slikmar

Well, SS is all about using bad guys to do things no one else can do. (too soon?)

The one good thing about the movie, is whether you agree or not, you can see both sides of the argument - unlike the travesty that was the Civil War in the comics.

Wonder how long, if none of these streaming services are reaching the numbers they expect, before we start seeing them making deals with places like Netflix and Hulu to stream their shows.

When the Ents decide to tear down a tower, they don't mess around. Pretty sure Saruman's tower was a lot higher then that before the forest showed up.

Wonder how long, if none of these streaming services are reaching the numbers they expect, before we start seeing them making deals with places like Netflix and Hulu to stream their shows.

I think this might be setting up Disney's channel, start up new series on there.  Which would be unfortunate because I won't be getting Disney's channel

I might catch it if its on netflix, but this is not a character I ever liked or wanted to see a movie about.

They should have used the first episode with Dick Sargent, by having it been Aunt Clara having transformed Darren into something, and due to her messed up magic, he didn't come back exactly the same.

Dammit, Houston letting Boston take series lead. They had one job, make sure that NY or Boston, whichever they played, did not go to world series and they are trying to mess it up.

It was sad, both Narn and Centauri wanted to rebuild their crushed empires, to be great as they once were.  Londo was willing to do awful things to get there -- and so was G'Kar.  They wanted their homeland back, they wanted their pride back, at all costs.  At different times in the show either one seemed tremendously villainous or heroic, sympathetic and unlikable.  It was verywell handled.

The one good thing about the movie, is whether you agree or not, you can see both sides of the argument - unlike the travesty that was the Civil War in the comics.

The one good thing about the movie, is whether you agree or not, you can see both sides of the argument - unlike the travesty that was the Civil War in the comics.

The one good thing about the movie, is whether you agree or not, you can see both sides of the argument - unlike the travesty that was the Civil War in the comics.

The one good thing about the movie, is whether you agree or not, you can see both sides of the argument - unlike the travesty that was the Civil War in the comics.

The resources that Tony put into the Avengers new compound, plus the Avengers themselves makes them the equivalent of a private military with global reach. Even if benevolent, having that kind of organisation to pursue its own agenda & interests would scare any number of governments, plus the norms of international peace, order & justice. 
 
Also, the Avengers are benevolent in their pursuit of the mission, however they have caused or exacerbated events they have been involved with ie collateral damage. 
 
- Sokovia -- Tony's attempt to fill the void left by SHIELD by deploying remote controlled armour drones operated by an AI like Jarvis. Collateral damage report: AI infused itself to a drone and took a major city in Solovia skyward before releasing it back to Earth like a meteor. 
 
- Crossbones incident: collateral damage is that Scarlet Witch accidentally threw a bomb that detonated into a nearby building causing a number of deaths & a diplomatic incident. If Wakanda wanted to sue the Avengers on behalf of their people, which court of law hears the case? 
 
In other words, the Avengers are well intentioned, but are not as efficient as they could be. To others, namely foreign governments the Avengers operate in; they appear reckless, sloppy etc with the government having to "clean up the mess". 
 
Other incidents and events the Avengers have been involved in: Battle of New York, the Triskalian (Winter Soldier), London (Dark World), South Africa (Hulk vs Hulkbuster), UN (when Bucky was framed), etc. 
 
All this reached a point in which governments of the world decided "enough is enough". Some kind of supervision is needed to coordinate & minimise the unintended damage The Avengers leave in their wake to protect Earth & its people from extraordinary threats. 
 
Tony agreed with their assessment and he had the most to lose, ie the investment in the Avengers & the new Avengers compound. 
 
Steve disagreed, believing that the safest hands of the Avengers were themselves, ie self governance. 
 
Really, both Tony AND Steve are right, however only one of them is allowed to continue under the framework of Sokovia Accords... to maintain some sense of international order & diplomacy between nations. 
 

I think it's clear who is right.
 
Look at the problems the Avengers dealt with which were pointed to in the movie as justification for the Accords to control the Avengers' actions:
 
1) The alien invasion of New York
2) The attempt by HYDRA to take over the world using new SHIELD super-helicarriers
3) The attempt by Ultron to destroy the world
4) The successful attempt by Crossbones to steal a biological weapon and the casualties from his suicide
 
1) The alien invasion of New York:
The Avengers were formed and asked to intervene by SHIELD which is the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division in the MCU. The government asked them to form and intervene in the situation. The government also bungled and attempted to nuke New York City, which wouldn't have ended the invasion, but would have just killed civilians and the heroes who were trying to stop the invasion. So the Avenger's actions were sanctioned, saved millions of lives locally, plus saved the world.
 
