Behold, the world's largest conveyor belt

Rating: Null/10 (5 March 2016)

"People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves. Now we plug right into repetitive motions of a hundred kinds." - Jeffrey Eugenides
Produced by Marvel Studios (now a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company), "Avengers: Age of Ultron" is a gazillion dollar superhero movie. Most of the film consists of dull, unimaginative action sequences in which powerful "good warriors" battle powerful "bad warriors". These action sequences - which have no sense of style, tempo and which are totally devoid of tension - are rolled out like crude, Pavlovian commands; the chemical rushes cynically demanded by corporate candy factories.
Breaking up the monotony of these monotonous actions sequences are equally monotonous and equally mechanical scenes in which our heroes "talk", "reveal their personalities" and "share their feelings". These scenes exist, not because Marvel Studios has any interest in drama, characters or continuity, but because "films are supposed to have these scenes". In the Marvel universe, nothing really matters. The individual plots and over-arching plot lines of Marvel's films don't matter. Characters don't matter. These things are only present to present the illusion of storytelling. They are filler. The constituents of a factory assembly line whose sole goal is the procurement of money.
You can't have a Marvel Movie without a super-villain. This time around our villain's a Really Bad Guy who wants to do Really Bad Stuff and who ironically pokes fun at Conventional Movie Villain Dialgoue whilst actually totally adhering to clichés. This villain (spoiler?) is defeated. Along the way, the film "comically" delivers its obligatory "one swear word", but not before a room full of lawyers and marketing executives run up the data, salivate over pie-charts and double check with global ratings boards.
Marvel Studios has a history of roping in "irreverent" and "edgy" directors. Afterall, you can't sell cookie cuttered dough to zombies without pretending it's the work of a rebel. As such, "Age of Ultron" was directed by Joss Whedon, a geek-king with a flair for zany dialogue. But like Tarantinospeak, Woody Allenspeak, Mametspeak and Coenspeak, Joss Whedonspeak is now officially annoying. Indeed, everyone in Whedon's "Ultron" now sports the same voice. Every character, be they villain, hero, co-star, robot or computer, is an ironic, sarcastic, wisecracking master of zany one liners. This orgy of flippancy, non-sequiturs and "cool dialogue" reeks of desperation; cool stops being cool when everyone speaks cool.
Watching most Marvel Movies is a bit like being forced to watch a pornographic movie for a full two hours past the point of ejaculation. "Ultron" in particular bludgeons you with bludgeoning. It's filled with CGI muscle-men pounding and stomping, blowing up buildings and tossing cars back and forth, and then doing it again, and again and again and again, and then again in the sequels and then again on the directors' cuts, and then again in the reboots, and then again in the reboots' sequels and then again and again. And then a few more times. And then again and again.
Today, Marvel Studios now rolls like one of the world's largest conveyor belts; factory film-making as the epitome of the self-perpetuating capitalist machine, repackaging and marketing to every inch of the world. Art subservient to product cycles, product obsolescence and schizoid brains. And all the while, the Studio keeps expanding, pushing their movies in the summer, their TV shows in the fall/winter, and their streaming shows in the spring before the cycle is repeated all over again. With the new mantra of #ItsAllConnected - ironic, considering no Marvel show/series meaningfully connects to another - Marvel moves like the cinematic equivalent of malware. And now that Disney's acquired the "Star Wars" franchise, we can expect it to similarly start squeezing new "Star Wars" movies out of its mechanical orifices like diseased clockwork.
Incidentally, like most recent Marvel movies, "Age of Ultron's" chief villain is essentially a Western defence contract run amok. So we have another "anti violence", "anti military" Marvel film which gets its kicks from violence, mass murder and the flattering of whole cities. Lazily written and acted, the film finds actor Mark Ruffalo continuing to be excellent, soulful and layered. He plays the Hulk, a property damage loving green dude with magical pants.
3/10 – What was Ultron's age anyway? Was that dude even legal? Worth no viewings.