Avengers: Age of Ultron
Director: Joss
Whedon
Writer: Joss Whedon
Starring: Robert
Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett
Johansson, James Spader, Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olsen, Paul
Bettany, Aaron Taylor-Johnson
Rating: Three and a
Half Stars out of Five
In theaters now.
Avengers: Age of Ultron, on
the whole, is a movie that knows it needs to be fun. It is at times
an effervescent, invigorated piece of pop filmmaking at its finest
when it shows the banter between gods and scientific monstrosities,
literal high flying action, and evil robots threatening to destroy
the world. But it is also a movie that gets too cute with itself,
taking the knowing winks associated with the Marvel Cinematic
Universe brand and turning them into several scenes of chessboard
shuffling fluff, filled to the gills with foreshadowing of future
pictures' conflicts that don't pay off in the movie in question. It
is a film with an at times unfinished look but one of the best –
and best looking – villains of the Marvel series. It has a
peculiarly mixed quality that just barely tips in the right
direction.
We
know the gang by now. Iron Man (Downey), Captain America (Evans),
Thor (Hemsworth), Black Widow (Johansson), Hawkeye (Renner), and the
big green guy (Ruffalo) do battle with the Earth's biggest threats.
At the film's outset, we are presented with a team that appears to be
a well-oiled machine – thank whatever you consider holy that
writer-director Joss Whedon abandoned the first film's individual
character introductions for an action sequence with everyone
together. Unfortunately for the members of the Avengers, cracks are
beginning to form. More unfortunately for the audience, the cracks in
the staging of action in this snowy forest result in the worst
looking part of the movie. The heroes zoom through the air looking
very much like the computer generated magic they are, with physics
out of a glitching video game – it's more floating like bubbles
than jumping and swinging like bodies with mass would do. There's a
literal weightlessness to Whedon's direction here that, under normal
circumstances, would make the audience's rooting interest much more
of an uphill climb. Luckily we have a history with these characters
that brings us onboard. That does not forgive the sloppy effects
work, which is a symptom of a larger problem with the movie – it
puts too much on the shoulders of the other films in the Marvel
series, past and future, without putting enough care into making the
present one great.
That
opening scene turns up the banter up to unbearably cutesy levels. In
the previous films and generally throughout the rest of this one,
this back-and-forth chatter is what makes the Avengers such fun
characters, but in the opening, Whedon belabors the point of Captain
America being an old fuddy duddy and Iron Man being the snarky
too-cool-for-school guy. If Whedon didn't call back to it so much, it
would be a minor annoyance, but he doubles down on this one dumb joke
so hard, spoiling it in the process. There's so much obvious work
going on here, jamming the point down the audience's throats without
relying enough on the actors' abilities to convey these ideas in
subtler ways.
It
does, however, serve up the primary intra-team conflict of Age
of Ultron being between the
competing worldviews of Cap and Iron Man. These two guys rarely get
along and always bicker, but this time things start to get more
heated, as Iron Man wants to build an artificially intelligent
security system for the entire planet to make the Avengers obsolete
the next time aliens attack. Captain America, essentially citing the
“if it ain't broke, don't fix it” philosophy, doesn't think
that's such a hot idea. After all, the humanity of these heroes led
to their improvisational triumph in the first Avengers
film, a humanity this robot
security guard, code named Ultron (voiced by James Spader), doesn't
have as a matter of course. Oh yeah, Iron Man and Bruce Banner, the
Hulk's alter ego, work on Ultron in secret against the other team
members', especially Captain America's, wishes.
It's
collar-tugging time here, and the overall through line of Age
of Ultron is so strong, with
this tug of war over how to best protect the planet serving as a
backdrop to action spectacles and comedic relief that stems from the
natural charisma of the performers. It culminates with the creation
of a best-of-both-worlds amalgamation, The Vision (Paul Bettany), a
character whose unabashed optimism about the human race is
heartening. He's a character who acknowledges all our flaws but sees
only beauty in our mistakes. To him, the imperfection of humanity is
what is right about humanity, a notion that is total anathema to
Ultron, an AI with abandonment issues taking out his rage on the
world. That disconnect between artificial intelligences mirrors that
of the Avengers' dual leaders, but perhaps more extreme, and it will
be fascinating to see the shadings of these opposing viewpoints in
future films. But again, that doesn't help us now.
If
Whedon had tightened up the structure of the movie to focus like a
laser on this stuff, we would have a classic pop art film on our
hands. But corporate tie-in mandates get in the way. We must set up
the upcoming Black Panther film,
so there's a trip to fictional African nation Wakanda to meet the
future villain of that movie, when his plot connection to this movie
is negligent and would have been better served by the easily
dispatched minor villain of the opening scene. The Captain
America-Iron Man showdown will be the point of next year's Captain
America: Civil War, so we can
only see them yell at each other a little bit before the robot
fighting gets in their argumentative way. New characters Scarlet
Witch (Olsen) and Quicksilver (Taylor-Johnson), super powered
fraternal twins, are utilized as mere plot devices too much of the
time, ways to point out the future for the franchise.
That
franchise building takes some wind out of the sails of the climactic
battle sequence, too. We know a cosmic free-for-all is coming with
the two-part Avengers: Infinity War movies
in a few years, so the scale of this battle feels a little off. Even
if it is of the “saving the world” variety, staging it in a
fictional small town in Eastern Europe feels like a step backward in
optics. It's a thrilling sequence that does everything right in the
way the opening does things wrong, with punches landing, characters
moving like they are made of something resembling matter, and
buildings crumbling with both practical effects and CGI. But it lacks
the destruction of New York City, arguably the world's capital. There
are no cultural signposts for the audience to latch onto, to say,
“Wow, losing this really matters.” It's faraway and, despite the
movie telling us the destruction of this place would mean game over
for the entire planet, we can't feel it the way we could in the first
film, and probably not in the Infinity War films.
Avengers: Age of Ultron is
a strange movie in its contradictory levels of quality from moment to
moment. It never loses its sense of playfulness, its inherent comic
book-y setups, its lovable outlandishness. But it feels so often like
it is holding back, waiting for a different moment, to land the
knockout punch. It's a procrastination movie, as we won't get the
real payoffs for years. Perhaps when viewed as part of the whole, it
will age gracefully. But as its own entity, it feels off. But that's
okay, because the characters remain great, the actors up to the task,
and a missed opportunity here might just mean a heck of a course
correction is on the way. Such is the beauty, and pitfalls, of
serialized storytelling.
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