Fearful, Failing Saviors: Age of Ultron Turns 10
We’re back! Today’s newsletter gets deep into Marvel nonsense if that is/was your bag; it’s a skip otherwise. Next entry should be a little more general interest.
I wish I could quit the Marvel movies.
The phenomenon of being an out and out MCU stan insisting that, I don’t know, Spider-Man: No Way Home belongs in the cinematic firmament has passed me by, but at the same time, it’s hard to not feel self-conscious over enthusiastically coordinating Thunderbolts opening night tickets at 34 years old. Fandom fare in general feels less compulsive than it used to, but I'm still 12 hours out from being sat for the third dozenth Marvel film. I think I’d be less hung up if the movies were still consistently good, or at least had something going on under the hood. For now, I'm still hanging in because more than the movies being digestible, they're a ritual with some of my closest people.
Anyway, in addition to today being Thunderbolts opening Thursday, it’s also the 10th anniversary of Avengers: Age of Ultron, the second team up movie in the MCU, and the 11th film in the franchise. While Age of Ultron is typically in the basement when it comes to ranking the 4 Avengers movies, it's one that I'm weirdly fond of to the point that it's not only my favorite of the big crossover films, but one of my top 10 Marvel movies period. And I don't say that to say it's secretly Brilliant, Actually, but that it's damn near my favorite MCU movie to think about. Let's start with the context.
It’s one thing to find yourself on the mountaintop, and a whole other figuring out how to stay there. This was the fundamental question during Age of Ultron’s development: the runaway success of the first Avengers movie and the secondary boost from stuff like Guardians of the Galaxy, the second Captain America movie, and Iron Man 3 proved that Marvel’s interconnected superhero universe had legitimacy, so how do you transition to your imperial phase after life as an upstart?
If Age of Ultron is to be believed, the answer is approximately “lose your shit and try everything.” There are specific things it does well that I like, which we'll get to, but broadly speaking, I just find this movie psychologically riveting. Age of Ultron captivates because it is the MCU’s civil war, its identity crisis in real time. It has the indulgence of a blank check picture while navigating a novella’s worth of studio notes on top of delivering on the sequel to one of the blockbuster miracles of the 21st century, and is clearly freaked the fuck out by the burden of its glorious purpose. It’s a film about fear, self-destruction, and discordance that feels itchy in its own skin. There’s a palpable strain to the movie as it tries to balance rampaging teen boy id, technobabble genius ego, and a superego preoccupied with Biblical imagery and dreams, all while it chases a greatness it thinks is just one punch or quip away.
Requisite disclaimer: Avengers and Age of Ultron writer/director Joss Whedon fucking sucks. In 2020 and 2021, Whedon’s near-superhuman public goodwill came crashing down when actor Ray Fisher accused him of workplace harassment on the set of Justice League, leading to a litany of past collaborators (particularly women) to come forward with claims of abuses of power and harassment across his career. Whedon, for his part, attempted a career-saving interview where he came off so unself-aware and flatly unlikable that he made Gal Gadot sympathetic. I’ll get to his particular fingerprints on Age of Ultron in a little bit, but to get it out there: Fuck That Guy.
There’s a scene bridging the 2nd and third acts that captures Age of Ultron in miniature: the birth of Vision. In this, you get the internal strife of the Avengers literally at each other’s throats (Captain America vs. Iron Man, Bruce Banner and Wanda, Hawkeye and Quicksilver), the way fear drives Iron Man and Captain America both toward and away from Vision, some clunky “just go with it” character beats (I’ve seen this movie like a dozen times–Tony’s pitch to Bruce still makes no damn sense), philosophical dialogue (“Are you on Ultron’s side or our side?” “I don’t think it’s that simple. I am on the side of life”), and a sense of quiet grandeur throughout (Vision taking in the cityscape is so pretty). It’s a sequence where everything moves in the same direction, and you can see the film’s, er, vision. Just ignore that it comes after the movie’s most plodding sequence in Seoul, or that there’s still another 45 or so minutes afterward.
Age of Ultron is a movie that only Joss Whedon could have made, for both its highs and still-10-years-later baffling lows. There are 35 other movies in the MCU, and I struggle to think of more than like, 3 that could juggle all the personalities in the room as deftly as the afterparty scene does, or one where the farm sequence is a highlight. He also captures a particularly comic book-y brand of heroism–characters in his two Avengers outings save people, speechify, and everyone from the marquee names down moves with a sense of wonder. It's a small thing, but I like how every character adheres to their color schemes even in civilian mode; they're heroes to their very essence.
(Quick aside: you don't have to get too galaxy-brained with it to consider that Whedon, a compulsive quipmeister who assumes he's the smartest guy in the room, imprints a lot of himself onto Tony Stark. Pair that with the extent to which AoU is about Tony and Tony alone being able to see the big picture and make everything right if only everyone else would get out of his way and let him be great, and you have something truly wild for a mega blockbuster to damn near scream at its audience.)
At the same time, Age of Ultron is throttled by Whedon’s cringey obsessions: dumb guy philosophical talking points, death-seeker heroes, high school nihilism, melodramatic self-obsession, a seedy lecherousness that tries to play itself off as humor, and great God alive everything Black Widow related that happens here. Beyond the eye-roll worthy stuff like how she gets damseled at one point, the multiple references to “ugh, the boys,” or her flirtatious friendship with Bruce Banner, Age of Ultron reveals that all Black Widows undergo forced sterilization to become hardened killers and remove any merciful part from them (?!). She explicitly states that her inability to get pregnant puts her on the level of Hulk’s monstrosity. Nothing against Scarlett Johansson, who turns in a perfectly capable performance, but 2015 being when the “Does Marvel have a women problem?” conversation kicked off in earnest for a reason.
Of course, Age of Ultron's got admirable surface pleasures in addition to its novelty as a superhero movie hangover. The cold open legitimately rocks, as do parts of the overstuffed finale, and the downbeat character moments shine as long as the character isn’t Black Widow. Wanda and Vision arrive on the scene like twin lightning bolts, thus establishing emotional throughlines for here, Civil War, and eventually WandaVision. Jeremy Renner finally gets his due as Hawkeye; I can’t believe I’ve gone this entire time without highlighting his status as the film’s glue guy. This also feels like the last team-up movie where the Avengers move as a unit instead of a series of groups; there’s a robust team dynamic here, whereas later entries Infinity War and Endgame occasionally feel more like triumphs of production management than anything else. We’re probably going to see that again with Doomsday and Secret Wars.
Like I said up top, part of what makes me wince about liking Marvel is that the output hasn’t been consistently good for a while, or, worse, the duds haven’t at least been memorable. That’s what I hold onto with Age of Ultron; I think it’s a moody, flawed masterpiece that nakedly and resentfully fights through its shortcomings, but it still has moments where I’m like “holy shit, this kinda rules.” Is it a better movie than, like, the first Doctor Strange, Shang Chi, or Ant-Man & the Wasp? Who knows, but I don’t care enough about any of them to crank out 1,500 words on all three, let alone just one.
After it made its money and Marvel went on an absolute tear with Phase 3 the next year, Age of Ultron got mostly left behind. Nowadays, if it's remarked upon, it's primarily as a begrudgingly important setup outing, or a misfire laden with bad vibes. Which, it is! But that's still in its own way worth celebrating. There's grace in its failings.
