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I really miss the days when the weirdest thing science created was me
So first I had dinner at the Madrona Tree with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gaudior and then we went to see Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) at the Capitol Theatre and then I banged one of my already sprained elbows into a bathroom stall door and walked most of the way home holding my arm and talking way too fast at Gaudior because of the adrenaline, so this is not a movie review; I don't have the typing capacity for it. You may consider these notes. I just want to get something down for posterity before my short-term memory shuts down for the night. [edit] As stated in the previous post, my ability to type shut down at the 2100-word mark and I went to bed. Finished this post in the afternoon, after seeing Buster Keaton's The Cameraman (1928) at the Somerville. Total spoilers everywhere, of course. For the Avengers, not Keaton.
It is increasingly difficult to talk about any of these movies as freestanding narratives than as installments in a serial and it doesn't help Age of Ultron's case that its first quarter-to-third really feels like someone jammed the back half of an unproduced sequel into the front end of the completed script. I understand it's supposed to start the audience in medias res, with a sense of continuing action rather than the artificial implication that our protagonists just put their lives on hold for three years, but it never quite feels like catching us up in the organic swing of the story; instead we get the unraveling denouement of a film that mostly existed in the end credits of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), some nicely improvisational down time in between adventures, and then the next one kicks off so abruptly, it catches the characters by plausible surprise and the audience not so much. I'm not saying I find it out of character for Tony Stark to leave a mad science experiment running unsupervised while he throws a party. There are ways in which that is the summary of Tony Stark's life. I just don't know what it would have hurt to open with the down time and fill in the backstory of the Maximoff twins in conversation or flashback (we even get a summary of their powers literally handed to Captain America; it's recap, but it needn't have been) instead of starting the clock with twenty minutes of video-game-style fight sequence and leaving the smaller moments of emotion or introspection to race alongside the Ultron plot and try to squish themselves in wherever someone was not getting actively walloped by an army of robots. Once the movie gets going, it's a relentless barrel of action. I can't tell if there were more thoughtful moments filmed and they got left on the cutting room floor or if they never even made it out of the shooting script; I miss them, either way. I miss the texture they give to the world, the three-dimensionality of characters who exist beyond hitting the marks of their narrative. This has been a complaint of mine as far back as Thor (2011) and I get that most audiences do not attend a blockbuster for the conversation, but when it's interesting conversation affecting the emotionally complex relationships of intelligent characters, I want as much of it as I can get and I don't want to have to rely on fandom to fill the gaps. Age of Ultron is more than two hours of movie and I'm not complaining about the length, but I wish someone had distributed it a little differently.
(One example: while it doesn't especially affect me one way or the other that Hawkeye has a family, other than a general amusement that it's a secret from all the other Avengers except Natasha—seriously, who expected her not to find out—I don't know why he gets that sensitive exploration of his home life when much more interesting configurations are sidelined. I appreciate the confirmation that Steve is still looking for Bucky; I'm glad that Tony's PTSD was not miraculously cured by having an entire movie about it; I'm still sorting my reactions to the pairing of Bruce and Natasha, but I genuinely like that their attraction raises questions of trust and safety and the definition of a monster in ways that the Bartons' relatively mainstream nuclear family does not, which makes it automatically more interesting to me. It's nice to know something about Clint in general, because he's the character of whom I have always had the least sense, but I'd still rather spend my time with Steve Rogers grappling with the twenty-first century or Natasha Romanoff grappling with her identity beyond the Red Room or Bruce Banner grappling with everything, himself included.)
There's also the issue of voice, which I cannot remember noticing so much in any prior Marvel movie. It may be a function of having finally accumulated enough canon onscreen that the differences between various writers' and directors' takes on the characters are perceptible, but it did nothing to ameliorate the feeling that Age of Ultron really needed one more draft before shooting. The Avengers (2012) surprised me by being, among other things, the first script I'd encountered by Joss Whedon where I didn't feel all the characters were channeling the same voice. Age of Ultron feels more like he's running up against the limits of his own archetypes. He writes a great Tony Stark. He's got the reflexive one-liners, the self-awareness, the interior monologue that frequently blurts into exterior and enough of the real fragility underneath the tossed-off flippancy of remarks like "It's been a long day—like, Eugene O'Neill long" that we believe how badly the Scarlet Witch's mind-meddling shakes him: it's what he sees in his nightmares anyway, the falling void of New York, the skeletal leviathans of the Chitauri gliding through an alien sky and he couldn't stop them, he couldn't save anyone, he never will. Tony's speech patterns are individual enough that we can recognize them in Ultron's off-kilter joviality, his pride and his distractability and his automatic running commentary blurred and distorted into something strangely humorless despite its self-satisfaction, smeared lead instead of mercury. We can even watch Tony recognize them, and look a little miffed at the unflattering mimicry: okay, but it sounds better when I say it, right? It totally sounds better when I say it. All of his creations mirror him one way or another, but Ultron isolates the worst parts and shines them back larger than life and twice as destructive, and Tony's not such a self-involved ass that he misses the metaphor.
