Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) (2 Viewers)

[Jonathan Perregaux]

What's sad about Avengers: Week of Ultron is that it barely warranted a few lines of dialog from Admiral Adama in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I was expecting Avengers movies to be the movers and the shakers in this universe, but instead it would seem those duties fall to Captain America for some reason.

 

[KevinGress]

That movie consisted of entirely too much artificial excitement. The stakes were just... meh. Forgettable. It was like eating a spoonful of Drano; sure, it'll clean you out, but it'll leave you hollow inside.

It's more that it didn't raise the bar any. The Avengers was a culmination of getting characters from stand alone movies together for the first time in an action packed romp. That raised the bar. Now we just revisited the same group - sure it had it's funny moments and some impressive action and sfx, but didn't do anything outstanding. You won't see that until The Infinity War, which will, once again bring characters together from various movies together for the first time.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Road to Endgame Revisit #12:
The first thing that struck me, watching this so close to the first Avengers, is how much more technically accomplished Avengers: Age of Ultron is -- and how little that mattered. The signature, most thrilling shot of the whole first movie is replicated as the opening shot here. The first movie felt very "TV" at times; this one is never less than cinematic.

This is the second of cinematographer Ben Davis's four contributions to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and his use of the camera and lighting design is more ambitious than Seamus McGarvey's work on the first one in just about every way. And yet I'm not a big fan of the look of those other movies, and I'm not a big fan of the look of this one. For most of the running time, it's just ugly -- with a heavy emphasis on teals and oranges. The color palette on the first movie was a lot more balanced and naturalistic, and plays better for me. The shots in the first movie lasted longer, with much less cutting, and that gave scenes and moments weight. This movie is much busier, but some how feels less substantial.

The music for this movie is interesting; as I've discussed previously, there was a big push in Phase Two to make Brian Tyler Marvel Studios's house composer. This was the third score he did in Phase Two, and also his final MCU score to date. While a lot of his music remains in the movie, and he's still credited as a composer, he was replaced relatively late in the game by Danny Elfman, who reworked and expanded upon Alan Silvestri's themes from the first film. In the audio commentary, Joss Whedon mentions Elfman several times, but doesn't mention Brian Tyler once.

This is one of two MCU movies in close succession that flirt with the idea of Tony Stark as the villain. I actually think in that aspect, it's the more successful of the two. Stark is an incredibly dynamic character, brilliant and funny and so compelling to watch. But he is a deeply flawed character, something that was made clear from the opening moments of the first Iron Man. As Robert Downey Jr. became the star of the overall franchise, Stark's flaws threatened to fade into the background a bit. To give this film a narrative spine, Joss Whedon placed Stark in the role of Victor Frankenstein, turned the very attributes that have made Tony Stark so successful and heroic into liabilities.

The Avengers as a team sort of has two centers, with Tony Stark as the brain and Steve Rogers as the heart. When those two are aligned and on the same page, the Avengers can do anything. This movie is a case where the two aren't aligned, and the brain is wrong. There's a wonderful beat at the end of the Seoul sequence, where the Maximoff twins have just switched sides and worked together with Captain America to stop a runaway train. Wanda has been inside most of the Avengers' heads at that point, and she knows what kind of man Tony is and what kind of man Steve is. She's instantly aware of just how big of a threat Tony Stark is, but Steve Rogers knows Tony too and she doesn't have to say much to make him aware of the problem.

As the title character, James Spader gives a terrific performance of a subpar villain. Ultron is the closest the MCU has gotten to a classic mustache-twirling villain, evil for evil's sake. He's basically a brilliant infant throwing a temper tantrum, with the entire planet as his toy chest. Sandwiched between Loki's witty, understated megalomania and Thanos's delusional, grandiose megalomania, Ultron particularly suffers from the comparison. And his primary means of countering the Avengers -- creating many, many bodies for himself -- plays into one of my recurring criticisms of the MCU, which is the frequency with which these movies turn to the superheroes going into battle with faceless hordes that we don't know and care nothing about. It gets repetitive and it gets boring.

