste, but I like a speedy pace with big event books. You might totally dig the pace here. The point is, we’re moving now, and that’s what pleased me most about this issue.
So, now we’ve got a question that will move our heroes forward, and we’ve got a better sense of how Ultron is operating. That should meant that next week we’ll see a more brisk pace, a more action-heavy piece of storytelling, and a bit of the actual event that will define this “event comic.” I’m still not in love with what I’m reading, but I’m much more intrigued than I was last week (plus I already agreed to write reviews on all 10 issues of this thing, so I’m reading issue 3 whether I like it or not at this point).
Well, here we are again, boys and girls. It’s Marvel event book time, and this time we get the return of Ultron. So, is Age of Ultron worth your time?
Patrick Troughton takes center stage in the second issue of Doctor Who: Prisoners of Time, freshly on the stands this week. Can this installment improve upon the first? Well, it wouldn’t be difficult…
Warning, here be spoilers. And Voord.
We’re treated this month to the art of Lee Sullivan, one of the long term artists for Doctor Who Magazine. This is a vast improvement upon last month. The likenesses are spot on and the original characters are vivid and imaginative. Very impressive, given the sheer number of background characters in this issue.
The story itself is a trifle. We don’t learn anything more about the mysterious hooded man in the first issue. Last month, I said I was reminded of The Five Doctors. This month, I fear we’re in for Ground Zero, a story arc undertaken by Doctor Who Magazine in the 90s, where various companions were taken at the end of each story leading to an anticlimactic and canonical nightmare of a finale.
I’m still not certain what this series is trying to do. It’s as if the Tiptons have gone on Wikipedia and glanced at each era of Doctor Who to see what it’s about. Yet there are dedicated in jokes that only the most obsessive fans would catch *cough*. The details are right, but the broad strokes are wrong. While these touches to the past are amusing, I want to learn what the bigger picture is. There had better be forward motion next month.
PAGE 1
Panel 1-These are three of the major TARDIS props used over the course of the series. From left to right: the current TARDIS (The Eleventh Hour onwards), the original (An Unearthly Child to The Seeds of Doom), and the bright blue 80s version (The Leisure Hive to Survival).
PAGE 2
Panel 1-”Look at the size of that one” was a reoccurring joke between Frasier Hines and Patrick Troughton, with them managing to work it into several scripts.
PAGE 6
Panel 1-The Babel Fish Emporium is a clear reference to former script editor Douglas Adams‘ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Yarvelling and Zolfian were, respectively, the creator and War Minister of the Daleks in the TV Century Dalek strips of the 1960s. Here, the Daleks were blue humanoids before radiation caused them to enter their metal casings. The Noble Arts is a tip of the hat to tenth Doctor companion Donna Noble. Cogley’s Books may be a reference to the Deep Space Nine episode Far Beyond the Stars, which mentioned a writer by the name of Samuel T. Cogley. Creatures spotted in the crowd include Slitheen or other Raxacoricofallapatorians (Aliens of London), a Voord (The Keys of Marinus) and a Sontaran (The Time Warrior).
Panel 4-Fezzes are cool.
PAGE 4
Panel 1-Magister was an alias of the Master used in The Daemons. The Hath appeared The Doctor’s Daughter. The Space Pig, even though he wasn’t really from space, appeared in Aliens of London.
Jubilee Pizzas first appeared in Dalek. The pizza box prop found its way onto the Torchwood set and was a mainstay during that series. The name itself comes from the Big Finish audio play Jubilee, also written by Rob Shearman and containing several of the same character beats.
Panel 4-The original Las Cadenas was a restaurant owned by Oscar Bocherby in Saville, Spain. (The Two Doctors)
PAGE 5
Panel 2- Every time the Voraxx are named, it appears to be in the same font as was used in the aforementioned Dalek strips.
PAGE 7
Panel 3-The woman looks an awful lot like Dr. Girlfriend from The Venture Bros.
PAGE 8
Panel 1-Belnap VII may be a reference to Nuel Belnap, a philosopher dealing in temporal logic.
PAGE 9
Panel 2-The penny farthing with the peculiar awning was part of the closing titles sequence of the cult 60s drama The Prisoner. Penny farthings were a key symbol in the show and represented to creator Patrick McGoohan of progress.
PAGE 11
Panel 6-The T-Mat was a teleportation system used on Earth during the mid-21st century. The Ice Warriors used it as a beach head during an attempted invasion of Earth. (The Seeds of Death)
PAGE 13
Panel 1-The robots in the corner are colloquially known as White Robots. They attacked Jamie and Zoe while they were trapped in a void that lead to the Land of Fiction. (The Mind Robber) It is thought that they were manifestations of the companions’ fear of the Cybermen and in the audio Legend of the Cybermen, they are servants of the Cyber invasion force. This is their first appearance in the “real world”. The costumes of the original White Robots were recycled from an episode of the BBC series Out of the Unknown. Quatloos are the currency of the Gamesters of Triskelion in the Star Trek episode of the same name. Cubits are used in Battlestar Galactica. The Alterian Dollar is from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, though it has recently collapsed.
PAGE 17
Panel 4- Jamie and the Doctor first ran into the Martians on Earth during the middle of a future ice age (The Ice Warriors). They, this time with Zoe in tow, came in to conflict with them again during the T-Mat crisis (The Seeds of Death). As the Doctor points out, it was the humans in the future that named them Ice Warriors, though the Martians themselves have used it in various times and places since.
PAGE 21
Panel 1-There appears to be a Draconian in the right corner (Frontier in Space).
Panel 3-The green blobby thing with a single eye is an Alpha Centauri, a race of hermaphroditic hexapods (The Monster of Peladon).
Panel 4-The weird black teletubby is another Voord. According to the Grant Morrison comic The World Shapers, the Voord are the ancestors of the Cybermen. Perhaps coincidentally, the comic features an older Jamie after his travels with the Doctor.
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