Case in point: during the film's second act, the team takes a pretty significant beating at the hands of the titular Ultron. They need to lay low for a bit, and hide out in Hawkeye's secret farm with his wife and kids. Introductions are occurring, and Thor accidentally stands on a Lego house. Slightly embarrassed, he uses his humongous Asgardian boots to sweep the shattered plastic under a coffee table. Seconds later, a young girl approaches him and looks up, way up, into his eyes. Thor looks down at the child, then up and around, and a look washes over his face - a look that begs the question, "What the fuck am I doing here?" He turns, walks outside and flies away. It's a pretty heavy moment, and further proof that even the silliest character can achieve gravitas if written the right way. But what surrounds the moment, and the context for Thor coming to this realisation, is entirely unnecessary for this film. In the aforementioned beatdown by Ultron, two new characters are further developed. They're Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, the sibling totally-but-not-legally-allowed-to-be-called mutants, and as Agent Hill puts it, "He's fast and she's weird." As Quicksilver dashes around a shipyard keeping everybody's attention, Scarlet Witch sneaks up behind Earth's Mightiest Heroes and plants inside them their greatest fears. Iron Man is absent, but he already got the treatment in the film's opening: a vision of a team and world annihilated at his fault, an annihilation that he survives. Black Widow is taken back to her childhood of being trained to be a ruthless, unfeeling killer, including being sterilised. "One less thing to worry about," she says in an emotional gut punch of a scene. Bruce Banner is convinced that Hulk is needed, and sets to destroying Johannesburg. Captain America sees what scares him most: the war being over and him going home. It's genuinely chilling, the latter especially. But what does Thor get? A vision of the next Thor movie. Sure, there are throwaway lines that indicate Thor's fear is abandoning his home to the point that an outside force is able to invade and destroy, but the prevalent point made is that this is what Thor 3 is going to be about. When Thor leaves the farmhouse, it's simultaneously because the ever-tenuous familial bond he has to our world has been broken again, but also because there needs to be another quick tease of what's to come for the son of Odin. So he goes and sits in a magic dream pool, has a cryptic conversation with Stringer Bell, never references it again for the rest of the movie, and shows back up half an hour later as the literal Deus Ex Machina to help Tony Stark bring to life something representative of the very thing he previously held him against the wall for having the nerve to suggest should exist.
The problem here is that nothing feels whole, or complete. The theme is persistent, and is concluded: everyone is obsessed with consequences both predictable and unforeseen. The film's villain is born of Tony Stark's continued emotional fallout from the amount of death that wore his name, and his introduction to an evil that no earthly power could hope to contest. An opportunity to make an artificial intelligence whose sole mission is world peace backfires when the thing with free will and unlimited intelligence immediately learns the Internet in full straight after being born. It's not surprising that something immediately introduced to everything ever would gravitate most towards the amount of conflict in humanity's short history, and the Old Testament, and conclude that evolution by way of extinction is the best course of action. Seems like that's something Tony might be a little embarrassed about, and would garner at least a, "Hey, yeah, sorry about that." But for the film's duration, his sole emotional reaction to his creative kerfuffle is a giggle. What the fuck, right? Well, here's the thing: if this film had any breathing room at all, you would come to know that Tony is fucking devastated by his actions, but he's not about to show that to anyone but himself, and he's not about to let a single consequence affect the mission. The movie doesn't have breathing room, though. His one moment in the film he could have had to drop a bit of self-reflection, he has to do that in tandem with Nick Fury (who must have been waiting in that barn for fucking hours), which further serves to undermine understanding him because, as I've just stipulated, Tony doesn't open up to nobody but Tony. The end result is a guy who wasn't supposed to have a character arc not having enough time to explain that he wasn't supposed to have a character arc and rather than coming off as persistent at all costs to a worthy cause, he instead just appears to act out against everyone but himself like a cold, fucking jerk.
