Review: The Avengers: Age of Ultron

I have long given up going to the theatre for any commercial dramas or comedies, but action movies are the one thing I will go see as a new release. I admit it, I shamelessly enjoy the excitement of seeing over-the-top (but not too far over) action on the huge screen and watching beautiful actors beat the shit out of each other. It's simple, it's direct, it's usually not cheesy or offensive, it might be a bit artless and predictable, but I don't often see people punching one another in the face in real life, so I can't put up with it for the excitement factor. And in the last few years, Marvel delivered some pretty great action movies, most notably The Avengers, Thor, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Despite Marvel's predictably horrible track record with sequels (the ever-multiplying Iron Man follow-ups and Thor 2), I had high hopes for this Avengers movie due to the first movie and last year's Winter Soldier. Alas, these hopes were cruelly dashed.

First of all, let me say what commercial American filmmakers will seemingly never learn: BIGGER IS NOT BETTER. Where did the idea come from that the more in-your-face CGI there is, the better the movie?? On the most basic level, excessive visual effects take time away from character development and desensitize the audience. With this movie, however, perhaps taking time away from character interaction is a good thing as the little we got of it was so atrociously written that I would probably have preferred to see more robots blowing things up. I have no idea why every single movie franchise feels the need to outdo the previous movie in terms of visual effects. How about just giving us a different story? What a groundbreaking idea, right? But of course, that would necessitate actual signs of mental activity on the part of the writers, something that is not detectable in this movie.

Now, obviously, I don't go out to see a superhero movie expecting Tarkovsky, but I do expect some stylishness and discretion in the use of visual effects. And the first Avengers movie certainly had class. Who can ever live up to the supervillain that Loki was? He was certainly not the most technologically advanced one, but, like heroin, he had a hell of a personality. Shakespearean actor Tom Hiddleston played him to perfection as revenge-obsessed Byronic hero gone off the rails, bringing some ice-cold British style to the table. The villain in Age of Ultron lacks personality to the extent that he doesn't even have a human incarnation. (Not that that has previously been a problem in the Marvel movies; Tony's operating system JARVIS had more personality than everyone in this movie combined, no wonder they got rid of him). To avoid any actual dialogue or interaction, about 90% of the movie is therefore pointless explosions, stunts, running, shooting, and fighting. Also telling is the fact that usually in a Marvel movie, only one city gets smashed up beyond recognition, while this time, it's three.

Okay, so, let's get to the rest of the characters. Even Tony (the most hilarious and sharp Marvel hero) is overly nobly motivated and dull. Witty quips at a serious minimum. Captain America is still in his element as the most boring superhero the world has never seen with a stick the size of a giant redwood stuck up his ass. He does an absolute zero of interesting things, but I didn't expect anything else. Bruce and Clint literally were not characters at all, for all the interest they present, they might as well have been replaced by robots and no one would have noticed. Thor says like one funny Thor-ish thing and that's at the very beginning. This is bad, but the worst is Natasha. The problems here are off the charts.

I'm not a big fan of Scarlett Johansson. She's good in action films and was nicely wistful and confused in Lost in Translation, but overall, she's quite wooden and heavy-handed. But the Black Widow was awesome. She manipulated everyone, beat the shit out of everyone, and was basically the most emotionally invulnerable, cool, ruthless Avenger. And now, suddenly, she develops a ridiculous attachment to Bruce Banner, is flirting in the most over-the-top 30s movie dialogue, crying all over the place because she can’t have children, and basically allowing herself to be captured without a fight. Clearly, the Natasha we know and love has somewhere along the way been replaced by a useless Barbie doll. She becomes some kind of damsel in distress that the Hulk picks up in the most stereotypical ‘monster from 50s horror movie carrying hot girl’ manner and brings to safety. Most offensively, there is a scene where she tells Bruce about being sterilized when being trained as an assassin. During her flashback of being wheeled into the operating room, she looks up at the nurses and they have no mouths. To me, this is clearly saying that she feels that her 'voice' is being taken away from her. So women can only express themselves through having a baby? And Natasha is useless because she is not a walking womb? From a badass bitch, she suddenly becomes weak and inferior, a liability, someone to be excluded from the battle because she has failed in a woman's main purpose: reproduction. I cannot believe that something this blatantly sexist was put into the film. It's well-known that Marvel fans have been wanting more character development and background on the Black Widow, but not this.

Poster for Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Age of Ultron gives us a revamp of this very image starring the Hulk and Black Widow.

Her dialogue with Bruce was perhaps the worst-written thing ever, it makes hardcore porn look like a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Before they even kiss they are suddenly talking about living together and kids. Someone please educate the writers in how humans communicate! The party scene was like absolutely no party that I have ever seen or imagined, no one can possibly have that amount of forced and stilted conversation. The 'look at something, say half of a witty comment, do something flashy and action-y, finish the comment' formula was used in this movie at least half a million times and is getting old fast. Whoever wrote the screenplay should be fired. Out of a cannon. Into the void.

I do have to give some credit where credit is due, one of the best scenes was when the Scarlet Witch (I didn't even start on the genetically altered Ukranian twins because their characters were also totally devoid of personality) messed with Thor's head and he saw a vision of all the Avengers dead. The slow camera pan over the dead, waxen bodies slumped or sprawled in death is reminiscent of a Gustave Moreau painting of supernatural doom and is satisfyingly chilling. Honestly, I think that those few seconds were the best of the whole 2+ hours.

Gustave Moreau - The Suitors.

There were so many ways it could have gone right. At first, I was rejoicing because of a hope that we were about the get a superhero version of Frankenstein starring Tony as Victor and Ultron as the monster. But no, that obviously psychologically fruitful scenario clearly did not appeal to the writers. Tony barely shows any remorse at fucking up on an epic scale. Also, deus ex machina is usually just an expression, but in this case, it is literally a thing as Vision suddenly emerges from the 'cradle' that was supposed to make a humanoid body for Ultron but was somehow altered by Thor. This was completely insulting to the audience. There is no way, seeing that living-tissue-producing machine, that we could possibly imagine it going anywhere good.

I'm probably just bitter because there were so many times that Marvel did it right. Okay, have aliens and robots fighting and shit blowing up everywhere. But give me the moment when Tony is tortured by remorse for his career of producing deadly weapons, when Loki lets go and falls into a void because he cannot have the love he deserves, when Steve stops fighting the Winter Soldier because Bucky is his best friend, that's what I paid my money to see. Oh, and also, I could have done with seeing so much less of Elizabeth Olson's breasts. So much less.

I'm sure people have seen this already, but here's the SNL skit about how Marvel refuses to give the Black Widow her own movie. SNL aren't my favourite, but they do a really great job of pointing out that Marvel (and for that matter, popular American movie studios in general) have no idea (like, absolute zero) of how to deal with a female character.