The Avengers Age of Ultron Review: Playing God

A large Iron Man in The Avengers Age of Ultron

The Avengers Age of Ultron

B-

A review by Frederick Cholowski

Lets hit an important point right off the bat; The Avengers Age of Ultron is a fun motion picture. Writer, director Joss Whedon can still expertly shoot an action scene, write fun quippy dialogue, and create a sense of comradery between characters that are as diverse as you can get. It’s a decently constructed action film that has many entertaining moments to keep its two and a half hour run time fairly breezy.

That’s where it ends sadly; the second Avengers film feels really empty and inconsequential for a film that is suppose to be a big culmination of a few years worth of story. It’s also the most generic of the last few Marvel films, following a formula that could almost be ripped from the first film. What I was left with walking out of the theatre ultimately is not excitement, or enthusiasm it’s just a sense of emptiness and indifference. I know that I had fun throughout the proceedings of the film but that never carried into the time afterwards. It leaves the film into feeling like a big, mostly entertaining, two and a half hour commercial for future Marvel films.

Age of Ultron opens in a post S.H.I.E.L.D world where the Avengers are running missions in order to rid the world of the last few remaining pockets of HYDRA. After they recover the tesseract during a mission, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) , out of fear of not being powerful enough to save the world,  decides to harness the power of the tesseract to create a new artificial intelligence in order to protect the world and keep it safe for good.  Of course as with most attempts to make a super intelligent AI it goes horribly wrong and instead of creating a force that can protect the world Tony has created a force that could potentially destroy it. Enter Ultron (voiced by James Spader) a super powerful AI program who has twisted Tony’s ideas of protecting the world into a scheme to tear it down and will stop at nothing to get the job done.

The most glaring problem in Age of Ultron is that its villain, and thus ultimately the thrust of its plot, feel inconsequential to everything in the Marvel Universe that has come before and to everything that will come after. It really feels like a B plot that is suppose to bridge us into the real A plot storyline that will culminate in the next Avengers films.  Ultron never feels like a full on credible threat and the loom of Thanos only helps to diminish it. It laves the viewer with the feeling that the film is just kind of there and will really play no part in the meta level proceedings which is rather disappointing given the expectations that come with the big culmination of all the individual heroes.

As a film on its own merits alone the film still suffers from rushed and messy storytelling. There are random subplots that come out of nowhere and pieces of attempted character development that are thrown at the wall so quickly that they do not even have a chance to stick. There is so much that Whedon is trying to do here and nowhere near enough time to do it thus certain relationships and backstories of characters kind of feel like they were inserted just for the sake of having them there. None of these developments or subplots have any sort of weight or importance, leaving them feeling empty and unnecessary.

It also does not help that Age of Ultron also feels a little formulaic. The last two Marvel films were so interesting because they changed up the formula in sometimes small but very effective ways.  Captain America Winter Soldier felt a bit like a spy film and Guardians of the Galaxy felt more like an obvert comedy mixed with a wacky space opera then anything else. Age of Ultron feels like it’s back to the average superhero film, just with more superheroes. A big villain is out to end the world in a particular way and it all culminates in a few big battles with way too much property damage. It makes the proceedings that already feel empty at their core and drain them even more.

The Avengers Age of Ultron is not a bad film, but it is one that suffers from being a lame duck. It just feels like none of the film is all that important and that ultimately the sole purpose of this film is to sell the viewer on the future of the universe. Not only that but its messy and even a little generic. Ultimately it makes what should have been a film that was overwhelmingly fun frustrating, empty, and one of the more disappointing efforts of 2015.