I like a lot of Joss Whedon’s work, but I’ve always found his public persona fairly irksome: too eager to hoard credit and diminish the contributions of his co-workers. Typically, he’s dropped hints in the press that the stuff you like about Age of Ultron was all his and the stuff you didn’t like was all Marvel.
But I disagree, as some of the things that irked me were classic Whedon problems:
- The story was at times more interested in subverting our pre-established narrative expectations than in creating its own expectations.
- Too many different characters employed the same kind of quippy postmodern jokes.
- Too much of the dialogue consisted of characters reversing their own turns of phrase, or reversing each others’.
- Tony Stark: Banner and I have been doing research...
- Steve Rogers: -That would affect the team.
- Tony Stark: -That would END the team.
- Thor: IS THAT THE BEST YOU CAN DO?
- Ultron: THIS is the best I can do.
Later, we have a better example of how to pull off a rousing dialogue callback:
- Tony Stark: How do we cope with something like that?
- Steve Rogers: Together.
- Tony Stark: We’ll lose.
- Steve Rogers: We do that together too.
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