“Ultron thinks we’re what’s wrong with the world. This isn’t just about beating him. It’s about whether or not he’s right.” Photos courtesy Walt Disney Motion Picture Studios.
The movie takes place over the course of just a few days, isn’t it a little melodramatic to call it “Age” of Ultron?
After saving New York in the first movie and then doing a bunch of other things that they couldn’t help each other out with because of the actors’ contractual obligations, the gang’s back together in The Avengers sequel. In what represents a stunning evolution for Marvel, they begin the film by actually addressing the events of previous movies, namely the collapse of SHIELD in The Winter Soldier. Age of Ultron begins with the group’s last raid on the Hydra compound where Baron Strucker (Thomas Kretschmann) is experimenting on debris from the Battle of New York, including Loki’s scepter, which he requisitioned from SHIELD before Hydra’s rebellion. Their mission successful, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) discover the head of the scepter is the key to cracking an artificial intelligence program they’ve been working on for some time, a “suit of armor around the world.” When this intelligence, Ultron (James Spader — JAMES SPADER!!!) boots up, he promptly kills JARVIS (Paul Bettany), backs himself up on the Internet, co-opts Stark’s robot legion and tries to kill everyone on the face of the Earth.
Age of Ultron brings Joss Whedon back as the writer/director, and makes it painfully obvious what the recent Marvel movies — Guardians of the Galaxy aside — have been missing: character development. Everyone’s questioned where Iron Man was when Maleketh was destroying the universe in Thor: The Dark World and why Banner wasn’t helping in Iron Man 3, but these aren’t just contract-driven omissions — they’re symptomatic of a larger storytelling problem with the series. At this point, many of the characters simply aren’t fleshed out as much as they need to be. Their motivations and fears, things that distinguish them from each other and why they’re doing things the way that they’re doing them are all unclear through a lot of the Phase 2 movies because their actions and interactions are inconsistent across the several-director continuity.
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