The Ultimate Threat

AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON asks what happens when you give a computer the ability to think for itself. To which we could add, what happens when you make a science fiction film that assumes the audience can think for itself?

Sadly, in the case of Age of Ultron, writer-director Joss Whedon’s serious attempt to make a smart blockbuster collides with corporate cookie-cutting and the belief that stockings are best overstuffed, even if what’s in them is just cotton wool or dead weight. Too much is going on, and not all of it is good. Thor, the Hulk, Iron Man, Black Widow, and the other guy with the arrows are still looking for a magical object, but when they find it we’re none the wiser about what it’s for. Bad guys still threaten the safety of the world, and the Avengers still think that only maximum force can secure a result.

So Tony Stark builds Ultron, a supercomputer with a body—the super-est of supercomputers, to be sure—whose job will be to “protect the earth” and end violence. I think. I’m not being snarky—the film is so overpaced that it mostly misses the opportunity to nurture plot points or emotional beats.

One exception is a funny sequence in which the team tries to lift Thor’s hammer, revealing their personalities in a competition between alpha (and omega) males—and Scarlett Johansson. Here Whedon (witty, politically intelligent) gets to be Whedon, and it’s clear that there was a more interesting movie intended behind, and even trying to break free from, this one.

Ultron, envisaged as the ultimate peacekeeper, becomes the ultimate weapon. The contemporary political resonance is obvious. Seeing that the greatest threat to earth is human selfishness, Ultron does what a program with no conscience would do: He sets about omnicide. We’ve seen this before—notably in James Cameron’s underrated 1989 underwater eco-thriller The Abyss, in which aliens think that the only way to preserve earth is to kill us. Ed Harris persuades them otherwise by showing that people are capable of the highest selflessness. It’s a brilliant, and rare, thing—the resolution of violent conflict by negotiation. In a Hollywood blockbuster.

Nothing so smart—or wise—happens in Age of Ultron. One character acknowledges the possibility of empathy (“I don’t want to kill him.”), but this is quickly superseded with “But he must be destroyed.” I think Joss Whedon knows that good intentions aren’t enough. Problem is, the machine behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe doesn’t.