Whedon never really has that sure a touch with anyone else in this film. He's good with the snarky side of Steve Rogers, the part of Captain America that will always be the pint-sized punk from Brooklyn who got in the face of bullies three times his size. When Maria expresses unthinking distaste that the orphaned, revenge-seeking Maximoffs volunteered for experimentation at the hands of HYDRA's Baron von Strucker, Steve's response is exactly as pointed and deadpan as it needs to be: "Right, what kind of monster would let a German scientist experiment on them to protect their country?" (See also the title of this post, which is delivered with the right combination of wistfulness and wryness.) Whedon's not as good at writing Steve as a straightforwardly good person and it shows. He confuses stiffness with righteousness with actual ethics; Chris Evans gives the dialogue all the nuance he can muster and I appreciate it, but it's difficult to shake the impression that Whedon views the character as fundamentally more limited than his modern-day compatriots—noble, reliable, and just a little bit dull, like the moral of the story; just a little bit dumb, like a good soldier. I don't get it. There's no reason to treat Captain America as the voice of conservativism when Tony Stark is the one going behind his teammates' backs to create a defense system for the planet that the planet isn't even offered a chance to say no to. Possibly Whedon missed how the entire last movie was about Captain America dismantling unjust institutions even when he was implicated in them. It wasn't story-breaking, but it jarred me just enough every time that I began to notice when other voices were out of key. Someone get Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeeley back on the line.
(He can write Natasha about half the time, I think. When Bruce presents his inability to give her children as proof of his monstrosity and she counters with her much less ethereal experience of sterility; when she kisses him and then shoves him off a cliff; that's the Black Widow I recognize. Anything she can use for the task at hand is a weapon, even or especially herself and other people's feelings toward her. Some of her other scenes, I was not so sure about.)
So what did I like about this movie? Mostly character work and the occasional surfacing theme, which seems to have been enough to send me out of the theater talking enthusiastically with Gaudior even before I tried to break my elbow. In no particular order of importance—
I said three years ago that I wanted a Mark Ruffalo Hulk movie; the ending of Age of Ultron seems poised to give us one, with the Hulk striking out on his own like the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno TV series. Until then, I'll enjoy that this film devoted almost enough screen time to the fault lines between the scientist and the other guy, which have only fractured further since the first movie. Ruffalo is just very good in the part. His Bruce Banner is a remarkably fearful character and it's played for sympathy rather than comedy or condescension; his most characteristic gesture is an anxious tangling of his fingers, apprehensive as the duck of his shoulders or the flinch of his brows. You don't see a lot of non-metaphorical handwringing these days, but here it only adds to the very physical sense that Bruce is hanging on to himself by his fingernails if he has to, holding himself back from reaching out, from wanting or responding, from taking any action at all; from losing control. Something in his balance is shifting. He's less confident in his boundaries. The Hulk remains a skyscraper-smashing juggernaut, but after the debacle in South Africa—we never see what visions the Scarlet Witch teases out of their twinned fears, but it's enough to send the Hulk rampaging unstoppably through the streets of Johannesburg until the combined stubbornness of Iron Man and an orbiting shutdown system named Veronica finally hammers him into unconsciousness and out of green—Bruce curls painfully in a blanket in the back of the jet, twisted with memory and shame. His arms around himself are tight as a straitjacket, his eyes open with anguish or wincing closed; he looks as though he wants to disappear into himself, except that's where everything went wrong in the first place. At the Bartons' safe house, there's the Avengers all in a row in their war-gear and there's Bruce in a sweatshirt standing a full pace from the rest. In or out of himself, he's not safe, and just enough expression other than rage crosses the Hulk's face to show that it's not as simple a split as a rational man and an unleashed id. What it is may be what he's run away to find out.
