Age of Ultron: The Empire of Tony Stark

Previously: My reviews of The Avengers and Captain America: The Winter Soldier
"What the was up with that Black Widow scene in Avengers: Age of Ultron?"
My unspoilery review of Age of Ultron over at the Daily Dot.

Warning: SPOILERS AHEAD.

When you write a negative review for a summer blockbuster, the response usually goes something like this: Why Do You Hate Fun? To get this out of the way, I'm not judging Age of Ultron from a tower of joyless snobbery. Rather, I think it failed in two pretty basic ways: As an "event" sequel to the Avengers franchise, and as a Joss Whedon movie.

I didn't have high expectations for Age of Ultron, but I generally trust Whedon to deliver an entertaining story with a solid emotional core. The Avengers still holds up as a fun, well-paced movie with an unusually engaging villain, making Age of Ultron all the more disappointing because it didn't live up to these three specific standards. It had all the big-budget action setpieces you'd expect, but overall it was incoherent and riddled with lazy storytelling and self-contradictory characterization. Even Whedon's trademark witty dialogue often fell flat for me, with too many jokes either interrupting the action or feeling like they'd been written for other characters.

Ultimately, I don't think Whedon had any interest in maintaining continuity within the franchise. To a certain extent this was fine, because Age of Ultron had to be accessible to a wider audience. They couldn't include detailed callbacks to earlier movies. But AoU didn't just sidestep recent installments in the franchise, it contradicted them. For example:

• How did the team get together? AoU opens with the Avengers storming a castle to retrieve Loki's scepter, strongly implying that they've been based out of Stark Tower for some time. However, CA:TWS ends with Cap and Falcon going off to find Bucky (which admittedly gets a throwaway mention in AoU) and Natasha dropping her Black Widow identity to go travelling and "find herself." How did Natasha come to rejoin the Avengers, and when did her not-very-plausible romance with Bruce begin?
• Tony Stark destroyed his Iron Man suits at the end of Iron Man 3. Obviously we all KNEW he'd go back to being Iron Man, but AoU doesn't mention how this happened. Instead we launch straight in with him using a private army of Iron Man drones to invade/protect Sokovia. Pepper Potts was offscreen throughout, which felt especially odd compared to Erik Selvig's pointless cameo.
• Steve Rogers' characterization veered back to its Whedon state in The Avengers: stuffy and priggish, with no real impact on the plot. Bizarrely, Steve's "worst nightmare" hallucination was little more than a simplistic flashback to WWII, telling us nothing further about the character. Then there's the running joke where Steve (a frontline soldier who grew up in 1930s NYC), scolds Tony for cursing. In what universe does that make any sense, other than to fabricate some LOLs for the Robert Downey Jr quip machine?

While some of AoU's narrative flaws can be blamed on editorial demands from Marvel (ie, too many characters and overly long action sequences, or the needless Infinity Stone foreshadowing), the most glaring problems were often in areas where Joss Whedon usually excels. Let's start with our villain, Ultron.

The puppet without strings.

During the press tour for AoU, Marvel made a big deal of Ultron and James Spader's performance, with Whedon saying things like, "Ultron's pain is very, very real to me. He can't control the way his pain makes him behave, and I can relate to that." Well, OK. But in the actual movie, Ultron goes from birth to "I want to kill everyone" in the space of about ten seconds, with minimal explanation for how he got there.

As a manifestation of Tony's security paranoia, Ultron is fascinating. But as a character in himself, he felt kind of thin and poorly developed. I got the strong impression that several Ultron scenes must have been cut, meaning we never got a proper explanation for his actions -- besides, obviously, his role as a mutated version of Tony's desire to build bigger and smarter types ways of protecting himself. AoU was full of Frankenstein references, but they all felt a little half-baked.

Ultron isn't even visually interesting: another metallic humanoid robot. His idealized male physique and human mannerisms definitely implied something about his role as Tony's son/creation, but the end result was just another evil killer robot. They really missed a trick by avoiding the Uncanny Valley, I think. Ultron bending over at the waist to speak to Ulysses Klaw was one of my favorite moments for him, because it showed Ultron's physical differences beyond "very strong metal dude."

I touched on this in my Daily Dot review, but it bears repeating: AoU never found a smart way to deal with Ultron as a non-corporeal entity. For most of the movie, Ultron doesn't need a body to survive. When you combine this with the knowledge that none of the main Avengers can die, it removes a lot of tension from the battle scenes. They either should've made more use of Ultron's nature of an AI (rather than an army of killer robots), or spent more time on psychological/emotional threats like Scarlet Witch.

In order to orchestrate a Final Battle, Ultron had to be trapped in his physical bodies. Ordinarily I'd be prepared to handwave this kind of narrative loophole, but it felt cheap given the film's failure to explore Ultron's motivations and impact. To what extent were civilians even aware of his existence? Why does he decide to levitate a Sokovian city instead of screwing with nuclear launch codes or shutting down everyone's power supply? Why does he travel to meet Ulysses Klaw instead of manifesting himself in a nearby machine? Is this meant to illustrate his repressed desire to be human, or is it just lazy storytelling?