The more compelling antagonist is the Scarlet Witch. Elizabeth Olsen is wonderful in the role, and this initial outing uses her abilities in more diverse and unexpected ways than subsequent movies. There's a wonderful dynamic at play over the course of the film: The Maximoffs hate Tony Stark, and blame him for the deaths of their family members and the destruction of their home. To defeat Tony Stark, Wanda gets inside the heads of the Avengers and targets their respective vulnerabilities with pinpoint accuracy. But it's a two-way street: it's easy to hate a name on the side of a weapon; it's much harder to hate real people who have triumphs and tragedies of their own, flaws that can be preyed upon but also strengths that stir admiration.

On the other hand, Wanda's twin brother mostly lands as a dud. Prior to Disney's recently completed acquisition of 20th Century Fox, the Maximoff twins had a strange status within the contractual rights of Marvel Comics's intellectual property. Whereas Fox had the rights to most mutants as an extension of the X-Men intellectual property, Fox and Marvel Studios had joint custody of Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver. Age of Ultron had the misfortune of coming out less than a year after 20th Century Fox released X-Men: Days of Future Past, where Evan Peters's take on Quicksilver was the breakout character and stole every scene he was in. Tonally, Joss Whedon was trying to use the character in a different way here, more serious and more burdened with both responsibility and loss. Peters's irreverent, ADHD version would have stuck out like a sore thumb. But sitting in theaters, watching Aaron Taylor-Johnson's take, audiences couldn't help but think of how delightful Peters was in the role, and how lifeless and stale this version of Quicksilver felt in comparison. It didn't help that Whedon had deployed the character as a one-and-done, the sacrificial lamb to give the final act personal stakes and justify changing allegiances. Because audiences had warmed to this version of Quicksilver, his death didn't have the impact it would have had if Days of Future Past wasn't in the back of our minds.

There are other questionable choices that make the movie feel clunky where the first movie purred along like a well-oiled machine. Probably the most bizarre one is the detour the movie takes in the middle to Everywhere, U.S.A. where Hawkeye has a secret family tucked away on an idyllic little farm. It clashes tonally and visually with everything on both sides of it. The whole movie grinds to a halt to accommodate it. It's not a terrible sequence, really, but it is a headscratcher. And for a writer/director who made a name for himself by telling feminist stories, it's a peculiarly regressive subplot where the husband goes off to bring home the bacon and the wife is a homemaker whose job is to take care of the kids -- an odd "Leave It to Beaver" dynamic dropped into the middle of a superhero blockbuster. Linda Cardellini is actually really great as Clint Barton's wife, smart and funny and fully aware of the life her husband leads and the implications of his career choice. Her and Renner really sell the intimacy and history of that relationship in a small handful of scenes. I love the energy of the farmhouse, with the Avengers scattered about having adult conversations and the kids running about like young kids on a farm do. But, again, it's just really bizarre. Even more so when it turns out that Nick Fury is hiding out in the barn.

Another misstep is the ill-advised choice to pair Bruce Banner and Natasha Romanoff up romantically. It comes out left field, not set up at all in previous movies, and feels imposed on the characters rather than flowing organically from the characters. In the audio commentary, Joss Whedon raves over and over again about the chemistry between Mark Ruffalo and Scarlett Johansson, and I just don't feel it. They're both really solid performers, so they make it work better than lesser actors would, but it still feels like something they're making work rather than something that does work. And making Natasha's central emotional beat of the movie her sense of loss at not being able to have children again feels like an oddly regressive choice. Johansson is phenomenal in the scene where Natasha tells Bruce what the Red Room did to her, and why. The vulnerability, and the attempt to minimize and dismiss that vulnerability, is staggering -- like a knife to the gut. But an evil robot is about to destroy mankind. It doesn't feel like the time to be thinking about having a family.

