Avengers: Age of Ultron

Writer/director Joss Whedon’s super power has always been his ability to take standard genre schlock and give it a sharp, bantery wit and real emotional heft. He takes characters and storylines you’ve seen a thousand times and makes them compelling and human. He did it with vampires and the supernatural with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He did it with the space opera and westerns in Firefly and Serenity. And, of course, he did it with superheroes in Marvel’s the Avengers. Part of the reason the movie made a billion and a half dollars worldwide is that audiences cared about the characters as much as the special effects. 

So the question is, could Whedon maintain both the wit and humanity he established in the first film with the inevitable bloat that happens with superhero sequels? First of all, think of sequels in general. Count how many of them that are as good as or better than the original. Now ask yourself what you’re going to do with all those extra fingers you didn’t need to count. Second, think about super hero sequels specifically. No matter how much money the first one makes, producers always seem to think the next one is going to be the last and so they need to stick in every villain, every jokey reference, and every plot twist they can. I’m thinking specifically of the Spiderman sequels that tried to jam in anywhere from two to four villains per movie and how those lumbering, overstuffed productions killed that franchise – twice. 

So in Avengers: Age of Ultron does Whedon pull off the balancing act between Hollywood bombast and the humor and humanity that are his trademark? 

Yeah, more or less.

In his zeal to protect the world, Tony Stark uses a new artificial intelligence program called Ultron to help his army of robot policemen/soldiers protect the world more effectively from the various cosmic dangers that are always looming in comic book movies. 

 Ultron evolves and decides that the best way to protect the world is to save it from the destructive, war-like humans that infest it. It’s sort of like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey if HAL was a nine foot flying robot with James Spader’s venomous, sneering voice. Ultron builds himself a massive army of mini-me robots and does his best to eradicate the human race. Our friends the Avengers along with new characters the Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, and the Vision work to stop him.   So the movie does have a new villain and three extra heroes in addition to the original six from the first time around. The story spans the globe and actually features a bigger, more danger filled final battle than the alien invasion finale of the last one.

So the size and scope are definitely bigger this time, and yet amid all that, Whedon hasn’t forgotten one of the basic rules of good storytelling: in order for audiences to care about a character that character has to want something and want it bad. And there has to be an obstacle in the way. That’s the heart of any good story.

 What’s great about Avengers: Age of Ultron is that every character wants something, and despite the spandex and armor and god-like powers, those desires are powerfully human. Like anyone, the heroes want love, they want to trust and be trusted, they want forgiveness for their shortcomings. They want to help and not cause more damage than they prevent. Even the rage-filled, murderous robot villain of the title is driven by things that most people understand – jealousy, inadequacy, a desire for what seems to him to be a better world. Whedon’s characters want and they spent the movie negotiating those sometimes prickly, inconvenient desires while simultaneously trying to save the world. 

There’s plenty of fan-boy comic book awesomeness to go around, but the reason why this movie is more than just explosions, cool special effects, and one liners is that the characters are flawed, hungry humans first and heroes second. Joss Whedon and his super powers save the day again.