Agents of SHIELD

Some of you may know that last year I made a little movie, I made it in the hopes of getting a job with Joss Whedon on the new Marvel universe show we now know as Agents of SHIELD. This was before the show was announced by the way, all I knew at the time was they were making a show set in the Marvel Universe, from there I knew it either had to be Shield or Heroes for Hire, and they had already introduced Shield in the Avengers so I took my gamble there. I made my villain Ultron, who is one of the great Avengers villains and because robots are cool, and I turned out to be right there too because low and behold the next Avengers film is going to be Avengers: Age of Ultron.  I had a budget of about 400, I had friends who knew what they were doing, or at least were willing to help me. I made this.


Sadly I think there are large parts of it that are better than the ABC show that now exists. I mean I know it's rookie film but if you consider the budget and talent pool that the Disney corporation have to draw upon and compare it to 400 dollars and some people I know, I did more than alright here.

There have been plenty of people writing articles on how to fix this show, the characters are uninteresting, the plots are harmless, it doesn't seem to be adding anything to the universe. Some of these are problems that come with making a show like this, it's fair to ask people to watch some movies, but to keep up with an extra show as well may be too much. Still none of these are anything more than story problems, and those can always be fixed. Its not like the show is always bad, there have been some that I would even call good, the bionic eye was good, the trapped behind enemy lines one was good. Then there are others which are just bad, like tonight's which featured a "ghost" and a weepy girl and a ruminations on God which were harmless.
They told the story of Melinda May, but they didn't show us it, it felt lazy that they did that, "oh yeah the mystery of the angry girl, here's what that's about"

So this is all really disappointing, so what am I going to do about it?

First I am going to find a better title for my Film, Hydraed is terrible. I don't know what I was thinking. I think Agent of Shield may work better.

Then I guess it's my job to write a better script for them. Try my hand at it. There is no point in back seat driving by saying what should be fixed, may as well just build that better mousetrap myself and see what I catch with it. 

How Man of Steel should have ended, but didn't.

Superman is fighting Zod, they are in the train station and Zod is firing his laser eyes at that family. Superman has his neck in a choke hold but the beams are still slowly making there way towards those helpless people. In voice over Superman hears Zor-el, his fathers words. "You can save them, you can save them all."

INSTEAD of snapping Zods neck he flies up, through the roof, into the sky, flying higher and higher, and taking Zod with him at incredible speed. We see below them the smoking hole that is Metropolis, about a six block chunk of a major city has been destroyed with various smoking parts in the rest of it.

"Nobody dies today Zod. Not even you"

Zod gets free of Superman somewhere in the clouds and they fight, their punches so powerful they dissipate clouds as they land. Zod tries to go after an airliner but Superman won't let him get to it. Flying under and up at Zod, pushing him further from the surface. It's a game of keep away with the planet.

They are now far above the clouds, Zod fires his eye beams at Superman, Superman meets his gaze, the lasers pushing against each other in the middle. From earth we can see it as a close star in the sky. They are at stalemate.
Superman breaks his gaze flies quickly to Zod and punches him again. Then he speaks.

"I'm the Last Son of the Krypton you are sworn to protect and preserve. If you want to get to these people, you'll have to kill me first."

Zod angry. " You think I can't"

Zod flies at Superman in a rage, his eyes with flame in them.

Superman lands a mighty punch, standing like a wall where Zod was flying to meet him, sending Zod reeling.

"I think you won't. Leave. Go and find our people."

Zod tries again. This time moving fast to other areas, Superman moves just a little faster and meets him every time. Zod never gets closer.

"Leave. Don't come back."

Zod tries a third time. Superman repels him a third time.This time he says nothing because they are now too high for words to be heard. Superman is just standing there. stern. His arms crossed. His eyes say it all. You are not getting passed me. Leave.

Zod, turns flies off, towards what we see is the the small remains of his ship. He leaves, as his ship opens to the phantom Zone and disappears.

Superman flies down to earth. To the smoking wreckage of the city. He picks up a large support beam that is trapping people and reaches down to help them out.

" I'm sorry about this. I'm here to help."
The person takes his hand.

Then you do the rest of the movie.


What makes Superman super isn't his powers, or the sense of Hope that he stands for. He has one job, he saves us. Not just friends and family, not just the people in the way, not just himself, he even saves the bad guy.

"Nobody dies today Zod. Not even you"

Myself as a student.

I'm going back to school, and for once I'm going to do it right. I've had an interesting academic career, I didn't follow the model, was shifty and to be honest I did it all wrong, but I still feel as though I have found for myself an amazing education, more than going the usual route could have ever provided. Still I am without the one thing that matters about going to college and that is a degree, it's been the great shame of my twenties, the reason I feel uncomfortable when I meet peers or have to talk about my life with others, it's a glaringly incomplete part of myself. People who know me expect that I should have already completed it a while ago because I seem like the type that would, I'm smart and I pride myself on my wit and passion for the thing I studied, English. I may have fallen out of the school structure but I never stopped learning, never stopped teaching myself, because at some point along the way I discovered how to do that, in so doing I've given myself a masters in comic books and storytelling with minors in film, philosophy, and comedy. On paper that isn't true, on paper I'm a failure. I would like to change what's on that paper.