(Did anyone else get massive Bride of Frankenstein vibes off the parallel scenes in which Tony seduces Bruce into doing mad science with him? Bruce as Colin Clive's reluctant Frankenstein, meddled in God's domain once already, thanks, got this monster, look how well that worked out for me, Tony sadly less fey than Ernest Thesiger in the Dr. Pretorius role: "I don't want to hear the man-was-not-meant-to-meddle medley . . . We're mad scientists, we're monsters. You got to own it." There is a nested Frankenstein mythos running through the film, explicitly noted in the final face-off between Vision and the last of Ultron's bodies, creators and their unsatisfactory creations. Of course, being a team effort rather than a mostly solo act of hubris, Vision comes out nearly godlike and genuinely nonhuman; Ultron is much more the classical monster, misshapen and embittered, much too like the man who birthed it. I'm talking about Tony again. Bruce has—or is—an alter ego already, and it's nothing to do with transhumanism or robotics. The Bride always was more of Pretorius' idea, but I do feel this leaves Bruce sidelined both in terms of responsibility and weight in the mythscape of the film. I'm wondering if it really is as simple as Whedon understanding the inside of Tony Stark's head best.)
I still want a movie about Natasha. Whether metaphor or memory, the balletic slices we see of the Red Room are tantalizing and appropriately disturbing; I hope they are in continuity with the training program we saw in Agent Carter (2015), because that was some superbly creepy shit. I don't buy infertility as a reason to think of herself as a monster, but I believe it as a tactic to shock Bruce out of his self-pity. Of course he can't give her the normality that child-fruitful Laura Barton and her idyllic Midwestern homestead represent, but when did she ever ask him for that? When did she say that normal was what she wanted? "I adore you, but I need the other guy." (And if you really want kids, Dr. Banner, adopt some like the rest of the planet. Just don't build any. You got lucky with Vision.) For that matter, I like the ambivalent suggestion that Natasha's relationship with the Hulk is actually more stable than her relationship with Bruce: she can get the Hulk to touch fingers with her and will himself back into his vulnerable other self, but she can barely get Bruce to touch her under any circumstances. What works less well for me, therefore, are the two counterpoised scenes where she declares her feelings and he backs away each time. Possibly we are meant to read her as more uncertain and faltering when dealing with real emotions rather than playing them for the benefit of a long con, but I don't see why that should be the case; witness her eventual camaraderie with Steve in The Winter Soldier, which took some work and was nowhere near as awkward. All of that said, I continue to care about the character far more than I expected I would before The Avengers and I enjoy Scarlett Johansson's ability to introduce ambiguity in between lines I suspect were written to be much more clear-cut. I want a Hulk movie and a Black Widow movie, though. No fair combining them.
I did not expect to like the Maximoffs. They are shortchanged by the pace of the plot; they deserve a lengthier introduction and more time to themselves, especially considering how strongly they register with the scenes they're given. I am a little sorry that their new history has so thoroughly divorced them from any chance of connecting up with the hell of a universe next door at 20th Century Fox (and I'm guessing they're no longer Romani Jewish, if Magda and Magneto are no longer their parents), but I am inexpressibly thankful that Wanda was not merely the latest incarnation of Whedon's wild-haired mad dancer; she has the physical look and some of the powers, but she's grounded. Her brother is older, faster, physically stronger, but he looks to her for direction. When she says they change sides, they change. I can't help but see the two of them slightly through the lens of Ian Tregillis' Milkweed trilogy, even if Wanda's a lot saner than Gretel and Pietro can't actually run through walls. His death surprised me when almost nothing else in the film did. I'm not entirely sure how future comics arcs will square with it. Maybe we'll get parallel universes in here after all.
Strangely, I have the least to say about Ultron. It's not that he's a boring villain, but he's a one-shot player and he is most important for what he brings out in the Avengers, not for what they show about him. He is very well voiced by James Spader, who makes his default register an eerily hypnotic combination of bemusement, amusement, self-absorption, and disgust; every now and then another emotion breaks through, like his childlike horror at accidentally severing an arms dealer's left arm (Frankenstein's monster, not realizing that children sink where flowers float), but nothing in the speed or pitch of that syrup-thick, slightly synthetic baritone varies to prove it. His plan is standard-issue planetary genocide cloaked in evopsych, but he's explicitly an experimental robot that got dropped on its head during delivery, so I feel like he might get a pass for how stupid the idea is.
