You shouldn’t go into it expecting a smooth ride, and you should know that there are basic ways in which it's not up to snuff. There's too much over-edited "coverage" by multiple cameras, as opposed to true direction with purpose and flair. (Marvel farms out the planning of its action scenes to second unit crews and special effects artists long before the actors arrive on set, which might account for the choppy, incoherent, “just get it done” feeling of some early showdowns.) It isn't until the final third that the movie's destructo-ramas develop personalities as distinctive as the film's dialogue scenes. Between Captain America (Chris Evans), Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and Thor; a number of supporting and cameo players; and several new leads, including Ultron’s henchpersons, the twins Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), there might just be too many characters, even for a two-and-a-half-hour movie. (Whedon's pre-release cut came in at three-plus hours; could this be one of those rare cases where longer is better?) The film will do nothing to quell complaints that the superhero genre is sexist: Black Widow is involved in yet another relationship with a male Avenger and burdened with a tragic backstory equating motherhood with womanly fulfillment, and while Scarlet Witch has some pleasingly Carrie-like rampages, she isn't given enough to do.
Still, given the band-of-heroes conceit and the mandate to serve as a high point in an ongoing mega-narrative, it’s hard to imagine "Age of Ultron" handily dispatching any of these problems. And as in the first “Avengers,” which was also overstuffed, Whedon manages to refine the main players’ personalities and set them against each other, often in logistically complex conversations between five or more people: action scenes of a different sort.
Captain America and Tony Stark/Iron Man are at the heart of this one. They’re always more intriguing when set against each other than when they’re claiming the spotlight in their own movies, but Whedon, who also serves as a consultant and dialogue polisher on other Marvel entries, has taken their conflict a step further by drawing on events in “Iron Man 3” and “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” It’s Stark who creates the titular bad guy—with the reluctant help of scientist and part-time Hulk Bruce Banner—in response to trauma he suffered while battling Thor’s brother Loki and his extraterrestrial allies in the first “Avengers.” Ultron is supposed to serve as a Skynet-like artificial intelligence network that detects apocalyptic threats and swiftly destroys them. Cap saw the horrific outgrowth of this mentality in the second “Captain America," in which millions of alleged terrorists were nearly wiped out by S.H.I.E.L.D. in simultaneous extra-judicial assassinations. Cap is appalled both by the Ultron project itself and the fact that Stark started it in secret because he “didn’t want to hear the ‘man-is-not-meant-to-meddle medley’” from his fellow Avengers. He was right to worry. Like many a sci-fi robot or Frankenstein’s monster, the creature has a different idea of what constitutes a threat (spoiler: it’s us).
All of which makes "Age of Ultron" a metaphorical working-through of America's War on Terror, with Cap representing a principled, transparent military, answering to civilian authority, and Stark as the more paternalistic military-industrial response to 9/11 type threats, treating the masses as unruly kids who aren't allowed a voice on grounds that all they’ll do is squabble and finger-point while the enemy-du-jour gathers strength. There are accusations of hypocrisy from both sides. Some of Whedon’s dialogue has the sting of political satire: Cap warns Tony that “every time someone tries to win a war before it starts, people die,” a not-too-veiled slap at post-9/11 American foreign policy, while Ultron chides Cap as “God's righteous man, pretending you can live without a war,” a comment that indicts the United States itself, if you read Cap as a beefed-up Uncle Sam. Ultron, meanwhile, is another example of faith in technology run amok. He fancies himself a robot deity and creates other, smaller robots in his own image (all of which speak in Spader’s voice), but he’s the sadistic God of “King Lear,” a wanton boy smiting flies for sport.
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