Age of Ultron review

Avengers 2: Avenge Harder was the biggest disappointment since Avengers 1: Look What Our Lawyers Accomplished. 

Or it would have been if I'd actually been stoked for Avengers 2. But I would like to highlight something I said in that earlier post:

If that's the case, then Whedon comes off as the MCU's version of the Pierce Brosnan Bond: a that'll-do personage who can't live up to the hype, but that's okay because it's not like you could realistically expect someone else to do better in his constraints.

I'm repeating that here because that's basically my opinion of this movie. It's like GoldenEye. It's well-put-together and hugely entertaining, but at the end of the day it's totally mindless and nothing actually happened.

Actually that's not true. They did spend some time setting up both Batman v. Superman Captain America: Civil War and Avengers 3: The Magic Mitten Thingy. In fact, what was going on in this film was almost incidental to what was the film was doing in service of the MCU. What's going on in this film is that Tony Stark gets mind-raped into building a new robot - because JARVIS and the Iron Legion wasn't enough, apparently, but because he hasn't seen 2001 or The Terminator or The Matrix or played Mass Effect, he forgets to give it a soul and it starts trying to solve humanity's problems by ending them.

Ending humanity, I mean.

The Avengers re-assemble and fight a lot and there's some blatant CSO (green-screening, if you want to use the oft-inaccurate lay terminology, you peon you) and CGI and at the end a small team of heroes is able to overcome a legion of soulless monsters. And this is supposed to be a surprise, I guess. This is what I mean when I say it's like a middling Bond film; you know all the beats, and there's never any tension because - sorry - writer/director Joss Whedon's reputation for tearing your heart out by murdering your favorite characters is totally undeserved. Maybe I'm spoiled by Game of Thrones doing that much more brutally and regularly, or perhaps by the fact that all of the Avengers are signed up for at least one more movie, but the fact of the matter is that at no moment in this film did I seriously believe that the heroes were either going to a) fail or b) die.

SPOILERS

Number One: The Twins
"But Quicksilver-" no. Shut up. Does not count; was not a hero at the beginning. Pulls a Heel-Face Turn because he suddenly realized that having a murderbot for a boss wasn't going to give him the greatest of retirement packages. Moreover his death is as profoundly stupid as, well, as Tara's death on Buffy, given that he dies shoving Hawkeye and Some Kid out of the way of a lot of bullets... while meanwhile his sister, who has telekinetic powers and thus could have either stopped the bullets or shoved Hawkeye and Some Kid out of the way without endangering herself, chose to do neither and then have a meltdown about it.

Hey, speaking of his sister, let's talk about Scarlet Witch. No, I'm not insulting the actress who plays Black Widow('s face*), that's a completely different character. Scarlet Witch can mind-rape people. She puts the whammy on Stark early on to make him build Ultron, but then she freaks out when Ultron decides to kill all life. Hey wait, wasn't that the plan? No, no, her plan was to make Stark build Ultron and then have Ultron turn on Stark. Somehow. But not on the rest of humanity. Just on Stark. Um.

*There's a saying - and if there's not then I'm saying it now - that the best special effects are not the "oh, look at me, this is obviously an effect" type - of which there are very very very very very many in this film, but rather the ones that are so sublime and subtle that you don't even notice them; in this case, Preggers!ScarJo's head being compugrafted onto a double's body in virtually every scene. That might be where the effects budget went and why the CSO work looks so shoddy (but then again, Iron Man 3 had the same bad CSO, so maybe not).

Number Two: Go Watch These Other Films, You Might Enjoy Them More.
So what the film does really well is play up the growing rift between Steve Rogers and Tony Stark, thus foreshadowing Civil War, a film I can't wait to see because I don't know who's actually going to win that one (probably Iron Man since Chris Evans is only slated for that one more film, in which case I can't wait to see how they go about actually killing off a character in these films). What the film does really poorly is shoe-horn the Endless Pebbles into the plot (and The Vision, too, for that matter - red-tinged clothes-wearing Dr. Manhattan does basically nothing, yay). Thor has to go away and "find himself" after being mind-raped by the Scarlet Witch and when he does, he comes back and spouts off a lot of gobbledygook - sorry, those last four letters might offend some precious non-trigger-warned soul out there, so "bafflegab" instead - about how you should all go see the Infinity Wars films in a few years.

