Avengers: Age of Ultron

Over Memorial Day Weekend I took some time to remember our country's greatest heroes...the Avengers!(especially Captain America!) Yes I finally got around to seeing it and it was awesome. It was action packed and hilarious. The only thing possibly better than  Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark is James Spader as Ultron, seriously the dude should get an Oscar. My favorite gag(that I'm still laughing about days later) is how in the opening sequence Captain America says "Watch your language" and everybody makes fun of him for it for the whole movie. Another interesting tidbit,with all the CG around Ultron and the Hulk, surprisingly the CG motion capture master himself Andy Serkis appears in the flesh for once as a vibranium smuggler from Wakanda.  Geeks will recognize Wakanda as the home of the Black Panther, a nod to a future movie. My only complaint: why does everybody use theri real names and never the more recognizable superhero names? Especially Hulk, who is usually referred to as "the other guy" we know who Bruce Banner's other side is, just say it for crying out loud.

This movie beins with the avengers working to help Thor retrieve the scepter of Loki which holds one of the Infinity Stones which were mentioned in Guardians of the Galaxy and it is revealed that some other stones have already appeared which means...wait, I'm getting way ahead of the story, let's back up. The Avengers have tracked the scepter to Sokovia, one of those generic Eastern European countries that is one nuke away from oblivion. As the team zeroes in on the Hydra base we meet the Maximoff twins, Wanda and Pietro, A.K.A. Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver respectively. They are working for Hydra and are supposed to stop the Avengers, but then Wanda messes with Stark's head and the mission ends up being successful-except that now Tony has an idea to use the stone to complete an A.I. project he calls Ultron. The idea is that the A.I. is supposed to protect the Earth so the Avengers don't have to, and since this particular stone is the Mind Stone which holds a mind, or rather an A.I. it seems the final piece to the puzzle. However, there's a misunderstanding in Ultron's programming and he thinks he's supposed to protect the Earth by getting rid of the Avengers. Ultimately Ultron's rason for being the villain is the world peace paradox that conflict can truly only be eliminated if there's nobody left to have conflict. Wanda can read minds, but she can't read Ultron because he's a machine so she and her brother work with Ultron to seek vengeance on the Avengers(the Maximoff family was destroyed by a Stark Industries bomb). Ultron seeks perfection by creating an organic body for himself, but as he begins to download his conciousness into the new body, it becomes a mind that Wanda can read and she reaizes he will destroy everybody. Now the twins and the Avengers have to work together to stop Ultron. Predictably they do save the day, but they look so awesome doing it. One last spoiler, the Vision comes in toward the end and plays a key role, and it was awesome seeing him in action. The reason I like the Vision is because back in my day, there was an Avengers video game which featured Captain America, Iron Man, Hawkeye and the Vision, which means that for the tail end of this movie, that team was actually together on screen, bringing to life something that was over twenty years in the making.

Now Marvel fans know there's way more coming in the next few years, and seriously, the next Avengers will be huge. In addition to the Avegners we already know from this movie, Ant-Man and the Fantastic Four are definitely happening which adds more candidates to the roster, as well as Black Panther when they pull that together, and Agents of Shield has also introduced Deathlok and Quake who could also join the Avengers roster, I know Quake was one in the comics which means Skye may make a jump to the big screen. Yes, Marvel fans, this movie was good, but it's only the tip of the iceberg.

Sword Art Online

Sword Art Online is a series similar to .hack, and yet, I would argue better, or at least more focused. Based on light novels of the same name, it follows players of online games, starting with the eponymous Sword Art Online, focusing particularly on one player named Kirito. Kirito was a beta tester who got ahead of the other players at official release because he had advance practice. Like .hack, the games of this series involve special gear that allow players to enter the games with all senses as if they were literally inside the game. Just as Tsukasa of .hack/SIGN ended up stuck in the game and in a coma in the real world, all players find themselves trapped in Sword Art Online. The first day everyone starts playing and then finds out they cannot log out. The Game Master explains the only way out is to win the game or die trying, and if anyone is forcefully removed from the game, their gear will automatically fry their brains. Many people die before they figure out this is legit and the players have to figure out how to escape on their own and the game becomes painfully real. Kirito makes many friends, especially Asuna and Yui who become his family. Asuna is a girl about the same age as Kirito who has become a guild leader and is known for specializing with a rapier. Yui appears to be a young player but is ultimately revealed to be an artificial intelligence that was supposed to monitor the players but went rogue and became attached to Kirito and Asuna who adopted her and treated her as their daughter. Kirito and Asuna continue to lead the march on completing the game, until it all ends early. During one mission, a guild attempt to clear a high level dungeon, Kirito notices that while most members of the guild are near death, the leader remains in good health. Kirito figures out that this player is in fact the game master who has integrated himself into the game just to observe players, but now that Kirito has outed him they settle it all in one final duel. Kirito actually wins and the game ends freeing most of the surviving players. However, 300 are still in comas including Asuna.

