Avengers: Age of Ultron

Released:  May 1^st, 2015

Rated:  PG-13

Distributor:  Walt Disney Studios

Starring:  Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, James Spader

Directed by:  Joss Whedon

Written by:  Joss Whedon

Personal Bias Alert:  Joss Whedon fan, bored of comic book movies

6.5 of 10

            The summer movie season is here, and Marvel is kicking it off yet again with Avengers:  Age of Ultron.  The team of Iron Man (billionaire playboy crime fighter), Hulk (green rage monster), Thor (golden god), Captain America (enhanced good ol’ boy), Black Widow (former Russian spy), and Hawkeye (bow and arrow dude) have reassembled to finish what they started in The Avengers:  to get every remnant of Loki off their planet.  Despite, or because of, their super powers/skills, they are incredibly bad at this task, with Iron Man instead creating a homicidal machine named Ultron.  Ultron’s got daddy issues, so the Avengers are the first on his hit list, followed by the rest of humanity.  So there’s your threat that only a super-special team can defeat, and the movie proceeds from here like pretty much every other movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

            As someone who’s not a fan of Marvel’s popcorn movies, the grinding gears of yet another bad guys vs. good guys plotline that does little delving into character or themes is getting annoying, but at least here you have Joss Whedon.  That means you get some good one-liners thrown in, but the Marvel franchise has replaced character traits with character connections, and the amount of i’s and t’s Whedon must dot and cross to keep the universe going leaves almost no time for anything outside the plot.  Marvel has drawn a line in the sand, and with the success they’re experiencing, they aren’t about to cross it to convert the stragglers like me.  It seems that most people enjoy what they’re cooking, and if you liked The Avengers and all the other movies, you’ll like Age of Ultron as well.

            The main cast of Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, and Jeremy Renner all return and play their parts with the ease of those who’ve been there and done that.  Joining the cast are Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen as twins with powers of their own and James Spader in the voice/motion capture performance of Ultron.  Taylor-Johnson and Olsen get a couple decent scenes, but mostly they’re navigating action sequences à la last year’s Godzilla.  Spader brings his trademark borderline-lazy nonchalance, which is to be expected but doesn’t quite work in the major villain role.  This failure mostly falls on Whedon, who wrote Ultron with Spader in mind and ultimately never got the character quite right.  Ultron’s presumptive and petulant, characteristics that don’t lend themselves well to a very menacing Big Bad, and there’s many illusions to him being an evil Pinocchio despite the fact that Frankenstein’s monster is a much more fitting comparison. 

Age of Ultron is hampered by many other problems, some of which stem from the film’s own premise.  The big difficulty with this group is that they aren’t really unified.  They come and go as their own priorities pop up, and their fighting abilities are all over the map.  The times when they’re actually all together are rare, and when they split up there always seems to be some character that is simply forgotten about.  Hulk is continuously left behind in action sequences, Thor disappears for a large portion of the down-time, and Iron Man is always flying away from everyone else.  They are a team in only the loosest sense of the word, and the effort it takes to bring them all together makes for some glaring contrivances.

            An even bigger issue is the nagging sense that the film feels tired, which comes from the audience as much as from the filmmakers.  Whedon has been vocal about how difficult Age of Ultron was to make, and many of the cast members have expressed interest in leaving the franchise.  Then you have the unfortunate fact that filmgoers have seen so many similar things in the past year.  Obviously, Taylor-Johnson/Whedon’s Quicksilver fails to live up to the frenzy that the character’s appearance in X-Men:  Days of Future Past created, but there’s also the success of Guardians of the Galaxy, which thrived on its sense of humor and makes the banter in Age of Ultron seem lacking.  Smaller things, like the humorous coincidence that the original brain-version of Ultron looks exactly like the robot brains in Ex Machina, doesn’t help the timing issues.  However, the main problem seems to be the lack of passion from Whedon and company, and it translates onto the final product.

            Despite these downfalls, those making Age of Ultron are talented enough to make a decent film even on autopilot.  With the expectations and the odds stacked against it, the fact that the film is even decent is a bit of a triumph.  But if the world’s going to invest a quarter of a billion dollars into anything, shouldn’t it be more than decent?

Other Notes (Ridiculous Superhero Version):

Ø  How is the ability to get in people’s head and shoot red things from your hands connected?

Ø  Why did they have that squishy CGI look in the opening sequence?

Ø  Why did they make Cap adamant that civilians weren’t getting hurt in the middle of a massive battle where civilians were obviously getting hurt?

Other Notes (Regular Version):

Ø  Those twins were awkwardly close. 

Ø  The crowd shots really highlighted how utterly white the Avengers are.

Ø  Can we discuss the fact that the woman named Scarlett didn’t play the Scarlet Witch?

Godzilla (2014)

Released:  May 16^th, 2014

Rated:  PG-13

Studio:  Warner Bros.

