Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
AFTER three years of excitement and hype, not to mention a number of hugely-successful standalone films, Marvel brings all of its key heroes together for its second Avengers mash-up.
Could it possibly live up to its predecessor, which not only received overwhelmingly positive acclaim, but became the third-highest grossing film of all time?
In a word: no. Although to its defence on that point, it was never really going to. It just isn’t ‘new’ anymore, and the wonderment of seeing all your childhood heroes beating up bad guys and cracking jokes together for the first time ever on the big screen cannot be replicated three years later.
However, in many other ways, the film just doesn’t quite add up.
For starters, if you’ve been following the Marvel films over the past few years, you’ll know that they’re all interconnected as part of one whole, dubbed the Marvel Cinematic Universe. One overarching plot and similar themes drive the movies, but Age of Ultron seems disingenuous next to those.
Things start off well with our superheroes; Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk, Thor, Hawkeye and Black Widow, storming a castle housing an old artefact and doing what they do best: breaking bad guys while spewing witty one-liners.
After they successfully retrieve this yet-another-super-powerful MacGuffin, Tony Stark uses its incredible computing power to attempt to augment his world peacekeeping robot programme, which has been missing its final piece.
Unfortunately, it proves too powerful and creates Ultron, a metallic menace far too destructive to control, who decides that the only way to complete its programming of ‘bringing peace to humanity’ is to drive them to extinction so that they can evolve into a species who don’t constantly war with each other.
Of course, our heroes must put aside their grievances with each other and overcome multiple personal issues to succeed.
It sounds well and good, and, of course, the visuals and action scenes are superbly crafted, but throughout I had the nagging feeling that this film was ticking a check-box to rake in another $1.5 billion at the box office rather than contribute to the wider universe.
Outside of one incredibly pointless foreshadowing scene involving Thor that takes up far too much screen time than it deserves and would have been better off left on the cutting room floor or as a deleted scene on the home release, if you removed Age of Ultron from the s Marvel continuity, it wouldn’t add or change anything about the direction of the story, which is the bringing together of the five Infinity Gems which will culminate in the third and fourth Avengers films in a few years’ time.
In fact, some elements are downright nonsensical. I don’t wish to spoil the ending of Iron Man 3 for those who haven’t seen it, but Tony Stark made a massive decision (the results of which were shown on screen at the end and formed the basis of the whole movie’s theme), which is completely ignored or even acknowledged right from the opening credits of this movie.
Furthermore, there’s an incredibly forced romance between Black Widow and Bruce Banner that has come entirely out of left field considering she spent the whole of Captain America: Winter Soldier outrageously flirting and foreshadowing a romance with Cap. It seems there wasn’t as much for her and everyone’s favourite Big Green Angry Thing this time around, so to add emotional depth this was shoehorned in, but fails to connect because of its sudden, bizarre nature.
As mentioned earlier, the action is as crisp as ever, although the film is definitely over-long and the structure seems to be: big battle, 10 minutes of calm and levity, a giant punch-up, peaceful plot exposition so the audience can catch their breath, then another extravagant set-piece. Repeat ad infinitum for pushing two-and-a-half hours and the whole thing is a little tiring.
New characters Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch bring a few new tricks to the table, but the former here is nothing compared to the X-Men: Days of Future Past version. Considering that came out a year ago and director Joss Whedon had a chance to one-up the brilliantly cool stuff that film’s version did, the character is a damp squib who we never get enough time with to fully invest in.
Ultimately, I expect this to be a controversial opinion - and I’d love to hear your thoughts on our Letters to the Editor page - but it frankly left me bored and unfulfilled.
It’s not like I hate these types of films; in fact, if you remember rightly, I dubbed Guardians of the Galaxy my favourite film of 2014. However, with the burning feeling of ‘been here, done that’ and the childlike excitement of seeing so many famous heroes on screen at once no longer a factor, if I’m brutally honest, I think I’m all superhero’ed out.
This is the 11th film in the universe since it began in 2008, but not only that, we’ve had new iterations of Spider-Man, Batman and Superman since, and DC Comics are bringing out their own blatant rip-off (complete with a plethora of standalone films); the Justice League Universe.
You’d think the cows in the Hollywood fields would be running dry by now, but nope, Ant-Man and yet another Fantastic 4 reboot will be upon us this summer. Will it ever end? Not while the studio rakes in cash by the billions.
As far as popcorn-munching fare goes, you can’t get much higher quality. However, there are only so many times one can enjoy a super-powerful hero punching and blasting hundreds of goons before tackling a super-powerful villain in an explosive finale. And, I’ve reached my tipping point.
