Avengers: Age of Ultron or "The Facts in the Case of Mr. Joss Whedon"

Let's face it: Ultron deciding within five minutes of accessing the Internet that "ALL HUMANS MUST DIE!" is probably the most realistic moment in the MCU. 

Those of you know, by now, that I have a fervent, passionate hatred for one movie in particular. Don't worry; I'm not going to do a review of it. I've kind of sworn off reviewing that movie unless I'm offered a sizeable chunk of cash. I just don't think I could make a hate screed worth someone's time, plus, like I said, I have a harder time embarking on the Snyder hate rants as of late. So not going to do it, unless there's money involved.

On a slightly related note, here's my ko-fi. If you want to drop a few bucks in my cup, I can't say I'd object too strongly. 

Anyway, the reason I'm bringing up that one movie is, well, due to this article from The Dissolve. The article posits that Age of Ultron serves as a response to that movie. And I don't think it's a conscious effort to do a Take That against the DCEU, but the contrast between the two movies, the way they use their various tropes, is something to reflect on. 

Unlike Snyder's film, which has an aesthetic of gunmetal grey or, when looking for some variety, blue-grey, Ultron is bright and glorious in color. The biggest distinguishing trait, however, is the drive the Avengers have to try and save as many people as possible. They are up against a villain who wants to exterminate humanity, so in response, the Avengers decide that every life matters and go out of their way to rescue as many people as possible. Because that's what heroes do: give 'em a choice between A and B, and they'll try to find option C, which is All of the Above. They may not always succeed in finding option C, but they fight as hard as they can to do so. 

Which again, puts it far ahead of that movie, with its borderline sociopath of a hero barely bothering to try to take the fight away from a dense population center. Yeah, the bad guy was having none of it, but again, what distinguishes the heroes from the villains is that the heroes try to pay even just lip service to the value of human life. 

It's the same problem that Fred has talked about in the Left Behind-verse. Both the good guys and the bad guys seek to destroy the other and violently subjugate humanity at their feet; the difference between the two is that one side succeeds in destroying its enemies and subjugating humanity, whereas the other one fails. 

This is obviously bad form, because the most basic rule of writing a story with heroes and villains, be them superheroes or characters from some other genre, is that there needs to be a fundamental difference between good and evil. The bad guys place no value on human life, so the heroes double down on the idea that all lives matter. 

But while I have a certain fondness for movie, I would be remiss in my duties if I didn’t acknowledge that it holds a rather jaundiced reputation in the fandom.

Some of it is, I feel, mostly undeserved. Again, with only a few exceptions, whenever people go on and on about how modern superhero movie X is the “WORST MOVIE EVER!!!” I mostly roll my eyes. You kids are all spoiled with your directors that actually give a shit…any superhero fan older than thirty can tell you that the history of comic book adaptations is often a dark and scary one. It was a long time before Hollywood accepted the basic facts that as silly as these characters are, there’s a reason people love them, and they work best when they’re mostly played straight. 

But I have to admit that rewatching this movie now that Joss Whedon’s reputation lies in tatters* is a different experience. While he was the creative force behind the first Avengers movie for me, it’s this movie that somehow seems to line up better with the embittered toxic egomaniac depicted by former exes and colleagues. When the first Avengers came out, Whedon was collectively worshipped by geek culture and while all the scandals hadn’t broken the time this movie came out, for whatever reason, it is harder for me to divorce the art from the artist for this film. I’m not entirely sure why.

Again, the decision as to whether or not to enjoy the art of someone who is a terrible person, is a personal one, capable of only being made on an individual basis. It’s up to you whether or not Whedon’s behavior is a dealbreaker. With me, I’m likely to continue to enjoy the stuff I’ve already consumed but hold back on exploring any further. However great Buffy or Firefly may be, there’s also art just as equally good that wasn’t created by assholes, so why not spend my time on them, rather than on assholes. Whenever I hear talk about how Toxic Creator X gave us this or that, I find myself thinking about his victims. What great art did we miss out on because someone was driven out of the industry by the toxicity and abuse they received? 

We likely will never know. And I do not fault people who still cherish memories of Buffy or whatever projects they’ve enjoyed. I understand how it is. We say things like “It’s just a movie/TV show/whatever!” but that’s not entirely true. We forged identities and communities because of our love for mere entertainment, and sometimes much more. The critic Nathan Rabin has talked about how when he was fourteen, after being sent to a mental hospital, pretty much the only thing that got him through was an obsession with seeing Steven Seagal’s Marked for Death when he got out. I’m sure many of us have similar stories about art that, regardless of its actual quality, really spoke to us and was there for us in a moment we really needed it. I have mine, and I’m sure the rest have yours. Sometimes you have to take strength where you can find it, even if it’s trash.