Stark is here to help, whether you like it or not.

Tony Stark's cyclical character development is one of the few things this movie did well. Over the course of five movies he's gone from thoughtlessly building weapons of mass destruction, to... thoughtlessly building even more terrifying weapons, for different reasons.

After vowing to shut down Stark Industries' weapons division in Iron Man, he's gone on to build armies of Iron Man drones, help S.H.I.E.L.D. develop HYDRA's fleet of lethal helicarriers, and create Ultron. And then! He tries to solve the Ultron situation by creating another superpowered AI. The more he tries to change the world for the better, the more he destroys. And unlike the rest of the Avengers, he has the power to do so on a massive scale.

In creating Ultron without the knowledge or consent of anyone else on the planet, Tony Stark stops being an influential tech mogul and becomes an imperial force. Pepper Potts is offscreen, JARVIS is destroyed and Rhodey is defanged, leaving no one to rein in Tony's megalomania. Even Bruce Banner only puts up a token protest against the idea of Ultron, which seems decidedly odd considering Bruce's history as the poster child for Frankenstein disasters. The Hulk is the result of an experiment to create more efficient soldiers, yet Bruce is willing to go along with Tony's plan to create an all-powerful artificial army across the world? Well, OK then.

At this point in the franchise, Tony Stark is a supervillain. The narrative just hasn't acknowledged it yet, presumably because his arc will reach its logical conclusion in Captain America: Civil War. For now he's in the odd position of being a protagonist whom we all know and love, but who is also doing terrible things that ruin the lives of innocent civilians across the world.

Tony has ascended to global superpower status, commanding a private army of drones and coming close to bringing about the apocalypse. Unfortunately while the movie critiques Tony's power, it also portrays the Avengers as heroic saviors. S.H.I.E.L.D. and War Machine evacuates Sokovian citizens with help from War Machine, while new characters like Dr Cho and the Twins are either sidelined or misrepresented.

Team America: World Police

I'll talk more about Sokovia and the Twins in another post, but right now I'd like to comment on this film's other fictional location: Wakanda. In the comics, Wakanda is an isolated African nation with significant mineral wealth and technological advances. It will appear properly in the upcoming Black Panther movie, but AoU introduced it via the weapons dealer Ulysses Klaw and his stocks of vibranium.

From the outset, Wakanda is depicted as somewhere so obscure that Bruce Banner -- supposedly one of the more educated characters -- can't even pronounce its name. So, are we to assume that Wakanda isn't the influential, technologically advanced nation from the comics? Because if the MCU included a secretive and insular nation full of scientific marvels, you'd think Bruce would've heard of it. To make matters worse, the next scene is literally labelled onscreen as taking place on "The African Coast." THE AFRICAN COAST?? Where the hell is that. Which coast. Wakanda? Morocco? Egypt? Namibia? Painfully stupid.

By inviting questions about Tony Stark's status as a global power and the Avengers' status as heroes, Age of Ultron left itself too open to being criticized on its own terms. After disposing of Ultron (A PROBLEM CAUSED BY TONY), the story just skips forward several months to meet the new Avengers team. I assume they're still funded by Stark Industries, but this time with Fury and Maria Hill back in charge. Tony experiences no noticeable repercussions for unleashing Ultron, and I guess just goes back to living in his heavily armed fortress in Manhattan? So we're left with a dubious amount of self-examination compared to Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the MCU's last high-impact movie.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

• Tony's "prima nocta" joke was gross. However, I can't tell if Tony is now meant to be characterized as a douchebag who makes weird historical rape jokes, or if it was just Joss Whedon being a smartass.
• I was tickled by the fact that Tony's party looked... super dull and middle-aged. You've come a long way, Playboy Tony Stark.
• Is everyone in New York chill with Tony keeping a drone army in his Manhattan penthouse? Yeah? OK. Well, it's not like they put him in jail for war crimes either. Being rich and famous can get you a long way, especially if you invented a world-changing method of clean energy production.
• Do you think they cut a reference to Howard Stark? I feel like things were headed in that direction with Ultron's comments about human children supplanting their parents, but it was probably fine as subtext.
• I really wish we'd heard from Pepper, although her presence probably would have stopped Tony from waking Ultron in the first place. On the bright side, this would've led to precisely the movie that most fans wanted in the first place: a fun domestic story about the team hanging out at a party for a couple of hours. One day, my friends. One day.

Previously: My reviews of The Avengers and Captain America: The Winter Soldier
"What the was up with that Black Widow scene in Avengers: Age of Ultron?"
My unspoilery review of Age of Ultron over at the Daily Dot.

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