Courtesy of Disney
In Hollywood, a big success almost inevitably breeds a big sequel. With Avengers: Age of Ultron, the Disney Studio has a movie that works as a sequel to at least three or four predecessors: the 2012 Avengers to be sure, but also Captain America, Thor: The Dark World and Winter Soldier. With a constellation of stars returning to their familiar superhero characters in the cross-referencing Marvel universe, breathlessly working to save the world from a Marvel-certified menace, Age of Ultron delivers what its audience wants.
The big draws include no-splatter violence on an industrial scale, rendered through dizzying special effects but with the leavening agent of humor to keep the sullen aspects of the story from dimming the enjoyment; and the characterizations of those superhero Avengers as they test their powers against an implacable foe. Ideas rattle around in here as well. In Age of Ultron, the old nightmare reemerges of producing a “better” race to supplant our own, nowadays through artificial intelligence wedded to the possibility of endowing the AI with a body through bio-cellular manipulation.
The violence is what’s worst about Age of Ultron, not only for reducing wholesale slaughter and destruction to banality, weightless and detached from human sympathy through its reliance on computer generation, but also for being tedious in its repetition. With few exceptions, the herculean combat of the Avengers is mind-numbingly dull. And yet, there they go in the midst of mayhem: quip, quipping, tossing a funny aside into the face of death. Captain America (Chris Evans) tsk-tsks when someone says “shit.” Yes, the humor is skillfully woven into our expectations for the characters.
The Avengers could easily have been flat as a comic book page if not for the resources of the A-List team filling the spandex and armor suits. Top among them, arch and self-aware Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man Tony Stark, the billionaire death merchant-technocrat; and Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner, an introverted and troubled man whose inner beast erupts into the Incredible Hulk. The romance angle is introduced by the budding love between Banner and sexy Natasha Romanoff, played by Scarlett Johansson like a fast-talking ’40s dame with a motorcycle and kickboxing skills. The ensemble cast is also notable for Chris Hemsworth’s Shakespearean depiction of Thor and regular guy-master archer Hawkeye, played by Jeremy Renner with grim determination. Don Cheadle and Samuel L. Jackson have small supporting roles.
The villain is hatched out of Stark’s imagination, an artificial intelligence program called Ultron, conceived as the ultimate weapon for defending Earth against aliens. But Stark’s creation takes on his demigod’s worst attributes and multiplies them by millions. Ultron, assisted by a pair of unusually endowed Eastern European siblings who barely survived the shelling of their city by Stark-made munitions (Elizabeth Olsen, Aaron Taylor-Johnson), plans to grind humanity into dust.
The ending is already posted on dozens of websites. Suffice it to say, the story leaves room for more sequels. In Age of Ultron, the dramatic tension arises less from the CGI battle scenes than from conflict among the Avengers, the differences in personality and worldviews that bring a spark of life to the project. “You still think you’re the only monster on the team,” Romanoff tells Hulk. It’s a twinge of moral complexity, an admission of guilt that earlier generations of superheroes could never have made.
Avengers: Age of Ultron
2 and a half stars
Robert Downey Jr.
Chris Hemsworth
Scarlett Johansson
Directed by Joss Whedon
PG-13
