Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) ***/*****
Marvel keeps making movies that introduce the world to new superheroes, and then they keep making these Avengers movies where all of the heroes from their other movies get together and take on a common threat. It’s a pretty solid plan they’ve got going, and it’s very unlikely that it stops happening this way any time soon. What this means is that you already know the bulk of the characters who appear in Age of Ultron. Nobody is coming into these movies cold anymore, there’s just too much backstory you’d have to be aware of to make sense of things. In one respect, this makes things easier for the person who has to write the film. There’s no need to take up time introducing everyone and establishing their relationships to each other, so the story can hit the ground running. In a similar fashion, it makes writing reviews of these movies a little bit easier too. There’s no longer any need to explain who and what The Avengers are, or even who the actors who play the individual characters are. You know them, you love them, and the only question is what kind of adventure they’re getting themselves into.
This time around our team is taking on one of the HYDRA cells that emerged at the end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and a pair of super-powered twins (a speedy Aaron Taylor-Johnson and a telepathic Elizabeth Olsen, both trying out Eastern European accents) who were given their unique abilities via the terrible experiments of HYDRA head Baron Strucker (Thomas Kretschmann). The Avengers’ foes don’t remain singular though, because after a Tony Stark experiment in AI accidentally creates a genocidal robot named Ultron (James Spader), our heroes find that they then have to somehow juggle taking on a pair of angry young supervillains as well as stopping the world-ending plans of an unbreakable robot (Ultron makes himself a body out of the same metal Uncle Sam used for Captain America’s shield) and his horde of more easily dispatched drones. People get punched, explosions are exploded, and worlds get saved. Pretty typical day in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Which is the main problem writer/director Joss Whedon seems to have run into while making this movie — large scale, super-powered action scenarios have become such a common occurrence in our current film landscape that the sight of them has become typical to audiences. Age of Ultron has all of the personality and spectacle of the original Avengers, but somehow it falls flat where that first movie thrilled. For perhaps the first time, the movie universe Marvel has created has begun to feel a little bit old hat, and it’s likely due to the homogenous nature of the stories they’ve been telling. Take the big climax of this film and replace the army of robots the Avengers are fighting with the alien Chitauri from Avengers or the HYDRA agents from The Winter Soldier and you’d be hard-pressed to figure out which film you were actually watching. There are other ways to end a movie than having two armies fight over a world-ending Macguffin that’s sitting at the center of a city that’s rapidly being destroyed around them, and it’s time that Marvel and its filmmakers start looking into them.
Or maybe Age of Ultron feels a step less thrilling than the previous couple Marvel movies just because it represents the worst action the studio has offered up in a while. The CG wonders look a little bit more rushed and fake and the editing a little bit more choppy than anything we got in movies like Captain America: The Winter Soldier or Guardians of the Galaxy — which may well end up representing the high water mark for this studio’s output. Could it be that the Marvel machine has started trying to accomplish too much in too little a time span?
When looking at the storytelling of Age of Ultron, that certainly appears to be the case. While the audience already being familiar with many of the Marvel characters makes Whedon’s job as a storyteller easier in the respect that he doesn’t have to introduce them, it makes it harder in the respect that he needs to find a way to service them all in one place as well as get them all moving in the individual directions that the Marvel sequel machine needs them to go. Taking care of all of the housekeeping required for making a team-up movie that’s launching a whole new phase of individual movies that will eventually lead to another team-up movie is a Herculean one that most filmmakers would make a complete mess of, and while Whedon seems to be the sort of guy who has the particular set of skills necessary for pulling off these sorts of feats, even he falters a bit here.
When you watch Age of Ultron you get the sense that a lot more footage that would have fleshed out the story and the individual character arcs was shot, but likely ended up on the cutting room floor. Characters like Thor and Captain America get stories set up that stop short and end up going nowhere, new villains like the twins played by Olsen and Taylor-Johnson get so little focus that their inclusion in the story doesn’t even really seem necessary, and even the titular villain seems to make a huge jump from being not a fan of the Avengers existing to not a fan of humanity existing that seems to come out of nowhere. It feels like a 20 minute-longer cut of Age of Ultron that gives its story and characters a little bit more breathing room could have been great, but as the story exists now, it plays like a lot of setup for what comes next and not so much a filmic whole.
All of that being said, there are still plenty of reasons that going to watch Age of Ultron makes for a fun experience at the movie theater — even aside from the sheer joy of seeing all of these iconic superheroes brought to life and teaming up together to use their powers in tandem ways. Whedon’s flair for dialogue is omnipresent, packing the film full of wit and humor and making it a work that’s unmistakably his. When you’ve already had a couple good laughs in the first five minutes of a movie and they never die down, even as all of the big plot stuff and all of the big action scenarios kick off, you’re going to have a good time regardless of any other aspects of the production that might not deliver. Even as it stumbles a time or two, Age of Ultron never stops being a ton of fun.
The other big thing that the movie gets right is its casting of Spader, who now joins the pantheon of perfectly cast Marvel actors. Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, and Robert Downey Jr. are all so charming and so well-suited for the characters they’re playing that watching them do anything in their superhero outfits is interesting on a base level, and the same can be said for Spader’s performance as Ultron. You wouldn’t think that a robotic bad guy would have as much personality and as many quirks as Ultron, or that it would come off as a bit silly if he did, but in Spader’s hands he’s quirky and funny and well-rounded, and it feels completely natural that he would be so.
Ultron feels just as human as any of the other characters on the screen, and he makes for a great villain for our heroes to brush up against (his introductory scene, where he sort of crawls out of a technological muck, is very birth of man, very birth of Frankenstein’s monster, and very cool). It’s just a shame that he wasn’t featured in a less jam-packed movie where he could have gotten a little bit more focus, because chances are good that he would have been even better. Going forward, it looks like most of the movies we’re going to be getting from Marvel are going to be crowded with even more characters and even more links tying them together, so hopefully they get better at maintaining focus on a couple of core players and one core story within each individual film as they go. Something like The Avengers felt perfect, but something like Avengers: Age of Ultron is starting to feel over-spiced.
