So the first big team up of comic book characters from a series of successful solo films earnt over a billion dollars at the box office and overall was well received by fans and critics alike – a simple task then for returning writer and director Joss Whedon to take on with the now firmly established team and growing universe around them to go and top that as best you can. Having taken on an army of invading aliens in the first Avengers cinematic outing this time the titular team are up against red-eyed robot Ultron, who has his own ideas about how the world should look and more precisely how it’s ills would best be solved, starting with the removal of the Avengers from it.
Whedon wastes no time in getting Age of Ultron up and running, with the Avengers from the first team re-united from the get go in a fast paced action sequence that gives each a moment to showcase themselves for a few moments as well as being part of an effective team. Tasked with rounding up some of the HYDRA group who remain at large, in this case Baron Wolfgang von Strucker, who has been leading some experimentation on humans using Loki’s sceptre, which is successfully retrieved by the team, although not before an encounter with the Maximoff twins Pietro and Wanda, two of von Strucker’s more successful experiments. Endowed with the enhanced abilities of super speed and the ability to manipulate minds and project energy respectively, the twins almost successfully disrupt the superhero’s mission, with Tony Stark falling victim to a hallucination brought on by Wanda’s powers in which he envisions the death of the Avengers group. Having returned home, Stark and Bruce Banner discover a sentient A.I. within the scepter’s gem and utilise it, despite Banner’s initial reticence, to finish Stark’s global defence program, named Ultron. In a move reminiscent of Skynet from the Terminator series, Ultron swiftly concludes that the best way of defending the earth should begin with the eradication of the human race and having wiped out Star’s JARVIS A.I. attacks the Avengers before escaping with the scepter to escalate his plans.
Of the new introductions, Elisabeth Olson’s Scarlet Witch fares better than Aaron Johnson’s Quicksilver – a character around which there were degrees of controversy given his usage in the X Men universe in Days of Future Past – although that isn’t to say that either are fully fleshed or rounded out despite the running time of the film. Whilst one scene gives a rather brief and basic insight into their reasoning for siding with Ultron there’s a sense that a little more could yet be forthcoming about them, how they see the world and what their own experiences have done to and shaped them when the film picks them up. Rather unbelievably Marvel has failed to heed it’s lesson from Iron Man 2 and brings Age Of Ultron to a jerky stop to venture into other sideroads which feel like nothing more than set-up points for future films, either solo team outings or for future Avengers team ups – in particular one sequence involving Thor feels brusquely sandwiched into proceedings, and though some viewers might well enjoy the sight of Chris Hemsworth thrashing around topless in a small underground lake to others it will feel like a needless diversion from the events of the film to sow future seeds for the Marvel universe.
An on-running joke about the straight laced Captain America taking umbrage at some of Tony Stark’s language feels like it should belong to the newly frozen version of Steve Rogers in the first phase of Marvel’s cinematic output, and strangely when the opportunity arrives to give some background and depth to the move’s events and their effect on the team it is on Hawkeye that the focus falls. A move that could be judged as either or both an opportunity taken to give some heft to a peripheral character from the series so far, or a slightly awkward and clumsy attempt to force the viewing audience to care for a character they’d barely been given much reason to root for so far, it does at least allow the story to breathe a little in the middle. Quite how viewers will take this section is more down to how they view the character and whether they want to take that time to see some real world style effects on the family outside of the Avengers team, an aspect of the team’s existence that hasn’t been explored before either as a unit or really in any meaningful way for most of the team, save for Captain America and the effects of loss he has to deal with having missed out on many decades of life. Those developments and insights however felt more a rightful, fluid part of those stories and not anywhere near as forced as the family life of Hawkeye may well come across as.
If all that sounds like Avengers: Age of Ultron is a huge letdown that’s not wholly the case – there remain’s some well orchestrated action sequences in the film, one of which kicks off the film in the midst of a raid on a Hydra base, through to the Earth threatening showdown, in which despite the number of combatants involved director Joss Whedon manages to maintain a good sense of clarity through the various fights and destruction going on. Whereas the on running language joke falls a bit flat there is a more successful series of gags including a pure geek out discussion about the worthiness to bear Thor’s hammer and the building relationship between Banner/Hulk and Black Widow gives Mark Ruffalo another chance to show an aspect to the character that gives the film some needed and interesting character depth for one of the main players. Thanks to the annoucements of future Marvel films there’s little sense of real threat to the team in the final battle and all it’s high points and visual effects, and there just seems a lack of fun or maybe freshness that was a feature in the first Avengers team up. Ultron himself comes across vocally as a curious mix of the Jarvis A.I. mixed in with some of Tony Stark’s attitude, balanced out with moments somewhat softly spoken calculated threat by James Spader, and carries enough of a physical presence to be considered a match for the titular heroes, even if his threat does seem diluted by the swarming metallic army he sends out to wreak havoc later on.
There’s little doubt that Avengers: Age of Ultron will make Marvel a ton of money, like it’s predecessor, and does have some moments of well worked team based action and development for a couple of the team to help shift the focus away from the three main players of the series to date. It does feel however like it falls short of really hitting the heights of some of it’s comic book movie contemporaries, with some uneven moments as well as a mid-section that feels bloated as it tries to bring a sense of the real world effect of the responsibilities and consequences of being a part of the Avengers team to the proceedings. As the premier comic book release of the summer Avengers: Age of Ultron is more of a stake into the middle ground rather than a raising of the bar for others to follow.
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