And while I am only tangentially knowledgeable about Buffy, looking at it, I can understand why it landed the way it did with people. Compared with what was out at the time, Buffy was a revelation, having the blonde teenage girl be the lead and outwit the bad guys, exist as an actual character and not a male power fantasy. To say nothing about the show’s LGBT rep; from what I’ve heard for a lot of people, this was the first place they ever saw LGBT people represented and treated as, well, people with quirks and foibles like everyone else. Buffy walked so that the innumerable shows that came after it, could run. 

Okay, I should probably get to the movie and do less navel-gazing about art and artists.

Well, to start, I have to say that I never liked the reoccurring “LANGUAGE!” bit with Steve Rogers.  First of all, I think someone did the math and proved that Steve swears the most out of all the Avengers. It’s a trap Whedon and too many writers fall into when it comes to Steve, treating him like a farmboy from 1950s Kansas as opposed to an Irish Catholic who came of age in a Depression-era Brooklyn slum.

And I freely admit that I’m mixing canons here, but while it’s not so much in the MCU, Steve has traditionally been written as the child of Irish immigrants, so I’ve incorporated it into my personal canon that I carry across all adaptations. That’s the beauty of multiple canons, being able to pick and choose from whichever traits you like. I just really like the idea of him being a child of immigrants, having firsthand knowledge that all fearmongering about immigrants is BS, because time may march on, but the arguments of bigots remain the same. 

And yes, I do have comic panels about this, which I use as part of my “Captain America Secretly Hates America” exhibit.

The movie skips the setup and just drops us in.

Of course, this opening seems to come a bit out of nowhere. The people who watched Iron Man 3 are like, "Uh, didn't Tony destroy all his armors?" and really, the only assumption you can make is that at some point, he just rebuilt them. I guess it's a symptom of how it is with Tony, how he can't seem to walk away from superheroing, even as the costs of it mount. Though again, it does make you wonder to what extent they planned the plotline of the MCU. While they did plan, it obviously wasn’t down to the dot and tittle and with as many people involved with the planning, it makes sense that they would occasionally trip over each other. A minor example can be seen in the “LANGUAGE!” bit with Steve, but a bigger one can be seen with Tony’s retirement. 

But while they’re in the process of kicking ass and taking names, they face some unexpected issues in the form of the Maximoffs. And here we’ve got to talk about Wanda and Pietro.

First off, their origin for those interested. Those of you have already noticed the major changes to their background. Basically, at the time this movie was made, Marvel didn’t have the rights to the X-Men and therefore, they couldn’t use the concept of the mutants or anything related to the X-Men at all. So Wanda and Pietro were written as humans who volunteered for Hydra experiments and gained superpowers as a result. And given that Hydra is basically a Nazi organization whereas Wanda and Pietro have traditionally been written as being of Jewish-Romany descent…yeah, there’s no denying the problematic as fuck nature of this.

So why did they opt to introduce the characters? According to IMDB, Joss Whedon said he cast Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch because he thought their powers would be cool to use in a film: "Their powers are very visually interesting. One of the problems I had on the first one was everybody basically had punchy powers. Quicksilver's got super-speed, Scarlet Witch can weave spells, and a little telekinesis, get inside your head. That's good stuff they can do, that will help keep it fresh."

While raiding the Hydra base, Wanda uses her powers to mess with Tony’s mind. It is this moment that will proceed to drive his actions for the rest of the film. So he and Bruce create Ultron, which as you can probably guess, doesn’t end well. 

But first, we'll have ourselves a party.

And while the MCU does better with its team of heroes than the DCEU, lately my thoughts have been similar to those expressed in this pin. 

Though it's not entirely accurate: we swung by 2016 to pick up Peter Parker

Because this party is the extent we get of the Avengers hanging out and being pals. While there are some nice moments, especially the hammer scene, we don’t really get to see them being pals much, which hampers the dramatic effects as the team breaks down. I’m not sure what or how they could have solved this problem within the confines of the movies. It’s one of the perks of TV series in that the long form aspect gives a little more breathing room, allowing for more monster-of-the-week and other kinds of episodes that let the writers play around with the characters even though they don’t do much to advance the overall plot. Maybe this is one of those things that could have been helped with shorts. As always, I remain a little disappointed that the MCU doesn’t run shorts before their movies ala Pixar. 

Because again, as much as I enjoy a good, well-crafted tragedy, I’m an even bigger sucker for fluff.

But you know how it is… you’re having a nice party, everyone’s having fun, and then your teammate’s secret AI project turns evil and crashes the party.

Following a lead, the Avengers track down Ultron to South Africa and here, Wanda decides to fuck with everyone’s head.

