Premise and Structure/Plot

There are a number of things that weren’t clear to me. While I hate that in a movie, it’s especially frustrating when the confusion happens early on fundamentals of the story.

• The opening voice-over was hard to hear.

• Why did Loki need that race of aliens (I didn’t even catch their names during the flick) to rule earth? As a deity, and especially with the cube thing, wasn’t he able to do it himself?

• Why did the aliens want to attack earth with Loki?

• How did Loki arrive on earth in the first few minutes? Since he did it, why couldn’t the aliens?

• Since the cube thing was so powerful, why was anything else needed to open the portal? I didn’t understand why Loki needed so much time and so much earthly help to open the portal.

• How did no one at the Stark tower realize that unauthorized work was happening on the roof? Sure, Loki would have killed them, but not before Tony learning about it.

• Loki knew a lot about specific things on earth, such as Bruce Banner being the Hulk. How did he know?

• What exactly was Loki’s plan by being caught? Black Widow got the information out of him that involved “the monster,” aka Hulk. But what did that mean? Was it part of his idea to pit the heroes against each other? That’s a stretch…A) Most of their in-fighting was natural and not induced by Loki and B) What did Loki think Hulk would do, kill all the others? Not reasonable.

The only thing I feared going into the movie came true- Black Widow and Hawkeye were too prominent in the action. In the finale it was ridiculous that they stood side-by-side with superheroes as if they were also invincible. Black Widow jumping on and riding that alien flying thingie was especially silly. According to the movie’s own rules, the boundaries of this universe, Black Widow and Hawkeye would have been killed within moments of the aliens arriving through the portal. That’s why they should have remained on the periphary, such as helping civilians. Earlier, they should have stuck to their roles, as when Black Widow tricked Loki into revealing his intentions with Hulk.

Even the poster made the mistake of giving them too much prominence. Captain America should have been in the spot where Black Widow is.

The end

While the finale looked great, it didn’t feel fresh as a catastrophic battle in a city’s core was done numerous time before.

Another thing that stood out was Hulk smashing that alien snake-ship-thingie. One punch and he knocked out a thing that was 1,000 times bigger than him? That should have been a little sequence.

Structure/Plot and Character

The story started evenly with Emily Blunt and Jason Segel each having reasons for the delay of their wedding. Then Act II started and it became just about Jason’s issue. That was uneven. It also wasn’t plausible. They moved to Michigan and yet the comments about Jason being overqualified for some of the restaurant jobs were as if they had moved to North Dakota. The guy was very talented so Jason becoming a bum and feeling un-manly was a weak choice for the story and ruined the good feelings I had originally developed for him.

Ending

The second half of the movie was way too long. The most glaring part was after the good scene with Jason’s parents; after their pep talk that set Jason straight, the next scene should have been his move to get back Emily. Instead, there was a needless and nonsensical scene where he broke up with his new girlfriend. It halted the momentum. That was something to assume, not show.

Premise

Tom was fired…and I wasn’t sure why. Rather than the muddled explanation of him not having a college degree, he should’ve been fired just because of the restructuring. Simple and relatable. Then in looking for new work and failing, Tom should have thought of the idea of going to school in order to have more and better possibilities.

Objective/Stakes

Ultimately, it was hard to believe that a Community College degree would have made such a difference to Tom. He had experience in retail, was a stellar employee, and he had another skill- cooking- to fall back on!

Character

Julia Roberts’ character was awful. Worse than not caring or rooting for a character, I hated her. She was nothing but miserable. There are ways to make us care for such a character and for her to still be an unlikely partner for Tom.

After registering for college, Tom was passive and had no objective. This ties into..

Structure/Plot

The girl with the scooter, the scooter gang, the jealous boyfriend…all meaningless to the story. If this was about Tom learning new aspects of life, then it needed to be a lot more interesting and meaningful.

I fell asleep when Tom and Julia kissed outside her house. There was not yet enough between them to make this plausible.

Premise / Logic / What if?

I loved just about everything in this movie. My only issue was with the nightmare creatures. I accepted the movie’s idea of offering sacrifices to the “ancients,” but I did not understand how that tied in to the host of zombies, ghosts, werewolves, etc. If anything, the ancients, in various forms, should have been the ones to prey on the gang at the cabin. It also raises the questions of how the monsters were captured and how they were held in place. The best movies do not leave such holes in their worlds.

A movie can have one gimmick, one What-if? That should have remained the ancients, that they existed and kept the peace with humanity as long as they got their sacrifices. To say that every other creature and evil also existed was silly, broke the mystique and not even necessary.

Added two weeks later: Despite loving it at the time, I now realize that hardly anything aside from the concept was memorable. No particular scene stands out in my mind, no character or line of dialogue.

Character and Structure/Plot

I would have agreed with the Academy had the second half of this film not been so down and aimless. That boiled down to a missing scene or sequence in the movie- George acts in a talkie, or at least takes a screen test for one, and learns audiences don’t respond to him the way they used to. It was never clear why everyone assumed he couldn’t make the transition from silent films to talkies.

I understood George’s issue in first not wanting to act in a talkie. But why did he remain so stubborn to the point of having to sell all his belongings? That ruined a good amount of empathy I had for him. And I didn’t see that as a natural part of his arrogance from the first half of the movie. Maybe it was, but it was still too negative for too long. The missing scene/sequence was needed after his own production failed and before he decided to sell his belongings.

Character

Simon Pegg was clearly the comic relief and I liked him. Jeremy Renner was the problem. His character was muddled, at times also comic relief (and it was stupid to have two character do that), at times mysterious, and then it turned out he was skilled like the others. More importantly, these disparate elements happened randomly. Meaning, I understood the mysterious turning into the truth about his background, but even after the truth was revealed, he seemed to be clueless about some things, then acted like Pegg, etc.

Little things

My spirit was dampened at the end of the opening chase scene when that agent was killed by the woman. It felt so false for him to not suspect a strange, pretty woman who just so happened to be walking in that deserted back-alley at that time. That same scene on a regular street or a blindside ambush in the alley would have been much better.

Tom Cruise scaling the outside of the hotel tower was the major set piece and, while it was cool in its own right, it failed in the area of plausibility. How did no one inside the hotel see him climb it? And, after getting in to the server room, how come Tom didn’t do the safer thing and exit the room from the door and take the elevator down? Good action movies do not ignore such issues.

Logic and Structure/Plot

In the hotel sequence, how did the blonde woman (who stole the documents in the opening) not know what her buyer looked like? This was a major turning point in the story and it rested on something so flimsy. That officially took me out of the movie and I watched the rest without caring what happened.