Review -ish: Avengers: Age of Ultron

  

Spoiler free summary – while not as fun as the previous Avengers film, AoU is a solid entry in the Marvel Studios’ mega-franchise. Many of the action sequences seemed unusually chaotic this time around and didn’t work quite as well as the film’s quieter moments.

From this point on, Spoilers Assemble!

The first Avengers movie was a huge hit, an almost perfect representation of the classic comic book team-up on the big screen. AoU is a more flawed creature, but it’s perhaps no surprise that it fails to attain the same dizzying heights as it’s older sibling.

The opening does a great job of placing the film in the continuity of the larger franchise – the Avengers are shown chasing down the last remnants of Hydra (Following on from Captain America: The Winter Soldier) whilst searching for Loki’s sceptre (Last seen in Avengers). It’s a pretty great opening – I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of seeing the heroes teaming up to pull off “special moves” – but it does illustrate my main problem with the film. Now, it may be that I’m just getting old, but I found a lot of the action set pieces to be too frenetic and chaotic. The first Avengers movie managed to avoid this somehow, with the obligatory final-battle-for-the-fate-of-humanity being set just right. It was easy to follow and had some great choreography. I didn’t feel quite as engaged with the action in AoU.

Baron Strucker, the current leader of Hydra, seems to have been using Loki’s sceptre and various other alien gubbins to develop an army of robots and to grant special powers to ordinary humans. He doesn’t seem to want the Avengers to know about the enhanced humans, but the kids in question, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, cock this up for him by joining the fray. After all the speculation as to how these two mutants were going to be incorporated into the film, I liked that they were just labelled “evil nazi experiments” and left at that. I liked how both characters were realised. Their back story gave them a legitimate reason to want to take down the Avengers, and I enjoyed how they managed to bring elements of their classic looks to the film whilst keeping them fairly grounded. I do think that Quicksilver’s super speed looked better in Days of Future Past though.

Scarlet Witch uses her slightly ill-defined powers to show Stark a horrific vision of the future in which the Avengers lay dead in the wake of an alien invasion, so Stark convinces Banner that they should use the mysterious stone in Loki’s sceptre to bring their Ultron project to fruition. Stark already has his Iron Legion, a handful of armours controlled by his artificial intelligence Jarvis, and just seems to want to build something on a much larger scale. It’s at this stage in the film where I started to wonder whether the Terminator franchise exists in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I mean, does it really seem a good idea to put an AI in charge of an army of robots around the world? It would be a pretty bad idea to put any one person in charge of something that big, let alone a computer program created using technology beyond human understanding. I don’t recall Stark and Banner discussing these dangers in the film. One can assume they talked about it off screen prior to the events of the film, but I would have appreciated some acknowledgement of the potential problem they were creating.

So, the whole thing goes tits up in fairly short order when Ultron gains sentience and decides, like many AIs before him, that the best way to save the planet is to kill a whole bunch of humans. 

Ultron is a fantastic creation. If I have one consistent complaint about the MCU, it’s that the villains, excepting Loki, are not as interesting as the heroes. Ultron is another exception, a charismatic, psychotic, intelligent monster, prone to monologues. When he first makes his presence known to the Avengers it’s as frightening, shambling patchwork. He soon sheds this in favour of a series of more generic bodies. Props to James Spader for breathing life into the creation. I guess the only thing that bothers me about Ultron is that despite his consciousness being spread across the internet, he keeps creating bodies for himself so he can smash stuff up.  And monologue.  Dude loves a monologue.  I think this kind of story sometimes fails to appreciate the horrific scale of the destruction that a malevolent AI could cause.  I mean, Ultron spends a chunk of the film trying and failing to get hold of nuclear launch codes, but he can move billions of dollars around with a thought.  He probably could have caused more trouble by collapsing some economies and waiting for us to blow ourselves up.  But that said, Ultron is portrayed as representing some of the darker traits of Stark writ large, and is perhaps just as flawed and short-sighted as his creator.  Plus, you know, how boring would it be to watch a film where Ultron just hangs out with Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch?  Possibly not that boring actually, Spader was awesome.