I do like the final combination of the new Avengers team. It's a major boost in diversity and it's a collection of personalities that promise interesting bonds and clashes. No one on the new team is a direct replacement for a predecessor, no matter how their powers or technologies may align: War Machine is not Iron Man is not the Falcon, the Vision is not Thor is not Wanda, Erik Selvig is a relatively normal professor of physics instead of a mad genius and he and Helen Cho can commiserate in the canteen about getting brain-zapped by Loki's scepter. While we're talking statistics, I really appreciate that there are two black men andfour five women (including a woman of color) in this movie and none of them die. We don't need bodies all over the floor in order to raise the stakes or make room for the new generation. And I do not object to the holdovers—Steve and Natasha pretty much are the only remaining Avengers I would trust to train a new team. Thor would keep forgetting not everyone is functionally invulnerable and Tony has pretty much already proven he's crap at mentoring. Hawkeye was surprisingly empathic in that one scene with Wanda during the levitation of Sokovia, but that's the most outgoing we've ever seen him. I'm not really surprised he retires to his farm at the end: he's always been the Avenger who seemed most to be putting his time into the job, not his identity.
(As I type this, I have identified one of Whedon's problems with Steve Rogers: he keeps forgetting Steve isn't old. He made a time-jump; he didn't live through those seventy years. His life experience is twenty-odd years as the bantamweight of Brooklyn and then two years as wartime Captain America and then maybe five in the modern world with S.H.I.E.L.D. and aliens and escalating moral complexities. Whedon writes him like the grand old man of the Avengers, and quite possibly he is immortal with that self-renewing metabolism that kept him alive on ice all those years, but in strictly experiential terms he's still the youngest of the original team except, someone correct me if I'm wrong, perhaps Natasha. His authority is moral, not paternal. There's a huge difference.)
So those are my scattered thoughts on Avengers: Age of Ultron. It's not as strong a sequel as The Winter Soldier or even Thor: The Dark World (2013), which frustrated me, but I am not sorry to have seen it and it doesn't seem to have set any of the characters in directions that make me scream, although I may revise my opinion based on succeeding movies. I may well see it again to consider further. Maybe I should stop typing now. These 3400 words sponsored by my fine backers at Patreon.
gaudior and then we went to see Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) at the Capitol Theatre and then I banged one of my already sprained elbows into a bathroom stall door and walked most of the way home holding my arm and talking way too fast at Gaudior because of the adrenaline, so this is not a movie review; I don't have the typing capacity for it. You may consider these notes. I just want to get something down for posterity before my short-term memory shuts down for the night. [edit] As stated in the previous post, my ability to type shut down at the 2100-word mark and I went to bed. Finished this post in the afternoon, after seeing Buster Keaton's The Cameraman (1928) at the Somerville. Total spoilers everywhere, of course. For the Avengers, not Keaton.It is increasingly difficult to talk about any of these movies as freestanding narratives than as installments in a serial and it doesn't help Age of Ultron's case that its first quarter-to-third really feels like someone jammed the back half of an unproduced sequel into the front end of the completed script. I understand it's supposed to start the audience in medias res, with a sense of continuing action rather than the artificial implication that our protagonists just put their lives on hold for three years, but it never quite feels like catching us up in the organic swing of the story; instead we get the unraveling denouement of a film that mostly existed in the end credits of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), some nicely improvisational down time in between adventures, and then the next one kicks off so abruptly, it catches the characters by plausible surprise and the audience not so much. I'm not saying I find it out of character for Tony Stark to leave a mad science experiment running unsupervised while he throws a party. There are ways in which that is the summary of Tony Stark's life. I just don't know what it would have hurt to open with the down time and fill in the backstory of the Maximoff twins in conversation or flashback (we even get a summary of their powers literally handed to Captain America; it's recap, but it needn't have been) instead of starting the clock with twenty minutes of video-game-style fight sequence and leaving the smaller moments of emotion or introspection to race alongside the Ultron plot and try to squish themselves in wherever someone was not getting actively walloped by an army of robots. Once the movie gets going, it's a relentless barrel of action. I can't tell if there were more thoughtful moments filmed and they got left on the cutting room floor or if they never even made it out of the shooting script; I miss them, either way. I miss the texture they give to the world, the three-dimensionality of characters who exist beyond hitting the marks of their narrative. This has been a complaint of mine as far back as Thor (2011) and I get that most audiences do not attend a blockbuster for the conversation, but when it's interesting conversation affecting the emotionally complex relationships of intelligent characters, I want as much of it as I can get and I don't want to have to rely on fandom to fill the gaps. Age of Ultron is more than two hours of movie and I'm not complaining about the length, but I wish someone had distributed it a little differently.