The same lack of development spreads across every character in the film, except for, bizarrely enough, Hawkeye. Who'd have thought the only character with a satisfying character arc in the fucking Avengers sequel was going to be the loser with the arrows? But it's all there. He is mortally wounded in the film's opening, leading to many lines at his expense about his uselessness in the team. His home life is brought into question at around the same time, successfully peppering the right amount of foreshadowing to the aforementioned second act half-time in the farmhouse where we meet the Hawkeye household. As really the only moment in the film where the characters get to just stop and talk about their feelings and shit, Hawkeye has a moment with his wife where they discuss the notion that his place in the team doesn't make much sense. "You don't think they need me?" he asks. "Actually, I think they do," she replies. "They're gods, and they need someone to keep them down to earth." But this human element of the team is exactly that: human. It's a job that comes with a death clock. Hawkeye understands, and promises that once this Ultron business is closed, it's time to retire. And when that fight comes, and Scarlet Witch cowers in an abandoned home as a young child exposed to and asked to fight in a war would, Hawkeye is the one that gets to deliver a knockout speech. "The city is flying, we're fighting an army of robots, and I have a bow and arrow. None of this makes sense. But I'm going back out there because it's my job. Okay? ... If you step out that door, you're an Avenger." He's basically wearing a sign the entire film saying, "I'm the character that sits enough between primary and secondary that my death would not affect any of the surrounding franchises, but would be considered an emotionally affecting event." And when he's sitting in the escape pod, and sees the child trapped underneath rubble ahead of him, and sighs because he knows he's going back out there, and when Ultron approaches in the helicopter showering machine gun fire in their path, and he shields the young boy with his back, you're ready for the uncharacteristically obvious trademark Whedon death. But that's when he hits you. Quicksilver zips into the line of fire just in time to catch about fifty bullets in his chest. "Bet you didn't see that coming," he mutters before falling to the ground. You're right, Quicksilver, I didn't, but your death (a true hero's death) is supposed to have an impact. This is supposed to be the bittersweet period to Hawkeye's character arc. This is the only character that he actively hates in the film, the one who mortally wounds him in the film's opening and the one he not-so-jovially threatened to kill just minutes prior. But it simply can't resonate, because Quicksilver's entire screen time amounts to roughly 10 minutes total. Whedon does his best - his all-too-fleeting moments on screen aren't wasted, and he knows the two best ways to show the impact of his death are to reflect it in the agony on his twin sister's face and through Hawkeye lying beside his dead body and saying, "Long day", and they do hit, but it's all too hollow. You simply didn't know Quicksilver well enough to care that he's now gone (not to mention his death seems a little convenient given the aforementioned legal trouble surrounding his existence in another franchise).
The narrative clusterfuck that is Avengers: Age of Ultron left me with a thought: when are we going to be able to point to one of these movies and say, "Yeah, that was the one. That's when it all paid off." It seems to be Marvel's mantra now to ensure that every film has multiple threads leading to the next set of films. This isn't necessarily a problem, until it encroaches upon the film's ability to exist in its own right, which is exactly what happens here. After seeing the first Avengers, I assumed that the individual character's movies would have all the tags, so that the team-up movies could be the staples - the ones where it all comes together and concludes that phase. Not to say I get the business of this better than the money-pool divers that are Disney, but I'd be willing to have a guess that there's a sizable chunk of Avengers: Age of Ultron's audience whose last Marvel movie was Avengers Assemble. They don't give a shit about the individuals' stories, so why the fuck are the individuals' stories showing up here to the point that it affects the coherency of the core narrative? What's just as bad is how difficult it's becoming to continually refresh the memory bank of where we're at with each new installment of the cinematic universe. This isn't comics. These movies aren't month to month, but year to year. So much of my understanding of this film hasn't come from multiple viewings, but from people on the internet. And this isn't even thematic resonance or artistic intent I'm searching for, the things that make mandatory multiple viewings acceptable, I'm just trying to work out what fucking happened. It may sound like I'm getting all worked up over a movie that's just stuffed a bit too full, but this is indicative of a much larger problem. Avengers: Age of Ultron has already made a literal metric fuck-ton of dollars, with no signs that it's going to slow down any time soon. Disney is steadily gaining control of everything we see at Summer, and if these figures are anything to go by, a narrative clusterfuck is going to be the blueprint for all future releases. And the worst part, the really insidious shit of it all, is that the film really isn't even as bad as I make it out to be. I've mentioned in previous reviews, including the start of this one, that Disney has this almost endearing mantra to never be bad - in that regardless of how short of totally amazing they fall, they must never make a truly rank piece of shit. Avengers: Age of Ultron, for one, deserves credit for being a superhero movie that actively and repeatedly shows the good guys saving people. Almost certainly a response to Man of Steel, there are multiple scenes in which wanton destruction of architecture is only done once the area is clear of human folk, and the climactic battle is about saving the people on the floating city first, and beating the shit out of the villain second. That should be commended. For two, it has some wonderful character moments that I haven't already mentioned: everyone trying to pick up Thor's hammer, Vision having a quiet moment with Thor after just being born in which he looks at the Asgardian, and his cape, nods and grows one of his own, Thor patronisingly telling War Machine that his less-interesting superhero story was, "Very good", Thor quietly telling Tony that his girlfriend is better -- you know what? Let's just call it every bit with Thor that wasn't a precursor to Thor 3: Party Hardy. And it's these truly brilliant small touches that can anesthetise an audience into believing that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But if Gestalt is what Marvel has always been going for, they've fucked it up this time. I truly hope that they recognise this unsustainable system before it's too late, but if the zeroes in their bank accounts are anything to go by, that may not be the case. Like it or not, we're entering the future of cinema - the Age of Wheelspin - where a film willingly sacrifices the coherency of its narrative to let you know what's just around the corner, where the next five years have already been mapped out to ensure you can't get off the train, and where everyone behind the camera is too good at their job to allow these hot messes to clearly not be worth your time. And it's working. For all of my ranting, I'm just as much a part of the problem as you, and I know that. But I'll be there to see everything that's coming, because even if at the back of my mind, I'm scared it never will, I just gotta see how it ends.
"I'M SO CONFLICTED AND GORGEOUS."