Speaking of trigger warnings, let's talk about why the feminists hated what happened to Black Widow's character here. 1) she was forcibly sterilized back when she joined the totally-not-KGB and that event traumatized her to this day, and 2) she's basically the Hulk's minder. 3) she's played by an unreasonably hot actress who thus body-shames everyone else oh shut up fatso. On point 1, why the hell isn't there a Black Widow movie? I mean seriously this girl's carrying around an insane amount of emotional trauma and still kicking ass, which is basically the second half of Buffy the Vampire Slayer writ large, and hey, I know just the guy who would do a really good job with that: Drew Goddard.

2) she's basically the Hulk's minder. Yes, it's true. Aside from being able to control men (and lesbians) with her boobs, Black Widow has no actual superpowers. She's on a team with a literal god, a guy in an invincible suit of armor, a super-soldier, and the angry green guy. Hawkeye is equally useless, but he got a family. If Widow had a family, the feminists would bitch about how of course the only girl on the team has kids because all women need to make babies, wah wah wah wah wah. Back to my original point, powers-wise, these guys are not on a level playing field, like, at all. In order to keep the actors/actress happy, they have to find things for the less powerful people to do. Did they find the right things for her to do? Well, in Cap 2: Winter is Coming, she was similarly outgunned. She couldn't fight the Winter Soldier, but she did a great job helping Cap navigate the complex world of secrets and spycraft. She was the dark knight to Cap's white knight, the spy to his soldier. It made a great use of her pre-established character and abilities. Here she's paired up with the Hulk, because... Ruffalo blackmailed the shit out of Whedon? I dunno. Not only does it not make any sense it kinda makes a teensy iota of sense insofar as she's the one most likely to have any experience with conditioning techniques, but it requires us to watch her awkwardly flirt with Banner and sing Hulk lullabies. No! F*cking stop it! This is a badass superspy who, last we saw her, tore down the world's foremost spy agency and dared Congress to come after her, and now she's singing lullabies to a guy who shouldn't even be on the team!

Number Three: Why is the Hulk in these movies?
I'll be honest with you, the Hulk is my least favorite Avenger. Neither Banner nor Hulk is actually committed to the team (Banner's remorseful about all the destruction he's caused and Hulk is friendly fire and collateral damage personified). Why do they take him along? Is there a single thing he can do that JARVIS in a Hulkbuster suit can't? If Banner has to be on the team (and that's as maybe seeing as how Stark's genius is rivaled only by his ego), why doesn't he just stay back in the lab? Seriously though, until Sovereign Ultron fired up his mass effect field vibranium effect field, the good guys had caused far more destruction than the bad guys had, and most of that was due to the Hulk. So why is he here? Audience appeal? Blech. Neither of his movies set the world on fire; if you ask any normal person what the second MCU film was, they'll say Iron Man 2. No, he's here because both films required him to hulk out and attack his own teammates in order to pad the runtime. We call this a Conflict Ball. And it sucks.

Number Four: Keep it Simple, Stupid
All of the characters in this film suffered because they had to spend their time with so many other characters. And trinkets, like Loki's scepter. Wait, if Thor only came back to Earth to take the scepter back, why didn't he take the scepter back with him at the end of the first film? And the other films, because as I said above, this film is really just Civil War Part One and Infinity Wars Part Zero. So nothing really happened except that a big chunk of Fictionville got oblitermatized. Next time what they should do is focus on one Avenger and have another in a supporting role. You know, like The Winter Soldier did. Oh.