drmka9

There's still a protocol and chain of command, though, and Lewis messed with both of those. I honestly don't think it would bother me if they had established her as having any EVA history or abilities. And truthfully, it doesn't bother me all that much. It's just the largest of the differences between the book and the film, and both interpretations are great. I think I overall prefer the book, but the film is still one of the best I've seen in some time.

I understand why they had Lewis do the final EVA, but it really undermines her character for me. She's a tough-as-nails former-military commander, there's no way in hell she'd pull the EVA specialist off the most precise EVA they have to make. Lewis essentially puts everyone else at risk because of her own guilt, and it's a shitty way to end an otherwise great character. I get why they did it, but the overall changes to the ending bugged. More so, I think, because in the book Watney explicitly says "Now, if this were Hollywood, here's what would happen...but this isn't Hollywood, so now here's what actually happened." It seems like they threw out a large chunk of why people loved the book so much. And I love the film, so I don't want it to sound like I thought it was terrible, I just wished it had skewed a bit closer to the source material on some things.

I really liked that Watney didn't have a wife, or girlfriend, or kid, or anything else. They risked everything to try to rescue him for him, not to bring back someone's dad/husband/etc. It actually makes it a bit more poignant for me. And there was actually one romantic subplot, but it was kept well in the background (as it was in the book). It was a body double. Damon was up for losing weight, but the shooting schedule made it impossible. One of the little nods to realism that just hit me was that they did actually show Watney's teeth getting grimier/yellower towards the third act.

I'm still digesting it, but I think I really liked it. While I loved the book, I'm glad the screenwriter streamlined some of the incidents and removed others entirely. The changes at the end bugged a bit, though. Most of the time, the sky on Mars looks yellowish, I believe. It does turn bluish at sunset, though. I don't think you'd generally see the clear blue sky in the middle of the day, as shown in the film. In certain photos from Mars, though, NASA will adjust the colors to look more Earth-like...that seems to be the aesthetic the film went for.

I've kind of figured that the Triskelion was off-limits to the helicarriers. Zola's algorithm would likely try to weed out the non-HYDRA SHIELD agents, and, at the Triskelion, there'd be too many of them in one place for the HYDRA agents to escape the line of fire.

From what I've read - and this is really only from one source, so take it with a huge grain of salt - Marvel knew AOU was going to have heftier criticism lobbed at it before it was even out of the gate. No one behind the scenes was really happy with the film, particularly the forced changes from the committee, but there wasn't time to reshoot. It wouldn't surprise me if this was fallout from that situation. I'm also not sure how much of a committee they really need, at this point. The "original" franchises have just about wound down, and none of them are particularly independent of one another anymore. It'll be interesting, though, to see how interwoven the newer franchises end up being without a committee behind the scenes.

The issue wasn't whether or not RDJ could play Tony, but whether RDJ would be sober and out of trouble enough not to sink the film. A number of people went to bat for him. Howard was one of the people who fought for RDJ, and was annoyed when his salary didn't keep pace with Downey's. He was replaced by (the far superior, IMO) Cheadle, but not without some issues. RDJ has stood by just about everyone else in the MCU, though. Not long after the Avengers came out, the actors had some serious negotiations with Marvel to amp up their salaries a bit. Despite having a contract that guarantees him more money than God, RDJ threw his weight behind his coworkers in the negotiations.

Both, kind of. Natasha is the diminutive of Natalya/Natalia - like Mike for Michael in English. She's also used Natalie as a cover.

TWS is my favorite of the Marvel films, but I tend to start checking out in that last third. I like the Cap/Bucky fight and the Agent 13/Rumlow standoff, but everything else feels a bit superfluous. The face-changing tech made more sense in the original cut, but it comes out of nowhere in the theatrical version. I still kind of wish the female council member just happened to be the one badass who'd try to take down Pierce, with Natasha coming in after the fact.

From what I remember, it had a lot more to do with the Avengers being released and everyone fangirling over Loki. Marvel wound up demanding that Loki be given more of a storyline, and Malekith's plot (the actual film plot, in other words) was cut drastically. It makes some sense, given the bigger picture of the MCU, but it's a shame TDW wound up so uneven as a result of the meddling.

I've never really thought of box office poison as an active thing, if that makes sense. It's just the opposite of "I enjoy this actor and will even see a shitty shitty film if they're in it." For someone like Reynolds, as an example, I don't think he has enough personal fans to overcome being in a terrible movie. It's not so much that he sinks the film, he just can't salvage it.

Natasha's kind of a weird sticking point: I really can't see her siding against Cap, especially with the other side being Stark-led. But she might have a lot of issues separating Bucky from the Winter Soldier - if she even believes that the two should be separate - and find Cap shielding him intolerable. She did try to hunt him down before Cap was ever in the picture. I'm also not sure the sides will stay all that stagnant, either. There's always potential for switching and double-crossing.

I've been hearing that from a bunch of sources.

They're also identifying the Winter Soldier stuntman in those photos as Sebastian Stan, when it pretty clearly isn't. Even when an actor does their own stunts on film (as many/most of the MCU actors do), stunt people are usually the ones who run through it over and over for safety checks and getting the scene set (lighting, framing, etc).

It took me a second viewing to realize that the leader of the rival posse was Bradley Cooper - and yes, that Bradley Cooper. He apparently grew up in that area and is the same age as Adam.