Avengers: Age of Ultron
Contains one fine performance—James Spader’s Ultron.
Going to a summer tent-pole like this, you certainly don’t come for the story, but in spite of it. You need to be ready to look past the kiddie sense of overdrive, sit through the interminable action sequences and awkward wisecracking between actors. Other than that, the experience is worthy of anyone’s time.
Starting with the shiny, mighty, villainous robot of the title, Ultron — the main draw of the movie ( enjoying the sole company of Avengers for long is a challenge — they’re self-satisfied braggarts; very obnoxious creatures). The figure is awe-inspiring; a marvel of fictional, technical design. It was impossible not to be mesmerized by his metallic, high-gloss, advance-engineered beauty. The character never looked unreal (he was wholly rendered in CGI) and never bore you, graced with a mellifluous voice (provided by James Spader, digitally enhanced). His husky, raspy voice offered nice, plainly terrorizing texts, shared in an arrogant and know-it-all manner. The bot was eloquent and sophisticated, as well as petulant (a strange combination) — thus quite un-robotic. His rogue plan was to achieve peace on Earth by making humanity extinct, comic-book/Bible-style. Of note was his amusingly repeated phrase about Avengers being puppets tangled in strings (true) and him having no strings attached. Another worthy addition to the movie was Elizabeth Olsen, playing a strange mind-reading witch, Scarlet. She’s a formidable actress in most movies she starts in (apart from Godzilla), so small wonder she delivered here. Her filmic twin brother (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) played a street urchin; both used a very thick Russian accent. One of the film’s best small moments took place when the Avengers set out to prepare for a final world-rescue mission, and Johnson took out his Adidas shoes for the task. His character’s manners and special abilities weren’t much (just speed and invisibility), so his quick death was more than convenient (his street-wise behavior ill-fitted here).
A ridiculous use of a fictive East-European location, Sokovia, to lay the final waste upon. As if the film needed further fiction. There were lots of other actions sequences, none of them remarkable (taming Hulk, battling Ultron, meeting Andy Serkis; all while happily destroying whole city environments) . Decidedly labor-intensive they are to make — and boredom-inducing to watch. Thankfully, the action didn’t deal much with the space/aliens (not for long, as the after-credits suggest). But there was a palatable plot point as if straight from the outer space, when Paul-Bettany’s software materialized into a red body of a levitating Zen master.
Actors established their comic-book personas in previous movies; now they just gave more of the same (their newly added dream sequences were neither haunting nor dramatic). So Robert Downey Jr. was self-centered and boastful, Chris Hemsworth handsome and ancient-speaking, Captain America ever the most boring and square person in the room, Hulk/Mark Ruffalo bitchy, whiny and faux-intellectual, and Scarlett Johansson reticent and moody. There was also Jeremy Renner, a regular guy with arrows, having a secret family established in a farm somewhere (‘a safehouse’). Visions put by Olsen’s witch into some of Avenger heads were hardly the stuff of nightmares. If those are their demons, well — they’re flat and unimaginative people (Captain America dancing in a hall, Black Widow reminiscing her prohibitive Russian childhood, Thor meeting Idris Elba in some palatial orgy, and the like).
Not to be obviousity-mongering, but: /while the film has actors, the main point of such big-budgeted and big-profit oriented brand-entertainment is to present characterless objects in motion and environments rich in technical detail. For the greater benefit of promoting Marvel’s corporate universe and securing its future cinematic ventures. Which are genuinely hard to love or care about.
You see here so many impressive technical designs: next-gen holographic user interfaces loaded with unprocessable data, research labs of enormous complexity— things like that overwhelm, drown the already non-defensible story and its actors. Performers in effect become just puppets (tangled in strings), muted by what’s going on around. While the film does have action-unoriented sequences (a burgeoning love relationship between Ruffalo’s Hulk and Johansson’s heroine, a visit to Hawkeye’s family house, Tony Stark’s house parties, Avenger team interactions) — those are awkward, platitudinal moments, which by their nature lack any real-world grounding or emotional impact, no matter how hard Joss Whedon (the director) tries./
At the end credits, the figures from Marvel pantheon are being rendered in a digital marble, shown from different angles in a computer animation. You see aspirational mythology-in-the-making here, of unfounded kind. Marvel heroes, while so boringly super-powered, are hardly gods — not interesting creatures at all. Ancient gods of Greece, Rome, Egypt (or Scandinavia) weren’t so blandly well-behaved.
