Assemble…
SPOILERS shall follow…
There
comes a time where the continuation of a thing starts to lead to diminishing
returns. This happens to everything, be it person, place or interconnected
cinematic universe; no matter how brightly we burn the candle, the wick can
only last so long. The journey that Marvel Studios started all the way back in
2008 with Iron Man has been a helluva
fun ride for movie lovers and comic fans alike, with the studio defying the
odds and having the quality generally operating on an upturned curve with each
successive release. But the question must be asked: how long can they keep it
up? How long can they juggle all these disparate franchises and characters
together across same landscape before the foundations start to shake and the
whole thing comes tumbling down? Is it time for scales to realign themselves,
as we the fans gowtih each new release from “Breathless Anticipation” to “Cautious
Optimism”?
Well,
I’m happy to report that Avengers: Age of
Ultron is not the feather that tips the scales in that other direction for
the MCU. Marvel and writer/director Joss Whedon assemble their team once more,
and after the monumental feat of bringing together all their superheroes for
one single, super-movie, are now faced with an even bigger task; that eternal
question, “what’s next?” Where do you go after assembling the Earth’s Mightiest
Heroes together for the first time in cinematic history and have them save the
world by staving off an alien invasion? You can either take the safe route and
go even bigger - essentially giving the audience the same thing - or you can
scale it back and make the stakes more personal. Keeping true to the Marvel
vision of “characters first, everything else second,” Whedon wisely opts for the
latter, and gives the Avengers a threat that not only threatens to destroy the
entire world, but their own team from the inside out.
I don’t
envy Whedon’s task of juggling all these characters and giving the A-list actors
who play them enough beats so they don’t feel like glorified cameos, but he
pulls it off. All the old favorites return, leaping to life via an awesome
singe-take shot that culminates into the first of many compositions throughout the
film that are the perfect cinematic evocation of a comic book splash-page. They
all get their own arcs and they all have something to do, but Whedon decides to
put the emotional focus on the characters who don’t have their own franchises to
return to, the most effective of which is the budding romance between Bruce
Banner and the Black Widow. It at once
comes out of nowhere and yet makes total sense: the two are eternally lost,
damaged goods, and understand each other in a way that none of the others ever
could - an idea perfectly visualized by the “lullabies” Widow gives to calm
Banner’s raging, green other half. Mark Ruffalo is easily the most talented actor
of his generation, and Scarlett Johansson isn’t far behind… ensuring that these
scenes hit like a ton of bricks when they show up throughout the movie.
Also
getting the lion’s share of the emotional weight is Jeremy Renner’s Clint Barton/Hawkeye,
who you might remember last time as the guy who got possessed by Loki almost
immediately and was basically a zombie for the first two-thirds of the film. Whedon
makes up for giving him a bit of the short shrift last time around by taking us
into Hawkeye’s personal life. A raid in South Africa by the team goes bad,
forcing the Avengers to go into hiding, and Hawkeye takes them to his own
personal safehouse: a place out in the middle of nowhere where he raises a family
with his wife and two kids when not Avengering. It’s a revelation that comes as
a shock to his team-mates just as much as it does to the audience, and was
precisely what was needed to humanize this otherwise stiff character. These
scenes with Barton’s family were so effective I found myself dreading the
moment Renner runs back into the fray to rescue a trapped child - seriously, I
would have been pissed if Hawkeye bit the big one here. And if you’re the focus on the non-franchisers
would lead to some unequality in the division of narrative labor, fear not: Cap,
Thor and Iron Man are every bit as involved in the plot, and all get to kick
just as much ass in the action scenes and Whedon’s crackerjack repartee as the
others. It’s precisely those scenes that are at the heart of what these movies
are all about: seeing these characters bounce off each other and work together.
Stark and Banner’s science bros, the party scene where they all attempt lifting
the hammer, the small, one-upmanship rivalry between Stark and Barton… as great
and as pure comic book as the action scenes are throughout, it’s the character
moments that will keep us coming back again and again.