It's also a movie where the pressures of serving a larger cinematic universe start to be felt. There are moments in this movie that would not exist if it didn't need to set things up for subsequent movies in the various component franchises. The most egregious of these is the cave subplot with Thor and Dr. Selvig. It goes nowhere, and does nothing for Age of Ultron. If you didn't need to set up the Infinity Stones, and the Infinity Gauntlet, in audiences' minds, it wouldn't be there.

There was a lot of discussion at the time this movie came out about the final battle's emphasis on protecting civilians and containing collateral damage, especially in the context of the final battle of Man of Steel featuring widespread collateral damage with little evident concern for civilian lives. I don't want to rehash that debate, but I do think that -- separate from that context and comparison -- it's crucial to the movie working. Everything that happens in the movie can be traced back to Wanda and Pietro being collateral damage in somebody else's conflict. That led them to Baron Von Strucker, to being enhanced by Von Strucker's experiments with the Mind Stone. That lead Wanda to plan her apocalyptic vision in Tony Stark's head, which lead to him creating Ultron.

There's also the issue that even more than most of these movies, the ending comes down to the spectacle of watching the Avengers destroy more or less identical drone bodies in new and creative ways. In the first Avengers, you had the emotional hook of these disparate heroes coming together and working as one for the first time to anchor the battle. That's old hat by now. So it becomes essential to have the human stakes of: There's no way to save this city, but we need to save as many of the people living in it as possible.

I love Hawkeye's pep talk to Scarlet Witch amidst the crumbling city. He has my favorite line in the entire movie: "The city is flying and we're fighting an army of robots. And I have a bow and arrow. Nothing makes sense." It's real, there's a fun and welcome acknowledgement that Hawkeye is the least powered of the Avengers, and he gets his point across. When Wanda decides to go out that door and commit to being an Avenger, her entrance into the battle is suitably epic.

Vision is one of those things that showcases the combination of organic evolution and long-term planning that drives this whole enterprise. There is no way that Paul Bettany knew any of this was coming when he agreed to record a few lines of dialogue as the voice of Iron Man suit's operating system in the first Iron Man. But it works beautifully. When Thor draws down lightning from the sky and brings Vision to life, it's an homage to the 1931 Frankenstein and all of the other homages that came before. But Whedon imbues the scene that follows with the wonder of the Nativity and the awe of the resurrection of Christ. If JARVIS was sardonic, Vision is something else. Bettany brings to the role here both a sense of Jesus's nobility and His separation from us. Like Jesus, Vision is here to save humanity, but he is also above humanity and on a different scale of being. When he confronts Ultron's final body, he accepts as a given Ultron's assertion that humanity will ultimately destroy itself. But unlike Ultron -- or Ego in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 -- he doesn't devalue humanity just because its existence is finite. He sees the beauty in humanity all the more because it is doomed to be ephemeral.

Connections to other parts of the MCU: Obviously the big one was delving a bit into the mythology of the Infinity Stones and explicitly identifying the one in Loki's scepter as the Mind Stone. Stark's new Avengers facility in upstate New York gets a lot of play in subsequent movies, but I don't know that it's ever worked for me. After the big swing of dismantling SHIELD in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, it felt like a cop out to transform the Avengers from a Dirty Dozen style team to a bureaucratic organization. Especially since it's populated by so many of the remaining SHIELD faces who didn't turn out to be Hydra sleeper agents. And after a movie that shone a spotlight on Tony Stark's hubris and overreach, I don't know that it plays well having him hold the keys to the castle. It'd been a while since I'd seen this movie when I watched Thor: Ragnarok so it was nice tonight to be reminded of why the Hulk was on that Quinjet that ended up on Sakaar. The debut of Kerry Condon as FRIDAY, the latest customization to the voice interface with his technology. The massive disaster caused by defeating Ultron led to the Sakovia Accords that set up the conflict for the next Captain America movie. Establishes Ulysses Klaue's character, who continues into Black Panther.