Okay but Clint talking to Wanda. On a city in the sky with robots trying to kill them. That is a father talking. That is a father trying to help a scared kid and I just really love what they did with Clint okay.
“We knew, that despite all the diplomacy and the handshaking and the rhetoric, to build a better world sometimes means having to tear the old one down.”
HYDRA doesn’t need you to be a Nazi. That’s a distraction; HYDRA merely asks that you mistrust and hate other people. That’s their way in, and it’s an easy one: just turn on the news. People are terrible, dead set on destroying the environment, history, ideals, and – most of all – each other… Not you, of course. You know better. So isn’t it then your duty to save people from themselves, even if they can’t see it’s for their own good?
Once HYDRA knows your cause, it’s just a matter of looking up the correct script in their asset-handling files and telling you what you want to hear. Everybody has a file.
“I know I’m asking a lot, but the price of freedom is high; it always has been.
It’s a price I’m willing to pay. And if I’m the only one, then so be it. But I’m willing to bet I’m not.”
This is why Steve is HYDRA’s antithesis. It’s more than fighting bullies – his worldview is entirely incompatible with their vision because each is based on opposite conclusions about humanity. Steve is willing to bet on us.
It’s telling that HYDRA’s answer to Captain America is an ‘ideal’ soldier who has been utterly stripped of identity and agency, while Steve represents both the desire to be better and the freedom to make that choice. For himself; for everyone. This is not naivete. Anyone who survives to adulthood will have long-since learned that justice may exist, but is far from guaranteed, and Steve’s decision to both love and trust others is a dangerous one. As others have said: choosing to be a moral person in an amoral world is one of the hardest things there is.
“Grandad loved people. But he didn’t trust them much.”
Fury is interesting.
He doesn’t share HYDRA’s contempt for humanity, but it’s no coincidence that he delivers his anecdote about lacking trust even while Project Insight, the poisonous fruit of this mindset, looms in the background. He represents the gulf between HYDRA’s misanthropy and Steve’s defiant faith in others, the complicated middle-ground between two complicated extremes.
Nick’s paranoia is hard-earned – it’s a survival mechanism – yet the behaviors that made him successful were instrumental in HYDRA’s infiltration of SHIELD. His rational reaction to evil also allowed that evil to perpetuate itself. But what do you do if that’s the only way you know how to live?
Okay, one thing I absolutely hated in Age of Ultron was the prima nocta ‘joke’. It wasn’t in the original released clip so it must have been a late addition, and I cannot for the life of me work out why Joss Whedon thought it was funny or appropriate. Maybe he thought it was somehow clever sneaking some Latin in under the radar, but even then I can’t work out what he expected-
“Wait, what’s prima nocta?”
“Oh, it’s the word for the old English law which dictated a noble had the right to rape a woman on the first night of her marriage!”
Natasha talked to Laura, though. (And to Laura’s little girl? She does have a name, I think, I’ve just forgotten it.) It passes by the ABSOLUTE BARE MINIMUM but I think it does pass.
