The End of an Age

Rating: 6/10 (11 May 2015)

It seems incredible to think that super-hero films might crash and burn the same way that historic/religious epics did half a century ago. After all, they have much more appeal for children than did those earlier movies, and every few years the market for a children's film is renewed. But seeing Avengers: Age of Ultron, one can see the end coming. Joss Whedon's writing is clever, but not as strong as what Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely have done with the Captain America films, although to cut Whedon some slack, the nature of the Avengers forces the writer to work with a huge and unwieldy cast; there aren't many writers who could have made Age of Ultron as good as it is.
Still, the overall feeling is that there's simultaneously too much of everything, and not enough of anything. Watching Avengers: Age of Ultron in a cinema with multi-channel sound turned up just a bit too high is a special kind of sensory overload, like those sixties rock concerts where the audience got stoned because that was the only way they could stand the volume. The multiple digital effects are at once dazzling and numbing; they are like a rich man's funeral where the huge floral arrangements are meant to confirm that the deceased was beloved, but only confirm that he was rich.
The result is that it's the real things that make us stop and say "hey there": that the crowds fleeing the Hulk's rampage are predominantly black (it is, after all, Johannesburg, but seems like a brilliant innovation because we are so used to seeing crowds of white people, and Asians, in blockbusters and kaiju films); that after years of hearing Paul Bettany as Jarvis, we actually get to see him, looking and sounding great; and that when all the dust has settled and the crisis is over, Tony Stark summons that most mundane of sci-fi devices (soon to be science fact): a driverless car. Although spectacles come and go, at the core of great films are real things. In Age of Ultron, the real things remain at the periphery, when they should be at the core.
PS: the incredibly skewed gender and racial politics of superhero films are also dating them shamefully. At least in Age of Ultron, a few women occasionally get to do something. But the black characters played by Don Cheadle (a bit of a fifth wheel, even in the Iron Man films), Anthony Mackie (after Captain America: The Winter Soldier, we want to see more of the Falcon and the actor who plays him, not just a glimpse) and Samuel L. Jackson (who doesn't do much in any of these films except once again, the excellent Winter Soldier) are hastily shuffled through the plot, soon dispensed with to make way for the white heroes. Perhaps mass audiences want super-heroes; but how long are they going to put up with this comic book white-guys-only world?