It’s a wonder any poor humans ever leave their houses in “The Avengers: Age of Ultron.” Then again, even staying inside is a hazard, when entire city blocks—people, cars, roads, buildings—are decimated as quickly and ruthlessly as you’d swat a fly on your kitchen table, and that’s just by the good guys having a aerial row. Throw in an extinction-level war launched by a psychopathic, megalomaniacal villain designed from artificial intelligence, and it sounds about time to grab the cyanide and prepare to be raptured.
But that’s life for all mankind and, and it’s a hard few days’ work for the sextet of bickering superheroes at the center of “Age of Ultron,” Joss Whedon’s rabidly anticipated sequel to his 2012 franchise debut, which opens Friday. The movie begins on an Avengers assignment already in progress: the raid of a Hydra outpost in chilly Sokovia, where the mad baron Wolfgang von Strucker has pilfered the all-powerful scepter—aka the movie’s McGuffin—and has been performing Mengele-like genetic experiments on humans. Fans of the Marvel-verse will recognize two of them: Russian twins Pietro and Wanda (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen, the latter perhaps the only miscasting in this franchise), morally confused victims whose superpowers will eventually earn them the designations of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch.
Whedon already displays his signature self-conscious wit in this early action scene. While Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, the Hulk, Hawkeye and the Black Widow are dismantling the ceaseless horde of nameless foot soldiers outside his compound, von Strucker asks his aid, “Can we hold them?” His aid responds, incredulously, “They’re the Avengers.”
But the inciting incident of “Age of Ultron” doesn’t occur until the Avengers are back home, and it’s fueled once again by Tony Stark’s remorse for having created weapons of mass destruction. In a road to possible annihilation paved with good intentions, he secretly enlists Bruce Banner to synthesize an A.I. component from the scepter’s gem and apply it to his “Ultron” global defense program, to create a sort of Iron Dome around Planet Earth. But “Ultron,” voiced perfectly and sarcastically by James Spader, quickly becomes sentient and downright nasty, adopting a robotic form and using his increasing synthetic power to create endless copies of himself and plot humanity’s extermination.
“The Age of Ultron” sits squarely in a recent science-fiction trend—A.I. run amok—that includes “Transcendence,” “Lucy” and, to some extent, “Her.” But it’s a theme that’s at least as old as “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a movie from which the robotically savvy Stark apparently hasn’t learned.
A guilty conscience remains Stark’s cross to bear, but all of the Avengers have the screen time to unpack personal baggage in “The Age of Ultron,” and that’s where Whedon’s writing really excels. Clint Barton wants to retire from Avenging to finally live in peace with his secret family, Thor continues to reconcile his duality as an earthbound god and, most poignantly, Natasha Romanoff and Bruce Banner’s pursuit of romance is stymied by the latter’s shame at his uncontrollable transformations into the Hulk, and the damage to civilian life that inevitably follows. This is why Whedon hired an actor of Mark Ruffalo’s caliber to play a character that received such short shrift in the first Avengers movie: Banner emerges in this second installment as the tragic soul and the moral compass of the Avengers, and Ruffalo’s acting chops lift Scarlett Johansson’s up to his level.
Ultron, quick on the uptake as he is, utters one of the movie’s key lines: “I have what the Avengers never will—harmony.” Indeed, the Avengers are as dysfunctional as Congress, a collection of clashing egos and motivations and approaches and psyches. Wracked by aforementioned insecurities, they constitute the most human of any of the modern superhero movie protagonists, and “The Age of Ultron” raises the genre’s bar for character development and backstory.
Which isn’t to say that Whedon’s film is a reinvention; it’s still an action-driven, CGI-showered, unnecessarily 3-D spectacle that adheres to a certain rhythm shared by its Marvel movie kin (sans Ang Lee’s “Hulk,” always the exception that proves the rule). But it’s damned exciting—heart-racing, even—and most importantly, it’s actually deep. This side of a complete and risky reworking of the genre’s moneymaking formula, this film is as rich as these type of movies can get, and should be applauded by cinephiles, comic book lovers and general audiences alike.