There was no justification shown anywhere to display how the Avengers did anything at all which was inappropriate.
 
2) The attempt by HYDRA to take over the world using new SHIELD super-helicarriers
The government's intelligence services were deeply penetrated by a terrorist organization which was using government resources to build superweapons which would assassinate everyone worldwide who might be capable of someday of opposing the terrorists. The couple of heroes who tried to stop that from happening were hounded by the terrorists who were misappropriating government resources but managed to stop events from escalating by crashing some of the superweapons into the ocean and crashing one of them into the government building which the terrorists had been using as their headquarters.
 
During these events, the only thing I could see for the US government to be upset at the Avengers would be making all those SHIELD/HYDRA secrets available to everyone on the internet. But that was done by the director of SHIELD deliberately giving his access codes to make it happen while he was standing next to the SHIELD agent who was typing in the commands.
 
There was no justification shown anywhere to display how the Avengers did anything at all which was inappropriate. Additionally, all the people working in the non-US governments of the world should be thrilled at what happened because they weren't assassinated by the HYDRA superweapon. They should also be thrilled at getting all the free intelligence information.
 
3) The attempt by Ultron to destroy the world
Once Ultron existed, he had to be stopped because he wanted to kill the vast majority of the people on Earth. In Sokovia, the Avengers took great pains to evacuate the threatened city before the crisis started. And after the crisis started, they took great pains to continue protecting and evacuating civilians.
 
If the Avengers had been slowed down by as much as five minutes while asking for UN permission to save the world from destruction, the world would have been destroyed.
 
You could argue that this series of events was started by the Avengers. But when you get down to it, Tony Stark was doing questionable scientific research behind the backs of the other Avengers which prevented them from making sure he had proper safeguards in place and which prevented anyone from being there to monitor things when it visibly started going wrong.
 
The actions that the Avengers made were entirely appropriate. The actions of Tony Stark which were made behind the backs of the Avengers were probably inappropriate. You could justify UN restrictions and monitoring on dangerous scientific research, but not the response of the Avengers. (I could also argue that the invasion of New York started in Project Pegasus because the government was doing dangerous scientific research in secret without proper oversight.)
 
You could also argue that the Hulk being mind controlled into going on a rampage was somehow the Avengers fault. But honestly, the president of the USA could have been mind-warped by the same villain and could have been persuaded into starting a global thermonuclear war. The leader of any country, company, or organization could have been just as mind-twisted as the Hulk was and would have been just as powerless to stop it. That's not the fault of the Avengers, that's just the state of affairs when a wide array of superpowers become available to random individuals who might choose to abuse them.
 
4) The successful attempt by Crossbones to steal a biological weapon and the casualties from his suicide
First of all, the theft of the biological weapon happened even with the Avengers being right there. That suggests that the theft would have been fully successful without the Avengers being there and a WMD would have been in the hands of a terrorist.
 
The chase of people trying to escape with the biological weapon was conducted with what appeared to be a high degree of professionalism and skill. All the bad guys were caught and the WMD was recovered despite competent planning on the part of the bad guys.
 
It's unknown how much time the Avengers might have had to contact the proper authorities in the nation where the events happened. But we also don't know whether the local authorities were trustworthy or competent.
 
It is also unknown why the facility had a WMD on the premises without enough armed security and safeguards to withstand a terrorist attack. Or why the facility was located in a densely populated urban area without roads of adequate size to allow a police response to an emergency. In the US, a facility like that couldn't get a high enough clearance from the CDC to do WMD research. Maybe the facility had the WMD because of an ongoing local medical emergency like an Ebola outbreak. But if it wasn't something like that (and that wasn't indicated at all in the movie), the UN should look into imposing regulations on who has access to biological WMD's, the safety of research facilities, and sanctions on any nation or facility which breaks the rules.
 
Back to the movie...the problem most of the public and governments appeared to have with the series of events was when Crossbones set off his (inobvious inaccessible focus) suicide bomb in the middle of a dense crowd of people. The purpose of an IIF is that people don't notice it. Professional hand-to-hand combatants who were familiar with Crossbones himself and who were also familiar with explosives weren't able to spot the bomb despite being in his presence for several minutes. I don't think it could be argued that if the Avengers had let the local police handle the situation that they would have spotted the bomb and have had the time to evacuate the area.
 
After it became clear that the bomb was going to go off inside of a crowd of people, the Avengers had the choice of letting the bomb go off inside a crowd of people or trying to move the bomb up and away from the crowd of people.
 
