I've been a pretty adamant follower of all-things Marvel
for the last fifteen years (my real entry point being inhaling the X-Men: Evolution animated series at the age of
eleven). During the years I've read a lot of comic books from Uncanny to
Unlimited and particularly loved the roll out of the new Marvel Cinematic
Universe (MCU) from Marvel Studios.
While I’m usually first in line for the movies, I was a
little slow on the uptake for The
Avengers: Age of Ultron. Not for lack of interest (really, really not), just
lack of time. I ended up rewarding myself with it yesterday afternoon after a
day of running around and, well. Look.
I loved its parts, loved getting to see my ol’ baes again, and
the glimpses of Natasha’s past and Vision and all the War Machine and Falcon we
got, but the sum of it left me a little disappointed. Because I’m a huge nerd,
and also because I got stuck in fierce traffic coming home, I ended up rewriting
it in my head and hey! I kind of fixed it!
1. Squash the Bruce x Natasha storyline;
2. Make the Maximoff twins the protagonists.
The biggest problem with Age of Ultron was a lack of commitment to any one plot and the fact
that it didn’t know whose story it was. Was it Clint Barton’s or Tony Stark’s
or Ultron’s? Was it Bruce Banner’s or Black Widow’s? You could argue that all
five of these characters got their time in the spotlight, but none of them had
a real journey. Clint revealed increments of himself and then a secret family,
but he had no true emotional arc – he didn’t start out as something and end
something else.
Similarly, Tony – who the story pitched as being the one
with the journey to make in this film – started believing something like Ultron
could protect the world, and when that didn’t work, made something exactly like
Ultron who could protect the world.
It was a wash, rinse, repeat with a different outcome no thanks to a character
moved. He went from feeling like Mr. Right All the Time to being
Mr. Right All the Time.
Similarly, the Bruce/Natasha plotline (which, ugh), came
out of left-field and affected the characters so minutely it may not have
happened at all. It revealed little that we didn’t already know about the two
characters and ultimately it left them in the places they were at the start:
Bruce Banner on the run and Natasha reunited with Steve Rogers.
Even characters with less screen time like Thor and Steve
ended where they started – despite finding Loki’s sceptre in the opening scene,
it was lost again by the end, and Steve went from being a man out of time
looking for his best friend to, well, being a man out of time looking for his
best friend.
The cards barely shuffled.
The thing that really gets me is the fact there’s the bones
of a great film here, and the key lies in Tony Stark. I know, I know, there’s a
lot of Tony Stark in the MCU, but it’s
hard to deny that he has one of the most compelling arcs in this shared
universe. A man struggling to be a hero and still often coming out the villain
makes for a hell of a character, and I wish that the writers currently on board
had more of a desire to explore that.
Why I like the MCU - why I've always liked Marvel Comics - is not the long
fight scenes or the pioneering VFX (although they're totally a bonus), it's the
line these stories walk in talking about the uglier side of being a hero -
about being a man out of time like Captain America or an assassin who keeps
finding herself on the wrong team like Black Widow.
It’s a universe full of conflict and the thing with AoU is that it never dug deep into
its most compelling one - Tony Stark facing the monsters of his own making. Not
in the artificial intelligence of Ultron, but in the two children who watched
their parents die and waited two days to see if Tony Stark's grenade would end
them too.
These movies have framed Stark as a villain before, most notably in Iron Man 1 and 2, and I'm sure with Captain America: Civil War just around the corner, he'll get to be again, but I can't help but feel this film would've prospered all the better if it had committed to Tony's obsessive intelligence and morally dubious tendencies. We hear non-stop about his history supplying evil overlords, but the fact is, Tony's never known where to draw the line and that's what makes him so damn watchable.
Tony should never have been the hero of AoU, the Maximoff twins should have been. They should've been because that story had motive and pain, rage and a history we were yet to know. That story had compelling characters in Wanda and Pietro and, most of all, it was everything AoU and even the wider MCU is trying to be - a story about war creating heroes and villains to fill a need and heroes and villains creating a war to fill theirs. After all, these characters are nothing without one.
The Maximoff twins were the perfect foil for Tony's plot with Ultron and could've been his ultimate redemption in reconciling them into the team. Instead we got a plot with Ultron which simply reiterated things we already knew about Tony. I honestly think the fight between the twins and Tony never eventuating was the biggest loss of the film.
One of the things I say a lot in my real life movie geek-outs and in my workshops is that the role of a good sequel isn't to stretch a story, it's to deepen it, and, rather unfortunately, I think Age of Ultron did the former.
These movies have framed Stark as a villain before, most notably in Iron Man 1 and 2, and I'm sure with Captain America: Civil War just around the corner, he'll get to be again, but I can't help but feel this film would've prospered all the better if it had committed to Tony's obsessive intelligence and morally dubious tendencies. We hear non-stop about his history supplying evil overlords, but the fact is, Tony's never known where to draw the line and that's what makes him so damn watchable.
Tony should never have been the hero of AoU, the Maximoff twins should have been. They should've been because that story had motive and pain, rage and a history we were yet to know. That story had compelling characters in Wanda and Pietro and, most of all, it was everything AoU and even the wider MCU is trying to be - a story about war creating heroes and villains to fill a need and heroes and villains creating a war to fill theirs. After all, these characters are nothing without one.
The Maximoff twins were the perfect foil for Tony's plot with Ultron and could've been his ultimate redemption in reconciling them into the team. Instead we got a plot with Ultron which simply reiterated things we already knew about Tony. I honestly think the fight between the twins and Tony never eventuating was the biggest loss of the film.
One of the things I say a lot in my real life movie geek-outs and in my workshops is that the role of a good sequel isn't to stretch a story, it's to deepen it, and, rather unfortunately, I think Age of Ultron did the former.
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