My start was at a seminary at a very nice school in Minnesota, the University of St. Thomas. I had convinced myself in High School that I was never going to be good enough for marriage or love and so therefore should stick to the one thing I saw myself as good at which was church. Upon arriving there I discovered that somewhere buried in my low self esteem was a desire to be loved and have a family which I was ignoring, and so I eventually left the school. That school wasn't so much about schooling as it was about discerning my vocation, but I did love the academic part of it. I loved writing papers and was astounded that I was in school at all, college seemed like such a cool place and I liked the pretension of the ideas and professors and the chance that I might write something big and meaningful.

I had to leave there once I decided that I wasn't going to be a priest, and ended up going to Louisiana on the invitation of a friend. At this point I thought that all schools were the same, my professors would prove that wrong almost immediately, not that it mattered since I arrived there 10 days before Katrina hit, so the school year was a thrown into chaos anyway, but also because at that time I had the existential dilemma of not knowing what I wanted to be when I grew up anymore. I knew I liked English in high school and comic books so I just started there, I wanted to write comics, but that's not an easy profession to find yourself in and I knew that. I was just studying for the love of it, and living in post Katrina Lafayette was enough adventure to keep my mind busy. Still I ended up leaving after only a semester because I knew I wanted a higher level of learning than that school was capable of offering.

Benedictine College is where I did the best part of my learning and where I was truly a student. It was a small school in Kansas, had a decent English program and offered a strong campus faith life, "the college experience" and also the chance to make my first comic books. I was truly challenged there, both educationally and in my faith. I got along very well with the English department there and was even head of the English club, which wasn't much of a club but I did organize some events. I immersed myself in the classes and readings there, and outside of classes worked on a project that I received funding for through the school, the first ever comic book music video. I said I was also challenged in my faith and that is true too as taking a class there on proving the existence of God caused me to lose my faith and I found myself a non believer in a world built by believers. So I left. I admit this was a mistake.

I came home to Colorado depressed. All things which I had thought true, which were the bedrock of me had been disproved. I felt defeated, and yet still had to finish my degree, and so I turned to the University of Colorado Denver, as my sister was going there and I didn't have any better ideas. I thought at the time that the comic I had made would get me noticed. It didn't. I still didn't really know where my major was headed, or what my future exactly was. So at that point I was just going to school for schools sake, for the sake of the degree that would help me do....I wasn't quite sure. People had told me I should teach, but I felt that was giving up on a dream of being a writer, that to teach was a cop out for greater things, I felt I could be more than just a teacher. I went to school and in the process found a full time job, did the thing I was supposed to do. Then I had a bad semester, I had a girl friend, the first really meaningful relationship, and she left me suddenly and without warning on my birthday. This was heartbreaking. Then a woman at work fell down some stairs and I ended up getting all her hours. Then the economy crashed. I tried to save my semester by doing something big and important, because I thought that would be impressive but I buckled under the weight of everything and it was all terrible. I felt like I had to choose between school and my job and at that point, with the economy where it was I wanted to keep my job. I still have that job like a noose or yoke around my neck. Anyway, that dropped my GPA like a stone and it took a couple years to get back in.

My problem so far has been this. I was walking towards nowhere. I had no purpose to what I was doing at school, and so I underperformed, or would try to over perform in a spectacular way so as to be noticed in the hope that would spur on some kind of opportunity but would fail at it because that's not what they were asking for. So there is the second lost semester, though not as bad as the last. Then came more time in the wilderness. I made a short film, in that time, which has so far predicted all of what the Marvel Film universe is doing. It was a short for Agents of SHIELD, which at the time wasn't a show and hadn't been announced yet. The villain I picked for the piece is going to be the bad guy in the next Avengers film. It also went nowhere thought and hasn't really been noticed. What that film was, was an final attempt to break into film. After it went unnoticed I fell into a depression again and finally found my way out of it with the help of a friend and spiritual director, who eventually said the same thing that other people had been saying but I had steadily ignored, I should teach. I had never allowed myself to consider that before, because I super focused on storytelling and basically wanting to be Joss Whedon. Once I allowed myself to consider that as a possibility my brain exploded with ideas of how I would do it, what it would mean, and I liked the idea.

So now here I am, with a strange history and a goal of becoming a teacher. I used to sit and think about how to tell a story that I would never get the chance to tell, and now I sit and think about how best to teach the things I love. I'm a lot happier, but now comes the hard part, I have to get that degree and I'm not sure who is going to allow me to do that. So basically prayers are something I'll take now.