nothin Avengers Dissemble | New Haven Independent

Avengers Dissemble

Movies are no longer about the thing,” wrote critic and journalist Mark Harris in a December 2014 essay for Grantland. They’re about the next thing, the tease, the Easter egg, the post-credit sequence, the promise of a future at which the moment we’re in can only hint.” Harris argues that this encouragement of moviegoers’ eternal anticipation is a thin veil for the cynicism, fear, and purely commercial motivations of today’s studio executives. Why take a risk on something original that could turn out to be unpopular, too topical, or anything other than a franchise capable of easy replication and unimaginable profits?

Avengers: Age of Ultron, the latest box-office titan in the ever-expanding Marvel cinematic universe, complicates and plays into this narrative of Hollywood stagnation and decay.

On the one hand, the movie — now playing at the Bow Tie Criterion Cinemas on Temple Street — is exceptional among action spectacles for its attention to character. Realized by an impressive cast of some of today’s best actors and actresses and brought to life by dialogue that is sharp, witty, self-aware, and thoroughly entertaining, Age of Ultron dedicates most of its efforts to exploring the all-too-human relationships between its super-human subjects.

On the other hand, the movie has a hollow core. Its story is disjointed, incoherent, and distractingly insubstantial, bludgeoned into franchise obeisance by nods to the future, references to the past, and nothing to say about the present. Though the screenplay jostles its characters to life during moments of clarity — and frequent moments of humor — the movie is ultimately weighed down by an unfortunate need to keep the stakes constantly pushed to the extreme.

The movie opens with the Avengers, a motley crew of the world’s most potent and egotistic superheroes, fighting in the snow-speckled woods of Sokovia, a humorous amalgam of every post-Soviet state that mistreats its people. Sokovia is woefully corrupt and finds legitimacy only in its promise of violence toward the United States. The battle has no clear beginning and an indeterminate end, but the point is not necessarily what the Avengers are fighting for — in this case, an all-powerful scepter from another planet that is currently being put to no good — but rather how they are fighting: together. This is a moment of rare unity for the Avengers, a team that suffered from fractious discord for most of the first movie.

Director Joss Whedon (whose celebrated TV work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly has catapulted him into the rare position of an auteur in charge of a multi-bajillion dollar movie franchise) highlights this hard-won teamwork through the use of a bravura shot that he also employed in the final battle sequence of the 2012 installment: a single take that hops, turns, and pans from one character to another, capturing each in his or her unique, furious contribution to the defeat of an anonymous and proliferating enemy. For a movie that sometimes feels like a series of character sketches best played out on a smaller screen, this shot is decidedly cinematic, filling the frame and propelling the action and characters towards the viewer. Here the team is both unified and dissected into its component parts: Iron Man / Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), the Hulk / Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), Captain America / Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), Black Widow / Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), Hawkeye / Chris Barton (Jeremy Renner), and Thor (Chris Hemsworth).

The team succeeds in capturing the scepter, but splinters soon thereafter as Tony Stark, inspired by an apocalyptic vision of his own futility, convinces Bruce Banner to help him build an all-powerful artificial intelligence dedicated to peacekeeping. Their creation, inevitably, does not turn out as planned, and the rest of the movie is spent tracking down, squabbling with, and repeatedly punching this new menace (voiced with unassuming malevolence by James Spader) as it attempts to bring peace to the world by annihilating all traces of humanity.

Downey, Jr.‘s Tony Stark remains the most fun to watch, his sharp tongue and super-inflated ego a wonderful counterpoint to the muscle-bound behemoths of Captain America, Thor, and the Hulk (Stark also gets to channel Whedon’s acute and playful sense of pop culture, such as when he describes a particularly trying day as a really long day, like, Eugene O’Neill long”). But Hemsworth offers the best physical comedy of the bunch, his every move a self-conscious projection of how a god among men should act, while Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner remains the conscientious, tortured soul introduced in the first movie, though this time a little less concerned with restraint and a little more concerned with the impossible dream of domesticity offered by Johansson’s Romanoff.

Any interest in character, however, is quickly subjugated to a mind-boggling plot involving the imminent destruction and inevitable salvation of the world. The movie tries to have it both ways on this front, with dialogue that calls attention to the farcical nature of the story followed by extensive battle sequences and endless plot machinations that swallow everything in their path.

But Age of Ultron cannot quite transcend its own spectacle. None of the main characters are ever in actual danger, despite the constant violence. There is no logic to the destruction or resolution, despite so much time spent explaining it. Worst of all, there is no actual consideration or attention paid to the people in South Africa, Bangladesh, and South Korea whose cities are leveled after each fight between a super-human and a super-robot. Despite the token praise offered at the end of the movie for the ingenuity, compassion, and resilience of humanity, all we see are masses of trampled-upon victims, voiceless except for their tepid thumbs-ups offered to superhero saviors on TV news recaps.

In the final battle sequence, Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye includes a bemused note in his pep-talk to a recently converted Avenger: The city is flying! We’re fighting an army of robots! And I have a bow and arrow! None of this makes sense!”

On its face, I dig that kind of humorous self-reflection. Yeah, call this for what it is: It’s silly and over-the-top and not supposed to make sense. But as someone who really cares about movies, am I supposed to spend my Friday nights looking forward (and backward) to a franchise that has little to say about people, power, or storytelling — and on top of that, doesn’t even want to make sense?

Sign up for our morning newsletter

Don't want to miss a single Independent article? Sign up for our daily email newsletter! Click here for more info.


Post a Comment

Commenting has closed for this entry

Comments

Avatar for William Kurtz