(One example: while it doesn't especially affect me one way or the other that Hawkeye has a family, other than a general amusement that it's a secret from all the other Avengers except Natasha—seriously, who expected her not to find out—I don't know why he gets that sensitive exploration of his home life when much more interesting configurations are sidelined. I appreciate the confirmation that Steve is still looking for Bucky; I'm glad that Tony's PTSD was not miraculously cured by having an entire movie about it; I'm still sorting my reactions to the pairing of Bruce and Natasha, but I genuinely like that their attraction raises questions of trust and safety and the definition of a monster in ways that the Bartons' relatively mainstream nuclear family does not, which makes it automatically more interesting to me. It's nice to know something about Clint in general, because he's the character of whom I have always had the least sense, but I'd still rather spend my time with Steve Rogers grappling with the twenty-first century or Natasha Romanoff grappling with her identity beyond the Red Room or Bruce Banner grappling with everything, himself included.)
There's also the issue of voice, which I cannot remember noticing so much in any prior Marvel movie. It may be a function of having finally accumulated enough canon onscreen that the differences between various writers' and directors' takes on the characters are perceptible, but it did nothing to ameliorate the feeling that Age of Ultron really needed one more draft before shooting. The Avengers (2012) surprised me by being, among other things, the first script I'd encountered by Joss Whedon where I didn't feel all the characters were channeling the same voice. Age of Ultron feels more like he's running up against the limits of his own archetypes. He writes a great Tony Stark. He's got the reflexive one-liners, the self-awareness, the interior monologue that frequently blurts into exterior and enough of the real fragility underneath the tossed-off flippancy of remarks like "It's been a long day—like, Eugene O'Neill long" that we believe how badly the Scarlet Witch's mind-meddling shakes him: it's what he sees in his nightmares anyway, the falling void of New York, the skeletal leviathans of the Chitauri gliding through an alien sky and he couldn't stop them, he couldn't save anyone, he never will. Tony's speech patterns are individual enough that we can recognize them in Ultron's off-kilter joviality, his pride and his distractability and his automatic running commentary blurred and distorted into something strangely humorless despite its self-satisfaction, smeared lead instead of mercury. We can even watch Tony recognize them, and look a little miffed at the unflattering mimicry: okay, but it sounds better when I say it, right? It totally sounds better when I say it. All of his creations mirror him one way or another, but Ultron isolates the worst parts and shines them back larger than life and twice as destructive, and Tony's not such a self-involved ass that he misses the metaphor.
Whedon never really has that sure a touch with anyone else in this film. He's good with the snarky side of Steve Rogers, the part of Captain America that will always be the pint-sized punk from Brooklyn who got in the face of bullies three times his size. When Maria expresses unthinking distaste that the orphaned, revenge-seeking Maximoffs volunteered for experimentation at the hands of HYDRA's Baron von Strucker, Steve's response is exactly as pointed and deadpan as it needs to be: "Right, what kind of monster would let a German scientist experiment on them to protect their country?" (See also the title of this post, which is delivered with the right combination of wistfulness and wryness.) Whedon's not as good at writing Steve as a straightforwardly good person and it shows. He confuses stiffness with righteousness with actual ethics; Chris Evans gives the dialogue all the nuance he can muster and I appreciate it, but it's difficult to shake the impression that Whedon views the character as fundamentally more limited than his modern-day compatriots—noble, reliable, and just a little bit dull, like the moral of the story; just a little bit dumb, like a good soldier. I don't get it. There's no reason to treat Captain America as the voice of conservativism when Tony Stark is the one going behind his teammates' backs to create a defense system for the planet that the planet isn't even offered a chance to say no to. Possibly Whedon missed how the entire last movie was about Captain America dismantling unjust institutions even when he was implicated in them. It wasn't story-breaking, but it jarred me just enough every time that I began to notice when other voices were out of key. Someone get Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeeley back on the line.
