5 Oddly Specific Ways In Which Avengers: Age Of Ultron Defines The Franchise

The Avengers made a lot of money. It’s what Marvel movies do. They’re even getting better at it: Avengers: Age Ultron only needs to gross $500 million for Phase 2 to earn in five films what Phase 1 made in six. If Age of Ultron came out and was just 2 hours of Kevin Feige blowing his nose with sheets of 24 carat gold, sheer brand inertia would still make it one of the highest grossers of the year. But Marvel Studios got into this plum position by delivering exactly what’s been expected of them: fast, fun popcorn entertainment that stars likeable characters. The Avengers, the current epitome of Marvel’s formula, will be supplanted by Age of Ultron because it has more of those characters doing more fast and fun stuff than ever before. You can’t really blame Marvel for taking an “if it ain’t broke” approach to their individual franchises, or the culminating Avengers films either. All these movies are kind of the same –take one part space MacGuffin, two parts science run-amok, set dialogue to snark, and let bake in an animation studio for 2ish hours- but clearly, that hasn’t stopped many people from going and seeing every installment. When it comes to Age of Ultron, though, the parallels it has to its predecessor are sometimes as granular as the rest of the movie is gargantuan. Rather than just being a mashup of all the other Marvel films, the Avengers series is establishing some highly specific makeup in its DNA. Take for instance.... 1) Third Act Sympathy Blonde When things are popping off in the finales of both The Avengers and Age of Ultron, it can be hard enough keeping track of our heroes, let alone the countless civilians doing their level best not to get blown-up, lasered, or vaporized by an errant Hulk sneeze. For whatever reason, though, both films go out of their way to highlight a particular, random blonde woman amid the fracas. “Waitress,” as IMDB credits her, appears when the wormhole is opening over Manhattan in Avengers, again when Captain America almost eats a Chitauri grenade, and then again during a round of post-battle news footage. “Sokovian Woman,” the Ultron equivalent, shows up before Sokovia joins the mile high club, pops up in a couple “everything’s going to hell” shots, and it’s her kid that Hawkeye and Quicksilver save near the climax. The purpose of both characters is to give the audience a surrogate and a throughline from the civilian side of things –it just so happens they’re both attractive blonde women. Is such an archetype the easiest means of generating audience identification with the least effort possible? Better ask Marvel’s resident shrinks: Tony Stark and Bruce Banner. 2) When In Doubt, Put Yourself In The Villain’s Shoes Non-Loki Marvel bad guys are not known for their charisma, or their intelligence…or much of anything really, they’re mostly pretty boring. But it doesn’t say great things about Ultron, or Loki himself that the two baddies big enough to take on all of the Avengers are so predictable that our heroes can figure out what their evil plan is just by thinking about it for two seconds. When Loki escapes the Helicarrier in The Avengers, all Tony has to do is link the Asgardian’s vanity to his own, and -BAM- Stark Tower is where the guy must be heading. Given that he built Ultron, it’d make sense for Tony to also be the one to map out the bot’s next dastardly move. But it’s Bruce Banner who takes a throwaway piece of dialogue from Ultron (and the most symbolically relevant kid’s painting ever), and connects Evolution-Obsessed Robot A, to South Korean Tissue Lab B. Banner has a knack for solving problems just in the knick of time, as also evidenced by… 3) Hulk Smash (Through Plot Obstacles) Bruce Banner is many things: wry, soulful, and an expert in any field the story deems necessary. As a man, and by extension, The Hulk, what he isn’t is outgoing or subtle. So it’s a little peculiar that in both films, the third act requires Banner to just show up somewhere, with minimal guidance or interference. In Avengers, he hops a motorbike and rides from the random warehouse he just crashed into while Hulking out, to the exact spot in Manhattan where the rest of the gang is holding a pre-battle huddle (maybe Tony checked in on Foursquare). In Age of Ultron, Black Widow is being held captive in the heart of the mad machine’s production facility…until Banner, again, just kind of appears from out of nowhere to bust her out. No fuss, no muss. Black Widow is so surprised by his presence that you think it might be a dream sequence or something. Anyway, it’s not like this sort of shortcutting is ruinous to the film – that these movies make any sense at all is a minor miracle, and for all we know, a line or scene explaining the character geography in greater detail was left in the editing room. These movies are long enough as is, even if longer is always better according to some. 4) Tony Stark’s Enlarged Sense Of Humor That was a dick joke. There are many like it to be found in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but with Age of Ultron, we’ve achieved peak peen humor in terms of abundance and absent subtlety. Specifically, it’s Tony’s boner for boner jokes that Ultron really expands on from the first movie. Remember when Loki tried to do the scepter-brainwash thing on him in Avengers, and how hilarious it was when it failed? It’s a great gag that dryly subverts an expectation previously setup by the film. When Tony follows it up with a crack about “performance issues,” getting thrown out a window mid-smarm is what’s actually funny about the beat. Ultron has Tony making an identical impotence joke when the Avengers are taking turns trying to lift Thor’s hammer, and this is mere foreplay compared to the climax of penis-related wordplay Tony is firing off by the film’s end. Obviously, it’s really easy for a writer to erect a dick joke or two, but at the current rate, you can predict Infinity War – Part I to sound more like a Judd Apatow joint than a comic book movie, along with one other thing… 5) The Villain’s Endgame Is Foreshadowed Midway Through The Movie We don’t know much about Thanos’ grand scheme just yet, beyond his intention to cosmically bedazzle that gauntlet teased in Ultron’s mid-credit sequence. If history is any indicator, though, you might be able to piece his plan together by the halfway point of the next film. It’s a thin connection, but the offhand Galaga reference in The Avengers does foreshadow Loki’s master plan of summoning a bunch of space aliens to descend upon the Earth. Ultron’s agenda for world destruction involves turning a massive heap of metal into a planetary pile driver. No less tenuous, and much more blunt, the finale is setup earlier during the fight between Iron Man and Hulk. Flying him high in the air before hurtling the Hulk down to Earth, Tony uses his Veronica suit to give Banner a top-to-bottom tour of a developing skyscraper in record time. Enlisting gravity to solve a problem is no more successful for Ultron than it is Tony (it takes a follow-up sucker punch to knock the Hulk out), but once again, Stark winds up a step ahead of his foe without even realizing it.