Natasha receives a vision of her past. For those of you wondering about the ballerinas, when she was in the Red Room, they brainwashed her into believing that she was a ballet dancer for the Bolshoi Ballet. And here, I fight the urge to go into a rant about what a barrel of missed opportunities the long overdue Black Widow movie was. 

Thor, like Tony, receives a vision of a dark future.

And as for Steve’s vision? Well, his is a bit trickier to quantify. I probably could count it as one of Marvel’s desperate efforts to prove Steve’s heterosexual, something they tried repeatedly to do after Winter Soldier basically supercharged the Bucky/Steve ship. But there are signs of deeper issues.

As for Hawkeye, that one doesn’t go as well as Wanda hoped.

Long story short, everyone’s left reeling in the wake of Ultron and Wanda’s attacks. So Hawkeye takes them home to meet the fam.

The farmhouse scenes work so well, containing some of the most naturalistic moments of this movie. I love the fact that Hawkeye turns out to be a family man. So many superheroes are isolated, having only a handful of colleagues they confide in. It’s easy to see why so many superhero stories make this choice—fewer relationships mean fewer things to trip up the heroes and serve as something which might hamper their ability to kick ass and take names—but it could represent a heaping host of missed opportunities. 

An example of all this can be seen in the horror genre. It’s a simple enough plotline to just send a masked serial killer after some idiotic horny teenagers, but there’s a reason some of the best horror stories involve adult protagonists. The simple truth is that an adult protagonist is someone who has more to lose. Usually, an adult has a well-established life—a home, job, spouse, and children—thus, giving them more of a reason why they have a vested interest in the status quo and why they’d be so scared by the prospect of something shaking it up. Plus, an adult is presumed to have a couple of brain cells to rub together, so you can’t get away with them making incredibly dumb decisions the way a horny teenager might.

There are also more personal stakes for the hero in all this. As said before, motives like “save the world” can be so abstract and vague as to be hard to envision, but “save person X” or “save the world so I can see my kids grow up” is a bit more concrete and easier to get invested in.

Don’t get me wrong: personal relationships can also be used to be killed off for cheap drama (see for example Lian Harper), but often they can provide another angle from which to view the hero. One of the neat decisions Batman: the Animated Series made was to not merely have Harvey Dent be an ally of Batman, but to actually be a good friend to Bruce Wayne, which serves to make his inevitable fall even more tragic. Bruce isn’t just losing an ally in his war on crime; he’s losing a friend, the closest thing Bruce has to a normal relationship. Granted they didn’t do as much with this friendship as they could have, but it’s still a nice choice.

Meanwhile, Tony and Steve chop wood, and Bruce and Natasha talk.

And I suppose it's high time I talked about one of the key complaints regarding this movie: the characterization of Natasha.

The attempts to pair her with Bruce in this movie are widely lambasted as an incoherent mess. On some level, I agree, but the thing is, I actually find the idea of those two being together to be interesting. Don't get me wrong; it was done badly in this movie. It comes way the heck out of nowhere and once this movie's over, it's never mentioned again.

If they had actually built up the relationship, I would actually be much more onboard. I find the idea of the two as a couple fascinating. Why? Well, I personally believe that of all the Avengers, Hulk is the one Natasha fears the most. She can't outfight the Hulk, outwit him, nor do her usual "femme fatale" bit--Hulk is a creature of rage and muscle. So having her and Bruce be together presents an interesting wrinkle on the subject. 

But given how badly it was received, Marvel chose to treat the whole thing like a cat turd: bury it and never speak of it again. And because fans tend to be an obsessive bunch (fan is short for fanatic for a reason), when not given an explanation, they'll come up with their own and plug them in. The commonly accepted one is that Natasha was deliberately trying to cultivate a romantic relationship with Bruce as a means of gaining further control over the Hulk. Because the Hulk continues to represent a dangerous loose end for the various world governments. Yeah, he saved New York City, but Banner's control over it is a tenuous one at best, as seen by his rampage through South Africa.

As I've said before, the reason the character of the Hulk endures, is due in part to the mystery surrounding the character, what exactly is it. Because while he's referred to as a "big green rage monster," at the same time, that is a rather simplistic understanding. Mark Ruffalo, in the IMDB trivia section for this movie, has a really cool quote about the relationship between the Hulk and Bruce: 

"There's a very cool thing happening in the film: Hulk is as afraid of Banner, as Banner is afraid of Hulk. Both of these guys are obviously the same guy, and they have to come to peace somehow with each other, and this confrontation is building across this film." 

 You have no idea what a cool idea that sounds to me, the idea that the Hulk is just as scared of Bruce Banner as Bruce Banner is of the Hulk. The "strongest hero there is" fears someone who, genius-level intellect aside, amounts to an ordinary human. 

I personally feel that Hulk works better as an ensemble character, rather than trying to carry a movie by himself, but stuff like the attempted Bruce/Natasha relationship, makes me wonder if it would have been better to have a Hulk movie before this one that better established the relationship. 