Kirito then finds out about a new game called Alfheim Online and one of his old friends from SAO tells him that someone thought they found Asuna inside the game, showing a screenshot that appears to be her. Kirito goes in the game and manages to reboot Yui as a navigation fairy who is very happy to see her daddy and sad to find out mommy is in trouble, and agrees to help find her. Yui leads Kirito to the central tower that leads up to Aincrad, the castle from SAO that now lies broken in the sky and tells him Asuna is at the top. Along the way, Kirito is guided through the game by his new friend Leafa, who turns out to actually be his sister who is playing the game in the next room at their house. Again, Kirito proves that through sheer will and determination and a little help from his friends and a little luck and hacking skill, he is able to find Asuna again the prisoner of a video game programmer, and free her, following a duel with the programmer.

The anime originally ended with Kirito and Asuna finally being free of the games, but the novels continued the story and now it has returned to anime with Sword Art Online II. The new game is titled Gun Gale Online and is quite simply a first person shooter like Call of Duty, etc. The big deal is that apparently someone has figured out how to kill from within the game, as in when a character is killed in the game, the player dies in the real world. Kirito has been content to pursue an education that will lead to a career in video games while spending his free time dating Asuna, hanging out with his friends and his sister and playing Alfheim so they can spend time with Yui. However, when he is contacted by the government to investigate GGO, he switches games and meets a girl named Sinon to be his guide in this game. Whereas everyone else relies on guns, Kirito uses a sword, because he has the skills to use it. This amazes and frustrates everyone around him, including Sinon. In the real world, Sinon is a school girl the same age as Kirito who once actually used a gun and killed someone when she was caught in the middle of a bank robbery. Her victim was actually the robber who threatened her mother, so it was righteous, but she was still traumatized and playing virtual sniper seems to be the only way to calm her nerves. Kirito can relate even though he doesn't know yet because he had to kill some people in SAO. Worst of all, he crossed paths with the killer and recognized a symbol from SAO, this player killer may be a player killer from another game, and this player may know Kirito as well.

How will this play out? Find out on SAO2 on Toonami!

Marvel's Agents of Shield

Sorry I'm late this week, busy weekend and hoped to see the new Avengers movie, did not pull it off. Instead I'm going to talk about Agents of Shield, the series that takes us behind the senes of the superhero movies and show ordinary people dealing with extraordinary situations. There are a lot of things going on in this show, but the big deal right now is the Inhumans. The Inhumans are a from a relatively obscure series about people modified by technology from the Kree from Guardians of the Galaxy. Long ago the Kree used terrigen crystals to modify chosen humans giving them gifts of inhuman power often at the price of inhuman deformity, hence they were known as Inhumans. The Kree abandoned these people, but hey kept on their traditions without the Kree and now a small group of them still remains hiding in secret. The really cool thing is, Skye is one of them. Her mother, Jiaying, was an Inhuman gifted with immortality and now Skye went through the terrigen mist and has the power to create tremors. Her real name is Daisy Johnson and she's actually a character known as Quake, who will some day join the Avengers, so that's cool. Bad news, her father is Mr. Hyde, though we haven't seen his full power, but we can connect the dots. He's not Inhuman, but he's...like evil Hulk. Then there's Gordon, the blind teleporter, and Lincoln, a doctor who can manipulate electricity, and Raina, a woman who aspired t be Inhuman until it happened and her body became covered in thorns and she has precognitive abilities.

Meanwhile, they have also brought us Deathlok and laid the groundwork for at least two other villains who will either come back later in the series or go straight to the movies. Along with movie tie-ins like cleaning up after Thor the Dark World and fighting with Hydra after Captain America Winter Soldier, this series is actually so awesome. The Hydra situation alon could drag this out for years, the whole cut one head and two grow back in its place thing seems serious, it seems like Hydra went through three or four heads in just this past season, and there will be another whenever the plot calls for it, I am sure. but for now, it's all about the Inhumans and tomorrow night will be the first episode since Avengers and the introduction of Inhumans, so it'll be good. Last week foreshadowed the movie with Raina having a vision about Ultron and Coulson asking Maria Hill to bring in the Avengers so the clean-up crew will have their work cut out for them!