Of
course, it would get a bit stale if it was just the original five members throughout,
and so we get the new characters of Wanda and Pietro Maximoff, played by
Elizabeth Olsen and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and it’s here the film stumbles a
bit. The characters themselves are fantastic, and the actors portraying them
are as equal to the task as the original team-members, but their development is
lacking - making the twins feel like an element shoe-horned into the movie
rather than feeling like a natural part of the story. Their story especially
feels cut down to the bone, as they go from Hydra flunkies to Ultron’s minions
to Avengers at the drop of a hat; a few more scenes devoted exclusively to them
and what they’re all about would have made them flow into the story much more
naturally. For the most part, the filmmakers are successful in incorporating
them as new recruits to the team (with one especially nice moment between
Quicksilver and Hawkeye), but a little bit more with them would have made all the
difference.
The big bad this outing
is, of course, Ultron, played to evil perfection by the silken-voiced James
Spader. The actor’s take on the villain is fantastic: Ultron is hilarious,
heartfelt and downright terrifying at times, and Spader walks that shifting
tightrope of tonality like a pro. The greatest villains are the ones who have a
point: Ultron was designed by Tony Stark to be a suit of armor around the world,
a vast Artificial Intelligence network to ensure world peace, and the android
correctly calculates that the biggest obstacle to such a thing are the little
ants stomping around and building their anthills upon it. Utilizing the cold
calculations of a machine, Ultron decides that the human race’s time is up, and
sets about to kickstart their mass extinction. This may make the villain sound like
a robotic, emotionless killjoy, but Spader inverts all of that by giving Ultron
just as much personality as any of the Avengers. Ultron is essentially Tony
Stark’s “son,” and thus he inherits his father’s witticisms and ironic sense of
humor.
The father/son dynamic,
or I guess more specifically the theme of the older generation being usurped by
the new one, is further enhanced by the addition of Ultron’s creation, the
messianic Vision, played by MCU stalwart Paul Bettany. Bettany has been there
from the beginning as the voice of J.A.R.V.I.S., and seeing him step in front
of the camera for one of these movies is a pure delight - the actor has been
wasted in much of the starring roles he’s gotten in the last few years, so
getting to see him strut his stuff in a big movie like this feels like it’s
been a long time coming, and his work as the Vision is unparalleled, and the
central conflict of ideals between him and his master makes the movie far more
than just another CGI slugfest. Where Ultron looks at the human race and sees
only doom and ruination, the Vision sees the same, but through a different
lens. They’re two sides of the same coin, with Vision representing the beauty
of an impermanent life, and Ultron being the existential doom of said life.
If
those characters suffer from anything, again, it’s abbreviation. Ultron shows
up nearly fully-formed in the first half-hour, after a rather unconvincing
montage of Banner and Stark working to develop his AI. Thor basically comes out
of nowhere (or rather, a half-hearted thread that doesn’t give the thunder god all
that much to do) and jumpstarts the Vision’s new body with nary an explanation
in sight, and it’s not long before the android joins the team and everybody
goes off to fight Ultron once more. This incompleteness of character is not the
fault of Whedon, who I believe is one of the best story and character structuralists
in the business, but rather the need to bring a movie in under two and a half
hours. The bones of the movie work, but that’s just what they are: you can see
how they all connect into a larger whole, making the structure of the story
sound, but there’s just not enough meat and tissue there to make it move as
well as it should. I think I’m crazy for even suggesting this, but the movie
really needed to be three hours long - that way we could get more scenes with
the twins, more scenes with Ultron so he feels like a presence, and more scenes
like the Vision staring out over the cityscape after his “birth.” Coupled with
the fine work done with the main Avengers, and we would have had a movie that
didn’t show its seams quite as much.
My chief complaint for
the whole film boils down to wanting more, but of course, we’re going to get
more: Marvel’s slate is set through 2020, and the Scarlet Witch and the Vision
and everyone else who felt like they didn’t get enough time to gestate will all
return at some point, to further grow and develop across Marvel’s growing web
of interconnected storytelling. Many are beginning to belabor the continuity of
such an endeavor, complaining about the films not being able to stand up on
their own, but I’m not so quick to point the naysaying finger. Time and
technology have changed the way we view movies, and the idea of a continuing
universe of narrative across multiple features is just another example of that.
There’s no rule that says a story should be contained to just one two-plus hour
long movie, and perhaps the definitions of just what a movie is can be changed
to fit something else entirely. That’s a
scary proposition, for sure, but I’m not so sure it’s a fundamentally bad one.
Much like the dual perspectives of Ultron and the Vision, I suppose the
cinematic experience Marvel presents will rest solely with the individual’s own
perspective on the matter. Personally, I
can’t wait to see where they take it next.
No comments:
Post a Comment