Issue #11: Gian's Reflections on Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

Watching Avengers: Age of Ultron (written and directed by Joss Whedon) many years removed from its 2015 premiere, it seems pointless to talk about how it couldn’t top the original Avengers. Instead, I tried to step back and think about what the film means today. At its heart, Avengers: Age of Ultron  is the story of one of humankind’s greatest fears: That we will be destroyed by our own creations.
 
Ultron first appeared back in 1968 in Avengers 55 (technically Avengers 54 although he wasn’t named in that issue). The story, created by Marvel greats Roy Thomas (writer), John Buscema (artist), and George Klein (inker), is about how Hank Pym a.k.a The Wasp/Giant Man creates Ultron from the android body of the original Human Torch. By using the Torch, Thomas, ever a student of comics history and continuity, brilliantly manages to link the Avengers to the original Marvel Comics #1, the first and most important of all Marvel comic books.


 
As happens so often, Ultron turned on his creator and tried to destroy him. Many years later, in the 2013 comic book Avengers Age of Ultron, Ultron does manage to take over the world and kill most of the heroes. Only a handful of superhero survivors remain to battle him, and Wolverine decides that perhaps the best strategy is to travel back in time, kill Pym, and prevent Ultron from ever being created.

The comic storyline is an excellent one, with Wolverine and the other heroes motivated by the loss of so many of their friends. The film version is less successful because the motivation for the heroes is less immediate. Partly, Ultron never seem menacing enough. James Spader plays Ultron as slick and mean. He acts witty and taunts his enemies. In one scene, he cuts of the arm of the villain Klaue, then jokes, “Oh, I'm sorry. I think that'll be fine.” But the jokes don’t create a sense of fear. Instead, they make him seem too human, less artificial and this undercuts the danger her represents. He lacks the coldness of Star Trek’s The Borg, who are completely alien and uncaring, assimilating other races not for spite or fun but only out of the cold calculation of their machine minds. It often feels that rather than playing an actual machine, Spader is acting as if he is just a bad guy in Iron Man’s suit, a bit like the fabulous 2009 comic storyline Dark Avengersin which Norman Osborne did steal a suit of Stark’s armor and then pretended to be good while secretly plotting evil.

 
The Vision (played by Paul Bettany), whom Stark creates in the movie to help fight Ultron, actually is far more machine like. Bettany hits just the right note of innocence and intelligence, acting like a true new-born synthoid. He seems awkward, alien, slightly removed from us, and this works well. It’s why the scene where he casually picks up Thor’s hammer, when all the other Avengers were unable to do so (though Steve Rogers came close!), works so well. The Vision is worthy of the hammer because he has no idea the power it possesses. Just as in the comics, the Vision will go on to try to find his humanity. And we can hope that Disney’s Wandavision show will provide us the pleasure of watching that exploration as did the marvelous 2015 Marvel comic series The Vision.



As a film Avengers: Age of Ultron does have some nice moments, but it drags at times as well and never quite finds its footing. The threat of Ultron being inside all of the world’s computers is barely explored. At one point James Rhodes (played nicely by Don Cheadle) says, “He’s in your files, he’s in the Internet. What if he decides to access something a little more exciting?" S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Maria Hill (played well by Cobie Smulders) responds, "Nuclear codes." But nothing ever comes of this story line. Instead, Joss Whedon just has the Vision burn Ultron out of the Internet somehow, in what amounts to little more than lazy writing. As reported by The Washington Post (“WikiLeaks: The CIA Is Using Popular TVs, Smartphones and Cars to Spy on their Owners”), the CIA actually does have technology which enables them to tap into every digital camera in the country, so this storyline about how computers can watch our every move is a very real threat and deserved greater exploration. Either that or just drop it entirely and instead make Ultron a stand-alone robot like he was in the comics.
 
We are all addicted to our phones, the Internet, and our computers. We love technology, and we do let it control our lives. And we know it. That’s why we’re afraid of robots taking over the world. We know we can’t live without our phones and it scares us a little. Don’t think so? Try remembering that feeling you got in the pit of your stomach the last time you couldn’t get your phone or computer to turn on, that sense of panic as you feel yourself cut off from the digital part of your world.
 
What happens if one day it’s not power failure but a computer that cuts us off? What if the machines, those sweet Siri’s and Alexa’s and Cortana’s we love to talk to, suddenly decide to cut us off? What then? Ironically, computers don’t have to come to life to take over. They are slowly doing it just as they are now. But they are getting smarter. Just ask the one in your phone, and she’ll tell you.