Avengers: Age of Ultron

Avengers: Age of Ultron

In a scene from the movie Avengers: Age of Ultron, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) tells the android villain Ultron (James Spader) that “there’s no need to break anything.” “Clearly you’ve never made an omelet,” Ultron replies. It’s nice when a movie hands you a metaphor like that. The second “Avengers” is a gigantic omelet combining everything in writer-director Joss Whedon’s refrigerator, pantry and spice rack, and dozens of eggs are broken in its creation.

This film about a team of good guys battling a brilliant, genocidal robot is bigger, louder and more disjointed than the first “Avengers” which, like this new installment, was a crescendo picture, meant to merge strands from solo superhero movies within the Marvel Universe. But it’s also got more personality specifically Whedon’s than any other film in the now seven year old franchise.

And in its growing pains you can see a future in which these corporate movies might indeed be art, or at least unique expressions, rather than monotonous quarterly displays of things crashing into other things, with splashes of personality designed to fool people into thinking they’re not just widgets stamped out in Marvel’s hit factory.

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 Iron Man are at the heart of this one. They’re always more interesting as foils for each other than they are commanding their own movies, but Whedon, who serves as both a consultant and dialogue polisher on other Marvel entries, has upped the ante by linking their conflict to events in “Iron Man 3” and “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” It’s Stark who creates the titular bad guy with reluctant help from scientist/part-time Hulk Bruce Banner after Loki and his extraterrestrial allies leave him battling Thor’s brother and a case of interdimensional PTSD following on that.

Ultron is meant to be a Skynet-like artificial intelligence network that detects apocalyptic threats and neutralizes them by wiping out whatever human population it determines to be part of the problem. Cap saw what happens when you take that attitude to its logical conclusion in the second “Captain America,” where millions of alleged terrorists were nearly wiped out by S.H.I.E.L.D. in simultaneous extra-judicial assassinations.

Cap is horrified both by the project itself and Stark’s decision to keep it secret because he “didn’t want to hear the ‘man is not meant to meddle medley’” from his fellow Avengers. And he was right to worry; like many an AI or Frankenstein’s monster before it, Ultron has a different idea about what constitutes a threat (spoiler: us).

All of which makes “Age of Ultron” something like America’s War on Terror restaged as a family squabble between Tony Soprano and Angelo Garepe. Cap represents principled, transparent military action answering to civilian authority; Stark is more in favor of paternalistic interventionism justified by situational ethics necessitated by 9/11-type threats against cities full of nuclear reactors whose populations are so many unruly kids not allowed any voice because all they’ll do is squabble and finger-point while the enemy-du-jour gathers strength in numbers.

Charges of hypocrisy come from both sides; some of Whedon’s dialogue snaps with political satirist’s sting: Cap tells Tony that “every time someone tries to win a war before it starts, innocent people die,” a line that could be read as a not too veiled slap at post-9/11 American foreign policy; Ultron calls Cap “God’s righteous man, pretending you can live without a war,” which indicts America itself if you read Cap as Uncle Sam on ‘roids. And Ultron is just another example of belief in technology taken too far. He fancies himself a robot deity and creates other robots in his own image (all voiced by Spader), but he’s also the sadistic God of “King Lear,” a wanton boy smiting flies for sport.

“Age of Ultron”, despite its flaws, is nothing short of amazing. If it’s a failure, as many critics claim it to be, then it’s a failure like Ang Lee’s “Hulk”, “Superman Returns” or “The Dark Knight Rises”, in that it’s far more idiosyncratic than most superhero movies which have titles synonymous with success. There are moments where it doesn’t so much recall other Marvel spectaculars as Whedon TV series like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel”; fun was had in those shows watching heroes and villains who knew they were heroes and villains work through psychological issues while trading screwball comedy dialogue along with body blows.

This film argues for all Marvel pictures being art more effectively than any other film of its kind ever made does; quarter billion dollar budgeted, CGI-festooned slabs of multimedia synergy can be art too, if they’re made by an artist with a vision and that artist seems to be controlling some part of the process at least. (I say “some” because Whedon has said this movie broke him; that could mean what we’re seeing onscreen is the best he can do under the circumstances, given that executive producer Kevin Feige and his marketing department are the true auteurs of the Marvel films.)

Amongst the usual suspectsquippery, lightning bolts, robots and explosions are moments of pathos, splendour, sentimentality and operatic terror. The dialogue is highly quotable; it’s delivered with deadpan camaraderie worthy of Howard Hawks (“Bringing up Baby”, “Rio Bravo”), and there are scenes that evoke earlier classics without rubbing your face in them.

The interaction between Black Widow and her erstwhile sweetheart Bruce Banner channels King Kong: she interrupts his Hulk-outs by holding up a slender hand with slightly curved fingers, and after a moment’s hesitation he reaches out in kind, like a curious ape touching his reflection in a fun house mirror.

A lyrical slow-motion set-piece shows the Avengers battling waves of Ultron’s android minions in a ruined cathedral, like the Bishop gang fending off Mapache’s army in “The Wild Bunch”; the circling camera movements are echoed by the film’s credits sequence, which visualizes the film’s heroes and villains as figures in a classical sculpture: Marvel in marble. The design touches are swell: Ultron might be the most overtly Jack Kirby-esque apparition in any Marvel film, his expressive face comprised of thin, overlapping plates.

It is vital to indicate the superhero genre’s kinship with horror. “Perhaps I am a monster,” says a character. “And if I were one, how would I know?” Conversations and monologues ponder action cinema as well as all life that’s supported by the interplay of chaos and order, creation and destruction.

“When the universe gets quiet,” Ultron says, “God throws a stone at it.” But most surprising and welcome is Whedon’s incorporation of criticism on the super-genre’s indifference to property destruction and civilian casualties (shown most callously in “Man of Steel”) into the fabric of his plot. “Ultron can’t tell the difference between saving the world and destroying it,” Scarlet Witch scolds. “Where do you think he gets that?”

It would be silly to cast Marvel or Whedon or their fan army as underdogs. Superhero movies used to be not long ago something like a niche genre; now they are all but America’s official culture, and this one will make a billion dollars no matter what anybody says about it. But still: Even as people buy tickets out of habit, I hope they will recognize that there is some art happening here, maybe for the first time since Marvel started stalking through our cinemas like Galactus.

“Age of Ultron” shows you could have a movie with stealth fighter jets and levitating cities and Hulk-on-robot fisticuffs that was as freewheeling as a no-budget indie. It would be sad to think this film might get piled on for its imperfections when instead we might be celebrating its effort to prove that even an ostensibly inflexible genre can bend into strange new shapes.

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