(He can write Natasha about half the time, I think. When Bruce presents his inability to give her children as proof of his monstrosity and she counters with her much less ethereal experience of sterility; when she kisses him and then shoves him off a cliff; that's the Black Widow I recognize. Anything she can use for the task at hand is a weapon, even or especially herself and other people's feelings toward her. Some of her other scenes, I was not so sure about.)
So what did I like about this movie? Mostly character work and the occasional surfacing theme, which seems to have been enough to send me out of the theater talking enthusiastically with Gaudior even before I tried to break my elbow. In no particular order of importance—
I said three years ago that I wanted a Mark Ruffalo Hulk movie; the ending of Age of Ultron seems poised to give us one, with the Hulk striking out on his own like the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno TV series. Until then, I'll enjoy that this film devoted almost enough screen time to the fault lines between the scientist and the other guy, which have only fractured further since the first movie. Ruffalo is just very good in the part. His Bruce Banner is a remarkably fearful character and it's played for sympathy rather than comedy or condescension; his most characteristic gesture is an anxious tangling of his fingers, apprehensive as the duck of his shoulders or the flinch of his brows. You don't see a lot of non-metaphorical handwringing these days, but here it only adds to the very physical sense that Bruce is hanging on to himself by his fingernails if he has to, holding himself back from reaching out, from wanting or responding, from taking any action at all; from losing control. Something in his balance is shifting. He's less confident in his boundaries. The Hulk remains a skyscraper-smashing juggernaut, but after the debacle in South Africa—we never see what visions the Scarlet Witch teases out of their twinned fears, but it's enough to send the Hulk rampaging unstoppably through the streets of Johannesburg until the combined stubbornness of Iron Man and an orbiting shutdown system named Veronica finally hammers him into unconsciousness and out of green—Bruce curls painfully in a blanket in the back of the jet, twisted with memory and shame. His arms around himself are tight as a straitjacket, his eyes open with anguish or wincing closed; he looks as though he wants to disappear into himself, except that's where everything went wrong in the first place. At the Bartons' safe house, there's the Avengers all in a row in their war-gear and there's Bruce in a sweatshirt standing a full pace from the rest. In or out of himself, he's not safe, and just enough expression other than rage crosses the Hulk's face to show that it's not as simple a split as a rational man and an unleashed id. What it is may be what he's run away to find out.
(Did anyone else get massive Bride of Frankenstein vibes off the parallel scenes in which Tony seduces Bruce into doing mad science with him? Bruce as Colin Clive's reluctant Frankenstein, meddled in God's domain once already, thanks, got this monster, look how well that worked out for me, Tony sadly less fey than Ernest Thesiger in the Dr. Pretorius role: "I don't want to hear the man-was-not-meant-to-meddle medley . . . We're mad scientists, we're monsters. You got to own it." There is a nested Frankenstein mythos running through the film, explicitly noted in the final face-off between Vision and the last of Ultron's bodies, creators and their unsatisfactory creations. Of course, being a team effort rather than a mostly solo act of hubris, Vision comes out nearly godlike and genuinely nonhuman; Ultron is much more the classical monster, misshapen and embittered, much too like the man who birthed it. I'm talking about Tony again. Bruce has—or is—an alter ego already, and it's nothing to do with transhumanism or robotics. The Bride always was more of Pretorius' idea, but I do feel this leaves Bruce sidelined both in terms of responsibility and weight in the mythscape of the film. I'm wondering if it really is as simple as Whedon understanding the inside of Tony Stark's head best.)