There was no way to know how powerful the bomb might be. There was no way to know how soon the bomb would go off.
 
There was no way to know whether there was a significant number of people in the multi-story building nearby or whether that building would be in the bomb's blast radius.
 
The best available option to preserve lives was to move the bomb up above both the crowd and the building. Fortunately, the crowd was saved but the bomb exploded before getting high enough to spare the building.
 
I really don't at all understand world leaders, particularly Wakanda, getting into a hissy fit about this. If the Wakandan nationals had been in the crowd walking toward the building (rather than already inside) and had been saved, I would presume by his juvenile reaction to the event that the leader of Wakanda would have been perfectly fine with that and would be praising the Avengers' brilliant reaction to the crisis.
 
Sorry, most world leaders in a terrorist event don't blame the first responders because their citizens were 40 yards closer rather than 40 yards further away from the terrorist when he sets off his suicide bomb.
 
Anyway, I don't see anything at all there to blame the Avengers for. "Let the terrorist have the WMD because if he were to have a suicide bomb which no one can see, then he might set it off" isn't really a valid plan for dealing with emergencies.
 
=======
 
So from my perspective, there's no justification for the Accords to exist (and no justification for them to have been either proposed or ratified but let's set that aside for the sake of conversation).
 
Should the Avengers have signed on to it?
 
Tony Stark is mentally unstable. When he was confronted by the mother whose son was killed by Ultron, Tony lost his ability to reason just as he did during various comic book story arcs like his Armor Wars and Civil War. That was true to the comics but doesn't make him, at all, right in his position.
 
In the HYDRA incident and the Ultron incident, the delay of just a couple of minutes would have meant the world as we know it would have been destroyed along with millions of lives.
 
There's not going to be a UN committee already gathered together 24 hours a day waiting to render decisions on whether to send in the Avengers. Just getting the committee up to speed on the information they would need to have in order to make a decision would take longer than a couple of minutes. By the time the committee had time to discuss and debate whether to send in the Avengers, the world would have been destroyed for sure at least twice and probably a third time already that we know of. So I don't see any way at all for that committee plan to work.
 
(Now if they wanted to make the Avengers do a UN committee after-action report so that better pre-planning and responses for future missions could be done, I could see something like that being useful. But that isn't part of the Accords.)
 
If I were in the Avengers, I'd have made an intellectual case to the Secretary of State, an imbecile who can't think things through on his own, and to Stark, who is mentally unstable, and try to jolt either of them into seeing that the Avengers' actions were appropriate and necessary. I'd also do the media circuit and explain to the press and public exactly why they'd already be dead many times over if the Accords were in place.
 
If that didn't work to stop the Accords from being signed, I'd advocate the Avengers not sign, stay together, and respond to any future world-threatening crisis as if the Accords didn't exist (while continuing the media appearances). Eventually, the Avengers would either save the world again and wouldn't be jailed for it due to the political backlash. Or some country which signed the Accords would experience a big enough crisis to invite the Avengers in even though they aren't UN sanctioned and that country would also become an advocate to repeal the Accords.
 

BIggest shocker to me was the ending to Deathwalker.  Which is also one of my favorite episodes, along with Comes the Inquisitor.

I could really see them being in the 60s as part of the race to space, with Reed being the scientist so ahead of everyone else, they deny what he is presenting.
 

One thing that strikes me about the rebooted Venom origin, and I haven't seen the movie and not sure if I will, is "why does Venom look like a black spider-man costume?" when in the new version, it had nothing to do with spidey.

Well, SS is all about using bad guys to do things no one else can do. (too soon?)

The second one was good, too. Badgers just don't have any taste.

I think you guys are picturing them zooming around NYC superheroing. Not really necessary. Mole Man? Lives underground. Negative Zone? Literally another dimension. They could introduce the Savage Land via a FF franchise. Again, not in the public's eye. The FF adventuring and exploring isn't a radical change. They directly trace their lineage to Jules Verne type adventures and pulp Sci Fi adventures. There's nothing at all radical about having them be mostly out of the public eye.
 
And if they were in the public eye? So what? Why would someone comment on a group of supers who were around 50 years ago in the context of any of the other MCU material? When would that have naturally come up in conversation in any Marvel movie to date? I think Fury has commented on a rise in the number of powered people, but he never said the current crop is the first crop of same.

I don't see a problem: Frame them as scientists, adventurers and explorers, not superheroes. No reason for them to ever really be in the public eye much. Certainly as easy as fitting in Pym's original Ant Man.