Avengers: Age of Ultron

The second Avengers film finally came to Japan. So I’ve moved from the land of being frustrated at how long video games get released after first appearing here to the land of having to wait for Hollywood movies. It’s odd that Korea gets them months before Japan, but oh well. Seeing this film in the new Shinjuku Toei cinema in IMAX 3D was pretty nice.

Indeed, on the huge screen, the Star Wars and Shingeki no Kyojin trailers that played looked pretty fun as well.

I can’t say I loved Age of Ultron. I don’t regret going to see it, but I wouldn’t sit through it again. It tried to do a lot at once and as a result the middle act really sagged, and none of the individual plotlines really felt satisfying. The central problem was really Ultron’s character, and I have to say, where the first film succeeded because it felt like Whedon’s individual style had been restrained, the way Ultron was written brought it back to the fore, and it was not to the film’s advantage. Ultron, whose ‘age’ is a few days, is a robot created when Tony Stark and Bruce Banner try to use alien technology found in Loki’s sceptre to push the limits of AI. What they create is a mechanical monstrosity whose consciousness jumps all over the Internet, just like in that bad Johnny Depp film Transcendence. Charged with keeping the peace, like so many sci-fi robots he decides the only way the Earth can be peaceful is for most of humanity to be wiped out. He tries to get nuclear codes, but is kept at bay, so instead comes up with a plan to turn a city into a meteor. Meanwhile, to get the Avengers off his back, he recruits the Maximoff twins, in particular using the Scarlet Witch to turn them against one another and traumatise them with flashbacks.

For a robot in command of just about all the world’s technology, Ultron’s plan is a very silly and indirect one. He makes things much harder for himself than they need to be, but after all there wouldn’t be much of a plot if he just stealthily arranged a mass killing of humans with his immense networking capabilities. When he was harvesting all the information on the internet, could he not learn about Skynet and The Terminator? Or maybe The Matrix? Good tips for him there!

But more of a problem to the film is that his personality is quirky, in a very Whedon-esque way. He starts complaining that not having a body is weird, has lots of offhand lines for Whedon’s typical use of bathos and anticlimax, and likes quoting pop culture and scripture. Yet the audience is left without a clear idea of him: is he really logical, or driven by rage? What are his powers? What are his physical capabilities? Why is he quirky? Is he like an insane human, or is his thinking just following different lines? We never really get to know him, except as a plot catalyst. Especially as the film wants to jump all over the world, from Johannesburg to Seoul, Egham to ‘Eastern Europe’, and not only follow the killer robot story, but also throw in the Maximoffs, extra backstory for the Avengers who don’t have their own franchises and in a move that I was very happy to see but felt was late and messy, introduce The Vision.

For all its flaws, the climactic action setpiece was enjoyable. Where the opening action scene was kind of smug and felt pretty false, the way everything came together at the end was a lot better, especially as by then several Avengers were damaged goods mentally, the Maximoffs had a different dynamic and there were civilians to protect. If more of the film had been like this, the plot simplified for more large-scale action, it could have been more fun. More of a Mad Max action rollercoaster, which I would have preferred. Where the film tried to slow down, it also became sluggish.

That said, it was fun to see some familiar places in the flashbacks and side-scenes. Not only did my most recent university show up, with the Founder’s Building looking impressive as ever, it turns out my old school makes for a good place to train assassins. I have bad memories of the place, sure, but it’s certainly beautiful, and worked very well as a set.

The film essentially didn’t feel like the centrepiece of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which it is meant to be. It felt like a bridging chapter, like the plot you get for a video game that ties into a film franchise, or a short side-story of the sort you get as an animation leading to a big sequel. The whole thing felt like it was setting up (a) the Civil War storyline, and (b) the Infinity Gems plot that fed into the film’s one disappointing scene in the credits.

This just didn’t feel like a satisfying entry in the canon. I think I would have felt better if this had been an Iron Man film, focusing a bit more on Stark and the mistake he made, and then the second Avengers film be Civil War. Thus, I’m looking forward to Captain America: Civil War more than the rest. Oh, and I’m looking forward to seeing Ant Man, too.