I still want a movie about Natasha. Whether metaphor or memory, the balletic slices we see of the Red Room are tantalizing and appropriately disturbing; I hope they are in continuity with the training program we saw in Agent Carter (2015), because that was some superbly creepy shit. I don't buy infertility as a reason to think of herself as a monster, but I believe it as a tactic to shock Bruce out of his self-pity. Of course he can't give her the normality that child-fruitful Laura Barton and her idyllic Midwestern homestead represent, but when did she ever ask him for that? When did she say that normal was what she wanted? "I adore you, but I need the other guy." (And if you really want kids, Dr. Banner, adopt some like the rest of the planet. Just don't build any. You got lucky with Vision.) For that matter, I like the ambivalent suggestion that Natasha's relationship with the Hulk is actually more stable than her relationship with Bruce: she can get the Hulk to touch fingers with her and will himself back into his vulnerable other self, but she can barely get Bruce to touch her under any circumstances. What works less well for me, therefore, are the two counterpoised scenes where she declares her feelings and he backs away each time. Possibly we are meant to read her as more uncertain and faltering when dealing with real emotions rather than playing them for the benefit of a long con, but I don't see why that should be the case; witness her eventual camaraderie with Steve in The Winter Soldier, which took some work and was nowhere near as awkward. All of that said, I continue to care about the character far more than I expected I would before The Avengers and I enjoy Scarlett Johansson's ability to introduce ambiguity in between lines I suspect were written to be much more clear-cut. I want a Hulk movie and a Black Widow movie, though. No fair combining them.
I did not expect to like the Maximoffs. They are shortchanged by the pace of the plot; they deserve a lengthier introduction and more time to themselves, especially considering how strongly they register with the scenes they're given. I am a little sorry that their new history has so thoroughly divorced them from any chance of connecting up with the hell of a universe next door at 20th Century Fox (and I'm guessing they're no longer Romani Jewish, if Magda and Magneto are no longer their parents), but I am inexpressibly thankful that Wanda was not merely the latest incarnation of Whedon's wild-haired mad dancer; she has the physical look and some of the powers, but she's grounded. Her brother is older, faster, physically stronger, but he looks to her for direction. When she says they change sides, they change. I can't help but see the two of them slightly through the lens of Ian Tregillis' Milkweed trilogy, even if Wanda's a lot saner than Gretel and Pietro can't actually run through walls. His death surprised me when almost nothing else in the film did. I'm not entirely sure how future comics arcs will square with it. Maybe we'll get parallel universes in here after all.
Strangely, I have the least to say about Ultron. It's not that he's a boring villain, but he's a one-shot player and he is most important for what he brings out in the Avengers, not for what they show about him. He is very well voiced by James Spader, who makes his default register an eerily hypnotic combination of bemusement, amusement, self-absorption, and disgust; every now and then another emotion breaks through, like his childlike horror at accidentally severing an arms dealer's left arm (Frankenstein's monster, not realizing that children sink where flowers float), but nothing in the speed or pitch of that syrup-thick, slightly synthetic baritone varies to prove it. His plan is standard-issue planetary genocide cloaked in evopsych, but he's explicitly an experimental robot that got dropped on its head during delivery, so I feel like he might get a pass for how stupid the idea is.
I do like the final combination of the new Avengers team. It's a major boost in diversity and it's a collection of personalities that promise interesting bonds and clashes. No one on the new team is a direct replacement for a predecessor, no matter how their powers or technologies may align: War Machine is not Iron Man is not the Falcon, the Vision is not Thor is not Wanda, Erik Selvig is a relatively normal professor of physics instead of a mad genius and he and Helen Cho can commiserate in the canteen about getting brain-zapped by Loki's scepter. While we're talking statistics, I really appreciate that there are two black men and
(As I type this, I have identified one of Whedon's problems with Steve Rogers: he keeps forgetting Steve isn't old. He made a time-jump; he didn't live through those seventy years. His life experience is twenty-odd years as the bantamweight of Brooklyn and then two years as wartime Captain America and then maybe five in the modern world with S.H.I.E.L.D. and aliens and escalating moral complexities. Whedon writes him like the grand old man of the Avengers, and quite possibly he is immortal with that self-renewing metabolism that kept him alive on ice all those years, but in strictly experiential terms he's still the youngest of the original team except, someone correct me if I'm wrong, perhaps Natasha. His authority is moral, not paternal. There's a huge difference.)
So those are my scattered thoughts on Avengers: Age of Ultron. It's not as strong a sequel as The Winter Soldier or even Thor: The Dark World (2013), which frustrated me, but I am not sorry to have seen it and it doesn't seem to have set any of the characters in directions that make me scream, although I may revise my opinion based on succeeding movies. I may well see it again to consider further. Maybe I should stop typing now. These 3400 words sponsored by my fine backers at Patreon.