The first Avengers moviewas the first film to capture the weighing machine and vibrancy of a comic book on screen . The subsequence , Age of Ultron , marks a smaller but still substantial advance : This is the first movie to make superheroes palpate great than normal multitude … by contract more personal . Here ’s our spoiler - free review article .
And by spoiler - free , I have in mind that we might touch on the most basic plot points , as conveyed in the first teaser dawdler , but nothing major . In a nutshell , this is a movie where Tony “ Iron Man ” Stark creates an artificial news called Ultron which turns evil , and it takes all of his Avengers buddies to save the world .
author - director Joss Whedon is the kind of magician who evidence you on the nose how he does a trick , but manage to make it even more telling in the cognitive operation . In this case , he construct Avengers : Age of Ultron as a serial publication of lowly , intimate kinship stories . And somehow , those small , interconnected stories wind up make up the Heron feel amazingly liberal and meaning .
It ’s not just the scale comparing thing , where consider the case in an intimate scene let Whedon to put them up against an US Army of Orcinus orca robots and make the latter seem bigger by comparison with the small — tons of natural action movies do that . The person - sized Hero are n’t just put against a huge backcloth — they become huge , in themselves .
It ’s something about the way Whedon constructs his big activity sequences , like ballet performances ( he enjoy his concert dance ) . Building on the endearing , fluid natural action dioramas in the first Avengers , where the “ camera ” flows from one hero to the next , Age of Ultron has some attractively construct battle scenes , where all the heroes get to be awing in play . Unlike countless other CG - froth action hero motion picture , Age of Ultron manage to take ordered series and sweeping destruction without dehumanizing its characters in the process .
But it ’s not just about the beautiful action scene — Age of Ultron also manages to make its submarine seem Brobdingnagian and significant , by making them seem like modest , messed - up citizenry . This is because Whedon understands that the great power of superheroes is in their symbol .
The burden trio of Avengers — Iron Man , Captain America and Thor — each have symbols that are constantly held up and used as metaphors in the movie . There ’s Iron Man ’s armor , Captain America ’s shield , and Thor ’s pound . The preceding films in Marvel ’s “ Phase Two ” series already experimented with split up the heroes from their symbols , by having Iron Man ’s suits operate without him inside them , and by exploring what happens when someone else ( the Winter Soldier ) can catch Captain America ’s shield .
But now , in Age of Ultron , the impression of Iron Man ’s suits operating without him inside them is taken to its farthermost extreme . Ultron is the benighted mirror of Iron Man , but also the worst case scenario for technology operating on its own . Meanwhile , as every dawdler for this movie has shown , the question of whether anyone else can get up Thor ’s pounding is explicitly brought up . And Black Widow picks up Captain America ’s shield almost as much as he does .
This deliberate operation of strip the paladin apart from their symbols and showing how the symbolic representation empower them winds up showing how the Heron are just people , but also how they get to become bigger . And meanwhile , the story of Ultron is really about an argument between Captain America and Iron Man about the nature of heroism ( do heroes just keep fighting , or progress an apparatus to keep the world secure and then call it a twenty-four hours ? Their differing stand are inform by what they saw in Captain America 2 and Iron Man 3 ) with Thor as the tie-in - breaker . The family relationship among the nub tierce is the back of the motion picture , and it allows Whedon to examine some corpulent themes while also staying focused on graphic symbol .
And meanwhile , most of the other characters in the photographic film have one specify human relationship , whose turning item are interwoven with the gyrations of the game . I ca n’t really get into what those relationships are , without expose the “ looter - innocent ” promise , but they ’re mostly pretty well crafted and the sheer number and intensity of them goes a long manner towards make this movie feel “ heroic . ” A regular adventure can involve a few family relationship , but once there are half a dozen pairings that you madly want to see study out , the story pretty much becomes epic by default — this was the secret of Whedon ’s Firefly , and he deploy it to gravid upshot here .
And the raw characters in the film mostly manage to add up to its potent focus on personal battle — in particular , Scarlet Witch has the power to make people see their grown fear , which wind up being a huge part of exploring how fear and insecurity drive these people . And how these thing can make people both weaker and more powerful , depending on how they reply .
That enunciate , Avengers : Age of Ultron is not quite as satisfy a film as the first Avengers , because it ’s radically overstuffed . There are too many wedge links to other properties , including Marvel ’s TV shows and all the movies . Some characters pop up towards the end of the moving picture that I forgot were even in this moving-picture show . You half expect Daredevil to pop up drinking a latte . I have a smell that Whedon ’s three - hour - plus “ director ’s cut ” will be a much stronger flick , because some essential connective tissue seem to have been cut for run for prison term .
But Age of Ultron is still a beautiful military action film . And even after a dozen other superhero moving-picture show have done a solid job of exploring the signification of valiancy , and the value of costume , and so on , this moving picture still feels like it has something entirely unexampled to say . ( While also commenting on our codependent human relationship with technology . )
Ultron feel like almost as much of a biz - changer for the musical genre as the first Avengers , because of the way its heroes manage to be human - sized and monolithic at the same time . If Whedon ’s first Avengers achieve the on the face of it out of the question task of bring forth Jack Kirby ’s nontextual matter on the big sieve , then his 2nd motion-picture show does something nearly as impressive : captivate the wholesale grandeur of Alex Ross or John Romita .
AvengersCaptain AmericaComicsIron ManJoss WhedonMoviesSuperheroes
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