But that's not the only issue people have with Natasha in this movie. 

Some of the reoccurring problems with her character stem in some small part from the fact that for a while, she was the only female avenger, thus, putting her into the classic trap where one character has to represent half of the human population. It's one of the reasons I adore Black Panther or Birds of Prey. By :gasp: :choke: :pearlclutch: having more than one female character, it allows the other characters to breathe a little, demonstrate actual personalities outside of being girls with girl parts. 

Natasha has also been written more, how should I say, favorable to the male gaze, which serves to further undermine her as a character. So many times, the camera focuses on her, um, talents and assets, which is probably why Natasha doesn't attract the character hate from whinyass fanboys the way, say, Captain Marvel** does.

This beautiful artist is basically parodying the poster of the first Avengers movie, which had everyone striking cool heroic poses, except for Natasha of course. Because we must stress that she's a girl with girl parts. 

As for the part where Natasha calls herself a monster, I interpreted it as referring to the red in her ledger, but other people took other interpretations. And yeah, people who can't have kids are not monsters; this is a fairly obvious statement, but I felt like I should make it just in case. 

In light of Whedon's unraveling, people are, of course, reevaluating his characters. For a while, he was labeled as a male feminist, but histories of his abuse of actresses and exes...And as this article points out,

female characters in his works are often strong because of horrific background of torture and abuse, which isn't exactly a ringing feminist endorsement. 

However, Black Widow has traditionally been written as coming from a background of brainwashing, torture, and abuse, so this isn't Whedon's fault. 

Then again, it does gall me that so many female characters have rape backstories. Male characters become heroes or villains for a wide variety of reasons, but you have any female character in a position of power, it'll invariably turn out that she was at some point, either raped or threatened with rape. Yes, this is sadly a reality for many women, but the thing is, you don't have to do that for every character. 

It was one of the strengths of Wonder Woman in that the titular character wasn't driven by angst or a horrific backstory; she was driven by an abundance of kindness. WW just loves and cares about people and thus, wants to do what she can to protect them.

Speaking of Wonder Woman, there's the matter of Joss Whedon's infamous script. Here's the full script for those interested.

Unfortunately, the Maximoff twins' alliance with Ultron hits a little snag when it turns out that he plans on wiping out humanity by using the capitol city of Sokovia as an asteroid. 

Okay, so now you know the stakes. Ultron is basically being all, "You can save this city full of innocent civilians or the world," and the Avengers respond by going, "STFU, we're doing both!" because that's what heroes do. 

That’s what sticks with me regarding the big climax: the lengths the Avengers go to, to try to save as many civilians as possible. Even before the battle really got started, they were doing whatever they can to evacuate as many people as possible. Because again, that’s what heroes do. In the face of Ultron’s plan for mass extinction, they assert the value of human life above all else. You know they can’t save everyone, but they’re going to do their damnedest to try.

And I’m breaking the rule, but it’s something I missed in future Avengers movies, how they get knocked around and smash through buildings with no real consideration or concern for ordinary civilians. Maybe they didn’t have the time to show this, but I missed stuff like the first Avengers movie where they tried to confine the fighting to one area to lessen the number of civilian casualties and their actions in this one. Even though they’re hopelessly outclassed, I also like how they had the police trying to do what they can to protect people.

It’s part of the reason that moment in Superman: the Animated Series continues to hit so powerfully. The police officers weren’t running around completely rock-stupid; they were doing what little they could to protect people. Yeah, they’re struggling because they’re ordinary cops against supervillains, but they’re still going to do what they can because every life saved, is a victory.

Then again, given what real world police are like, this may be the most unrealistic part of these adaptations.

Okay, done bringing depressing reality into this.

Despite all the buildup with Hawkeye and his family, Pietro is the one who ends up dying, rather than Hawkeye suffering a case of retirony.

Eventually, the day is saved. The people are evacuated out, the city is destroyed, and Paul Bettany has to actually show up for work rather than just collect a sackful of cash for a voiceover.

As for cut scenes, the infamous cave scene actually makes more sense in the extended version, making me wonder why the heck they cut it in the first place. Apparently the studio forced Whedon to put the cave scene to provide buildup for Ragnarök, at least that’s what he claims.

As for the mid-credit scene, Thanos is going to stop delegating and get off his ass.

And that’s Age of Ultron. Next up is Ant-Man.

*For those of you struggling with the paywall, let me lend you my 12-foot ladder.

**Don’t worry. We’ll get to the collective whinyass fit the fanboys through over this movie. Though they have it out for Brie Larson in general, to the point where the key to winning a fight with them is to go, “Hey look it’s Brie Larson!” then punching them right in the motherfucking face as soon as they turn their heads.