“I really have to watch the X-Men movies,” I overheard a cinemagoer saying, as the crowd for the first Melbourne screening of Joss Whedon’s Avengers: Age Of Ultron filed into the autumn night. I half expected a nearby staffer - like those crack Olympic security teams in charge of making sure anyone in event territory drinks only the correctly-branded carbonated beverage - to interrupt the conversation; helpfully pointing out that whilst X-Men is a Marvel property on page, it isn’t on screen, so perhaps they’d prefer to talk about the great new Daredevil series on Netflix, instead.
But the impetus and inspiration behind this eavesdropped conversation is clear no matter how the billion-dollar comic-book box-office is divided: Age Of Ultron is a film that makes you think about other films.
From the way Robert Downey Jr. boasts of all he did in 2012’s Marvel’s The Avengers, to the obligatory closing-credits sting that promises you, by 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War, Part 1, that purple evil-space-dude with the wrinkly chin will finally enter the fray, Age Of Ultron is the place in which Marvel’s multi-movie branding extravaganza feels most transparent; where you’re aware how often story is bent to accommodate marketing.
After a wildly-enjoyable Bond-styled prologue that drops the audience into a raid-on-an-evil-compound mission, where the Avengers function as a well-oiled team: Hulk a controlled wrecking-ball, Thor/Captain America executing hammer/shield two-player special-moves, Iron Man crackin’ wise about your mama, the gang retreat to the Thunderbirds-esque Avengers Tower for a celebratory booze-up. It’s cute comic-relief, a riff on that old superheroes-around-the-house saw, with a casual-wear Thor in charge of a drinking game in which the gathered ranks try and grapple with his Godly hammer (note: homoerotic innuendo is half-implied).
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But the party mostly seems staged so that friends from allied entertainment properties can pop in and lay pipe: Anthony Mackie connecting the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier to the upcoming Captain America: Civil War in a few lines of artless exposition; Don Cheadle boasting of a bigger role in TBC Iron Man 4; Downey Jr. and Chris Hemsworth discussing the absent girlfriends left behind in their separate series. The whole feels like a ’70s sitcom staging a crossover spectacular with figures from its varied spin-offs, the only surprise being that the always-delightful Paul Rudd doesn’t drop by to let us know that his new movie Ant-Man opens in theatres July 16.
This is, of course, intrinsic to The Avengers, which is, at source-text essence, a contrived alliance between in-house icons, born 50 years ago amidst the Barnum-esque hucksterism of the comic-book trade. And Age Of Ultron is a film about the looseness of that alliance, essentially positing our heroes less as rockband than as supergroup: a collection of starry solo acts who, when brought together in one collective, have troubled reining in the egos, and fall easy prey to backstage squabbles.
Thus, the evil at work in Age Of Ultron sets our bandmates against each other, and against themselves. It starts with Elizabeth Olsen as Scarlet Witch, a shadowy terror-whisperer who moves like a J-Horror curse and can cast spells that send victims descending into symbolic nightmares. Of course, those nightmares also feel like allied branding teasers: Idris Elba’s Hemsworth-troubling cameo on loan from Thor; Hayley Atwell swanning into Chris Evans’ sadly-sexy dreams like an Agent Carter programming reminder; even Scarlett Johansson’s amazing Russian-ballet-and-assassination-school flashbacks feeling like a showreel audition for a standalone Black Widow movie (which, like: do it!, benevolent Marvel overlords).
Age Of Ultron is a film that makes you think about other films.
Soon enough, this dissent-mongering motif brings the arrival of the titular heel, Ultron, a robo-monster who looks as if on loan from the Transformers movies. The villain is, as par for the 2015 blockbuster course, rogue AI turned sentient evil super-computer thing; though, as voiced by James Spader, this uninspired foil at least has a few moments of glad Whedonist irony (“I wanted to take this time to explain my evil plan,” he jokes, trope laid on the table).
Ultron is the unintended creation of an act of Playing-God by-way-of-R&D-montage science by Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo’s ever-tortured Bruce Banner. Which, as Best Laid Plans turned Shit Hits Fan, sets the rest of the gang against them, and the pair against each other; leading to one of those depressing breaking-shit fight sequences in which ostensible giant Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots destroy whole downtowns’ worth of CGI skyscrapers in one single scrap.
Having turned on themselves, the Avengers retreat to lick their wounds in the heartland cliché of Hawkeye’s secret rustic farmhouse. There, along with a closet full of flannels, a pile of logs to split, and a rusting tractor in a barn, Jeremy Renner has a couple of kids and Linda Cardellini’s supportive wife (“I totally support your avenging,” she literally says) in wait. This is the emotional manipulation centre of the film, where Renner is framed as regular clock-punchin’ family man, and where Ruffalo and Johansson, tortured would-be paramours whose love may be fated to remain unconsummated, whisper pained sweet-nothings outside the guest-bedroom en suite.
Then a Special-Guest-Appearance-ing Samuel L. Jackson struts into farmhouse frame for an inspirational locker-room speech (Teamwork! Togetherness!), and the gang goes off to fight the super-villain and his endless army of replicant drones. The logistics of fighting an AI foe are pretty swiftly forgotten: Ultron may be non-corporeal sentience haunting more networks than the NSA, but action-movie logistics dictate he still has to be a robot-man who can have a fistfight with Captain America on top of a moving truck.
From there, things get bigger and sillier: Paul Bettany goes from RDJ’s toffee computer-butler to your next known Marvel property, The Vision; Olsen and Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s ‘Eastern European’ accents are wobblier than newborn deer on ice; Hemsworth invites Stellan Skarsgård to an underground cave to achieve an electric blue dream-sequence in which all those multi-movie MacGuffin-stones zap together in psychedelic screen-saver; Johansson is taken hostage by Ultron and tied to the figurative railway tracks, because apparently gender clichés die hard; and, in the showstopper final-fight finale, a whole town is lifted into the clouds.
“A city is flying, we’re fighting robots, I’ve got a bow and arrow, none of this makes sense!” Renner quips, attempting to get a turning-to-good Olsen to just go-with-it; this Whedonist irony a reminder not to come to a super-hero movie expecting plausibility. But even that strain of arch, self-referential humour feels like just another element that Whedon has to juggle. His Avengers sequel is a billion-dollar balancing act, a teetering Jenga tower of corporate responsibilities, Cinematic Universe rules, nerd-servicing Easter eggs, multi-movie arcs, and a more-is-more mandate for the biggest brand in the stable.
Watching Age Of Ultron never feels as if you’re sitting down to a single story, experiencing a single movie. Even when it ends it doesn’t really, merely pausing for the next instalment. This is business-as-usual for blockbuster filmmaking circa 2015, but putting the business before the show means that, here, the dramatic stakes feel terminally low.
With Marvel movies already plotted out ’til 2019 (in Phase Three of their own evil plan for global domination), it’s hard to be too invested in any standalone episode, to feel threatened by any one villain or scared for the fate of any one hero, to have a singular cinematic experience contained within this 140 minutes. The Avengers assemble (again), RDJ says funny stuff, CGI shit blows up, credits roll. Tune in next film: same Marv-time, same Marv-channel.
