AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON

AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON. Joss Whedon,[1] dir., script, from the comic book by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. USA: Marvel Studios (prod.) / Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures (US dist.), 2015. Charles Wood, prod. design. For details see IMDb entry for the film.

Most centrally, a robot-take-over movie. See for a definitive hodgepodge of film imaging of things and beings mechanical, cybernetic, and Industrial — combined with scenes surreal and kind of mythic or mystical (one of the Avengers is the god Thor, who deals with such matters, but he is not the only one). Students of movie weaponry should note weapons from Hulk's fists to Thor's hammer to Hawkeye's[2] high-tech bow and arrows to Black Widow's handguns to Nick Fury's S.H.I.E.L.D.-produced giant aircraft carrier as hovercraft to Tony Stark's use of his Iron Man powered armor and James Rhodes use of his as (significantly named) War Machine. When 1936 kids serial like FLASH GORDON mixed styles and periods and to some extent genres, it was usually to use props that were at hand for episodes in a genre still defining itself. AGE OF ULTRON is a major film by a sophisticated director, with one studio handling the production, and an estimated budget of some US$250M[3]; the esthetic mix is what the filmmakers wanted.

For "the human/machine interface" note Ultron as a penultimate AI robot and the combination of the AI computer program Jarvis with flesh and mechanism for Vision: an android/robot (cyborg) combination, and perhaps an objective correlative or epitome of the film as cinematic SF. (IMDb classifies the film as "Action, Adventure" in addition to "Sci-Fi," and when it's in that sort of SciFi mode it's mostly destroying things.)

Reviewed by Cait Coker, SFRA Review #313 (Summer 2015): pp. 60-62.[4]

Erlich 01/V/15; augmented 8Aug21