Avengers: Age of Ultron
Directed by:
Joss WhedonScreenplay:
Joss WhedonCinematography:
Ben DavisCast:
Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Samuel L. Jackson, Cobie Smulders, James Spader (more)VOD (4)
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Marvel Avengers: Age of Ultron stars Robert Downey Jr., who returns as Iron Man, along with Chris Evans as Captain America, Chris Hemsworth as Thor and Mark Ruffalo as The Hulk. Together with Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow and Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye, and with the additional support of Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury and Cobie Smulders as Agent Maria Hill, the team must reassemble to defeat James Spader as Ultron, a terrifying technological villain hell-bent on human extinction. Along the way, they confront two mysterious and powerful newcomers, Wanda Maximoff, played by Elizabeth Olsen, and Pietro Maximoff, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and meet an old friend in a new form when Paul Bettany becomes Vision. (Disney / Buena Vista)
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"Marvel is playing games with the audience "Find ten differences". Leaving aside the obligatory "bigger, longer, more expensive, more computer effects", it is indistinguishable from the first movie. What you would miss terribly is a charismatic villain (again), it is noticeably lacking the human element (again), what is completely absent is any fear of the characters (again), everyone is just playing with each other in a harmless way (again) and the final hour turns into one big not escalating, confusing and an interchangeable CGI action mess (again), in which just a bunch of bad guys from space replace countless robots. It is almost impossible to tell the first and the second movie apart, because each of them has the same pros and cons, so you know exactly in advance what and in what form you will get. Which, of course, applies to some extent to all (cinema) Marvel movies. The question is whether to take this established "corporate unified approach" as a good thing or bad.
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As with the first episode, I give it an awkward three stars and save any more for the DVD version. It's not that I didn't like the second Avengers, there were just so many things to fault in it that the film doesn’t deserve a higher rating from me right now. I was disappointed by the underutilization of Baron Strucker (and he was played by Thomas Kretschmann!), Joss Whedon's annoying need for someone to say or do something at least a little funny every now and then, a bland Ultron who was not scary (and who of course also had to say things that were supposed to be funny), and the near absence of suspense. But I liked the scenes like the hammer raising (really funny) and the conversation between Black Widow and Dr. Banner (dramatic, touching, it had everything), I was thrilled by the Hulk and Hulkbuster duel, ILM's special effects were a joy to behold (except for the first Hulk and Black Widow tranquilization scene, which is actually topped by any King Kong - even the oldest one) and, so I don’t forget, Vision was the best of all.
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I am an old and conservative man who is no longer fast enough for the pace of Michael Bay's hypnagogue sessions, and I am increasingly enjoying wooden characters who constantly need to feed their egos. I can laugh at all that and forget about the absolutely tragic love cooing of a rookie and Russian, which I would without hesitation call one of the biggest directing failures in the history of Marvel. Again, the Avengers are not getting anywhere and are working with the same (and not completely fresh) model of action, and I do not see any exorbitant escalation in them. I enjoyed it, for example, because for the first time in the history of Marvel films, I was afraid for the life of one of the characters, and also because it is the first solo for Hawkeye, who knocked me on my ass from the back lines. I got what I came for. A slow, lightly leather and conservative costume event, which is starting to be particularly intimate in its grandeur, because it is basically a party of friends who long for rest.
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The same thing over and over again. Unfortunately, there is a lack of coherence and it lacks the dynamism of the first film. Among all the comic-book clichés, the only things that remain are the well-developed characters and the sharp emphasis on the supporting, not so powerful, yet very interesting figures (Hawkeye, Black Widow). The could have spared the nonsense with the Hulk, as well as the cheap action just for the sake of it, but those smooth digital sequences are cool, right? (even though they look lilke Zack Snyder’s stuff.) Joss Whedon doesn’t deliver anything revolutionary, he just pockets a lot of money because he does what works the most: a little bit of everything, so no one gets offended and everyone gets their fill. I wonder how many dozens of comics with the same plot narrative and framework Hollywood will have to make before audiences realise that it's all the same? Then a creator like Nolan will have to come in and rewrite history again.
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“I’ve had a long day. Eugene O'Neill long.” Unsurprisingly, Whedon is wagering on the tried and true. Also, the second Avengers is a sharp ensemble action movie that entertains more with clever dialogue than with massive, stylistically intoxicating action sequences, which this time are at least a tiny bit clearer thanks to the long “relay” shots (whereas the first film culminated with this technique as an illustration of the team’s cohesion, it serves as a visual leitmotif in the second one). ___ The interaction between the characters is no longer only about the necessity of finding their way to each other, maintaining their individuality and learning to cooperate. They begin to get to know both each other and their own dark sides better, which leads us to see them also as people (or rather characters with human problems) and not just as superhuman and essentially courageous saviours of civilisation (not for nothing do the heroes address each other mostly by their civilian names). Despite that, the film doesn’t cross the line into mutual teasing at the relationship level and it lacks serious conflict that would pose a threat to the team’s unity. Whedon remains too obliging toward his heroes and their somewhat pubescent thought processes, and despite being slightly more serious, Age of Ultron is still far from the bleakness and seriousness of Guardians of the Galaxy or at least The Dark Knight. From the beginning, the tone of the film makes it clear that it’s not going to get heavy, no adult problems will be resolved (“corny” is the best description of the relationship between Natasha and Bruce, as well as Clint’s family life), no serious crisis will occur and the allusions to American foreign policy will remain at a general level (Ultron as the result of the advancing mechanisation of warfare, violence perpetrated in the interest of protecting democratic values, the tension between the transparent and the concealed war on terror, with the former approach represented by the idealistic Captain America and the latter by Stark). ___ Unlike the elitist first film, the primary interest in the human element is not limited to the superheroes – the final action sequence is based on trying to save as many civilians as possible. The absorption in their own tragic story, the mutual flirtation and the amusing measuring of egos against one another are thus balanced by concern for ordinary human lives, though that concern serves mainly to underscore the mythological dimension of the narrative. It would not have been necessary to depict the heroes in the form of classical statuary in the closing credits in order for us to realise that they have the same role in the modern (fictional) world as the Greek gods did in antiquity. ___ The second Avengers is a more masterful, albeit somewhat mechanical, manifestation of what made the first Avengers movie surprising – the combination of a loud blockbuster with an informal and imaginative conversational relationship flick. If it represents the final development phase of Marvel adaptations, that won’t make me angry. In relation to genre conventions, however, the subversive Iron Man 3 and the narratively sophisticated Captain America: The Winter Soldier showed us that it can be done more imaginatively. ___ In the end, Age of Ultron is the most audacious in terms of the demands that it places on viewers who want to flawlessly find their way around in the story and among the large number of characters throughout the film’s entire 140-minute runtime. It begins without any in media res exposition and it doesn’t linger on explaining who is who and what they are after during the next two hours. The many hints, signs and allusions assume that you are as familiar with the fictional encyclopaedia as the characters are. Though I have mostly kept up to speed so far, I cannot imagine how I will manage to sort through the tremendous amount of facts ten movies and a hundred series episodes later. 80%
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