Starring:  Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Juliette Binoche, Sally Hawkins, David Strathairn, Bryan Cranston

Directed by:  Gareth Edwards            

Written by:  Max Borenstein

Personal Bias Alert:  anticipation was high, was very tired when I went to see it

7.3 of 10

            For the record, if Godzilla or something like him ever really attacked a city, I would want to be there to see it.  Preferably I’d also live, but I understand the risks.  It would be worth it.  It would be unique, a singular experience in all of human history.  I can imagine myself standing there, watching him use a building as a crutch, and being terrified and awe-inspired and probably paralyzed.  That aspect of my personality is probably what made me so excited to see “Godzilla” even though I had never been very interested in the other Godzilla films.  It’s a spectacle, and I’d much rather see massive creatures battling it out than massive machines.

            You would think the titular character would be the main focus of the film, but instead the story revolves around a Navy officer named Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson).  Ford’s mother (Juliette Binoche) died when he was a child in a nuclear plant accident, which Ford’s father, Joe (Bryan Cranston), is convinced was anything but an accident.  When Joe trespasses on the quarantined fallout area in order to continue his investigation, Ford must travel to Japan to retrieve him.  While in Japan, a MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) awakens and triggers a battle between two love-struck MUTOs and Godzilla himself.  Ford finds himself balancing his Naval responsibilities and his desire to get home to protect his wife and child, all while avoiding getting squashed by the gigantic monsters.

            There’s many more human characters in this film, including scientists played by Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins and a US military admiral played by David Strathairn.  The result is a long and convoluted first and second acts which tease the finale battle to come.  They try to fill the time with character development and explanations of where Godzilla and the MUTOs come from, but none of it is ever very interesting.  The explanations about Godzilla and the MUTOs never adds up, and the character development is shoddy.  Elizabeth Olsen as Joe’s wife and Sally Hawkins are woefully underused, and Strathairn and Taylor-Johnson do little else but grumble about plot exposition.  Cranston and Binoche get some good scenes at the beginning of the film, but without Binoche, Cranston falls into a slightly over-the-top angry lunatic mode.

            While the focus on characters bogs down most of the film, it is a well-used device when it comes to the cinematography.  Many shots of the creatures are from a human’s perspective, resulting in quick glances of these massive creatures as they pass by.   It gets across scale and awe remarkably well and saves the full view of the creatures until the big finale. 

            Another saving grace of the film is its strong sense of humor.  Themes of man’s arrogance is played up, and we often look pretty silly as the creatures tear through our cities.  In my favorite example, we see Ford’s wife busily cleaning up the kitchen and telling her child to get ready for bed in the background, while in the foreground the boy stares at a news program showing astounding footage of one of the MUTOs wreaking a city.  That one made several people laugh out loud in the theater I was in.

            When the final act eventually arrives, we get the big Godzilla vs. MUTOs fight everyone was waiting for, and many inadvertently smashed buildings to boot.  The previous acts set up Godzilla as the one to root for, and even though that never made any sense, having something to root for does make it more satisfying.  When Godzilla finally stomps out of the ocean, in all his CGI grandeur, I couldn’t help but get excited.  He really is rendered beautifully, and I think we might as well call the Oscar race for visual effects right now.  No one’s going to beat that.

            Despite the problems I had with the film and the physical exhaustion I felt after a long week, I was constantly entertained.  The anticipation is like a cinematic shot of caffeine; there’s no way you won’t get excited.

            I’m tacking on an extra paragraph here, because I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the strange cultural appropriation going on here. Godzilla is a Japanese invention, a metaphor for the devastating effects nuclear bombs have had on Japan’s history.  That we as Americans (the ones who dropped the bombs on Japan) have embraced this creature, and now made our own film, is peculiar to me.  I can’t put my finger on precisely why, and I’m as guilty of liking this creature and everything it stands for as anyone.  But seeing Ken Watanabe, one of the most successful Japanese actors to transition into American films, inform the otherwise American/European characters that Godzilla is king of the monsters seems strange.  You see, king of the monsters was the tagline given to Godzilla in the Americanized version of the original 1954 film.  So a Japanese actor staring in an American movie based on a Japanese property that was created as a response to the actions that America took against Japan in 1945 is informing the largely American actors of a title America gave to the Japanese creature.  Do you see the appropriation rabbit hole this film is?

      Other Notes (Ridiculous Monster-Movie Version):

Ø  Does the main character have death repellant, because he should have died

Ø  Godzilla waits to use his blue fire power until he’s almost lost.  You know, because he likes to fight fair

Ø  Nobody notices the massive hole in the side of the mountain

Ø  Nobody notices that Godzilla’s still breathing?

Ø  Nobody notices a MUTO carrying a submarine walking out of the ocean and into the forests of Hawaii!?

Other Notes (Normal Version):

Ø  Why doesn’t Godzilla eat nuclear stuff too?  Why is he just hiding in the ocean instead of causing a bunch of harm?

Ø  Did you recognize that one army officer that had a few lines?  I did:  hello Richard T. Jones

Ø  This film has a weird fascination with children:  the girl that sees the water receding before the monster shows up in Hawaii, the boy in the train station, young Ford seeing the nuclear plant being destroyed.  The list goes on.

Ø  Mmm…nukes