Ultron’s plan is actually satisfyingly comic-booky, so I shouldn’t really criticise it.  First off, he wants to force life on Earth to evolve by causing a massive catastrophe, to rival the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs.  I found his rationale for this pretty interesting.  Stark wanted to use Ultron to create “peace in our time” , but Ultron maintains that peace will be impossible without a drastic change to the status quo.  So, when Ultron fails to acquire launch codes for the nukes, he decides to recreate a meteorite impact by using Chitauri tech to LEVITATE A FUCKING CITY INTO THE ATMOSPHERE AND DROP IT ON THE EARTH!  Well played.  I like to think he gets that dramatic flair from Stark.  So, the end action sequences focus on the Avengers’ attempts to evacuate the city whilst battling hordes of robot drones.  While I guess it could be considered tedious that they insist on saving everybody, I really liked it.  One of the things I didn’t enjoy about Man of Steel was that Superman was focused on defeating Zod in the finale, whilst thousands of people were presumably crushed to death around them.  I liked seeing the focus put on saving lives, which is surely kind of the point of superheroes, the fighting is just a means to an end.

The second part of Ultron’s plan is to use a combination of vibranium and some hi-tech skin regeneration doohickey to create himself a new body, which will carry the mind stone, the infinity stone that was housed in Loki’s sceptre.  This doesn’t work out so well for the metal maniac, as it contributes to the creation the Vision, the Avenger that basically ends him.  As an AI spread out across the internet, Ultron is basically indestructible, but Vision purges him from the internet, leaving him confined to his legion of robot bodies.  So, dumb move Ultron.  The creation of the Vision was great though – first off, I’m just a big fan of the guy, and he makes a nicely colourful alien-looking addition to the team.  After years of superhero films that struggle to justify why a character chooses to dress in a particular costume, by trying to establish that they’re functional in some way, it’s refreshing to see a guy accessorise with a yellow cape, because fuck it, why not?  It’s like he just looked at Thor and thought “Damn, gotta get me some of that”.  I’d probably go for trying to mimic his abs, but I suppose, as it’s a superhero movie, abs are standard issue.  His final quiet confrontation with Ultron was poetic and chilling.  Also, his creation caused the tension between Stark and Cap to erupt into actual conflict, understandably – Banner and Stark’s insistence on the creation of a new AI to solve the problem they created with their previous AI was baffling, like trying to prevent a flood by diluting it with more water or something.  It works, obviously, but they kind of lucked out – the film itself points out that Ultron’s enemy isn’t necessarily their ally.  But of course, we know we can trust the Vision, because he can lift Thor’s hammer, lending significance to a scene that had previously just been played for the lulz.  Still, as we all know, this isn’t the end of the friction between Stark and Cap.

The script does a great job with the huge ensemble.  Everyone has their moment – I thought the blossoming romance between Banner and Widow was well handled, even though he totally fails to mention Betty Ross.  The brief exploration of Widow’s past was heartbreaking, the revelation of Hawkeye’s family was moving.  Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch were well rounded enough that I cared what happened to them.  I guess the run time doesn’t give time to develop every character, but most of them can be developed in their own films – let’s save the Thor movies for expanding on Thor’s personality, an Avengers movie is just an opportunity for him to smash shit up.  Still, I didn’t feel that anyone got shortchanged.  

So, just to round up, a few random thoughts.  I can’t believe that I’ve rambled on for this long and not mentioned the fight between Hulk and Stark’s Hulkbuster armour, “Veronica”.  It was a great sequence and pretty sad to see the two friends fighting, knowing the effect it would have on Banner’s state of mind afterward.  Great to see a new line up of Avengers at the conclusion of the film – Falcon, War Machine, Scarlet Witch, Vision, Captain America and Black Widow is more the kind of random hodgepodge of A-list and B-list characters that I’ve come to expect from the Avengers, rather than all the high profile heavy hitters.  And that last mid-credits scene reminds us that, although the team is fractured and facing even an even worse schism in the near future, they will ultimately pull together once again to face the big ol’ purple menace on the horizon.