Countdown to Doomsday - Avengers: Age of Ultron
A decade on, Age of Ultron is the Marvel movie that mistook setup for substance, and the first dry run for the homework problem that broke the Multiverse Saga.
From the Author
The most revealing thing a blockbuster can do is tell you what it was secretly for. Most of the best Marvel films were built to be themselves first and pieces of a larger machine second, which is why they still play as movies a decade on rather than as expensive connective tissue. Avengers: Age of Ultron is the moment the priorities flipped, the first time a tentpole felt visibly conscripted into setting up films and shows it would never live to see, and the strain shows in every seam. Rewatching it now, well into a countdown through the Infinity Saga, the verdict is not that it is bad. It is that it is the first Marvel movie that seems unsure whether it is allowed to be about itself, and that uncertainty is the thing that keeps an entertaining film from being a good one.
The plot, such as it can be untangled from its own setup duties, finds Tony Stark and Bruce Banner using the scepter recovered from Baron von Strucker's Hydra base to jump-start a dormant peacekeeping program, only for the artificial intelligence they create, Ultron, to decide the surest route to peace runs straight through human extinction. The team chases him across the globe while contending with twin enhanced humans, Wanda and Pietro Maximoff, and eventually midwifing a second synthetic being, Vision, into existence. James Spader voices Ultron with real menace, and Elizabeth Olsen, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and Paul Bettany also star alongside the returning core ensemble.
To be clear, this is a 4 out of 5, and the reason it clears that bar is that it is simply fun to watch. It does not have the dead stretches that bogged down the first Avengers, the opening raid on the Hydra base strikes exactly the right register, that jocular, mid-fight banter feels earned when the stakes are Nazis with bigger guns, and the set pieces move. There is a lot of interesting material buried in here, the idea of Ultron as a distorted mirror of Stark, of Vision as the thing Ultron believed himself to be. The film is never a chore. If it turns up on cable and you have nothing else going, you will not change the channel.
That said, the film has a tonal whiplash problem that undercuts its own stakes, and the pattern is specific: nearly every death lands with a punchline chaser. Strucker is dispatched and waved off with a quip. Pietro's death is foreshadowed by a recurring "you didn't see that coming" gag that drains the moment of weight before it arrives. Even Ultron's end, which sits inside a fantastic philosophical exchange with Vision, gets capped with a one-liner. There is nothing wrong with a jokier, conversational tone in the abstract, and early on it fits. But you cannot sell the end of the world as a credible threat while the characters treat it as a light afternoon, and the script never resolves that contradiction. It is compounded by what was already becoming a house style, the Whedon dialogue tic where everyone speaks in the same rhythm of deflective wit, to the point that no line can be assigned to a character by voice alone. Wanda suffers worst of all here, given so little to do that she registers as a tragic thing events happen to rather than a person, which means the heavy lifting to make you care about her gets deferred years down the line to WandaVision.
The deeper issue, and the one that reframes everything else, is that Age of Ultron is a movie serving two masters. At two hours and twenty minutes it buckles under the weight of its obligations to the wider universe, the digression to seed Vision and reveal the scepter housed an Infinity Stone all along, the detours into Natasha's backstory and Clint's home life. It has the same fundamental problem as Iron Man 2, a film so busy being a bridge that it forgets to be a destination. That instinct, the belief that a movie's primary job is to make you do homework for the next one, is the original sin Marvel spent the entire Multiverse Saga repeating, training audiences to feel they had to watch Loki to follow Quantumania and resenting the assignment.
Here is the part worth being specific about, because it is where the film stops being a single misfire and becomes a case study. Age of Ultron is a relic of the first time Marvel tried to fuse two separate universes into one canon, and it failed then for the same reasons it failed later. The connective project running underneath this film was the marriage of Marvel Studios and Marvel Television, and Agents of SHIELD was carrying the load: season one was reactive to the movies, dutifully addressing the collapse of SHIELD after The Winter Soldier, but by season two it had started building out mythology, the secret history of Hydra, the alien involvement, the groundwork for the Inhumans. That last push was not anyone's creative vision at Marvel Studios, it was a mandate handed down from Marvel Entertainment chief Ike Perlmutter, who, unable to use the X-Men because the film rights sat at Fox, decided the Inhumans would be the studio's mutants by other means, a substitute pushed across comics, cartoons, toys, and eventually a famously disastrous IMAX-launched television series. The Inhumans were, in all likelihood, meant to be the saga after Thanos. Clearly that is not how things went. The Marvel Studios and Marvel Television split in 2015, Perlmutter eventually lost the film side entirely, and the moment Kevin Feige was free of the mandate he quietly walked the Inhumans movie off the schedule.
The lesson sitting in all of this is the one Marvel never learned. Tying Agents of SHIELD to the films did not send a single moviegoer to ABC to catch up and the explicit crossover beats were a nice "oh, that's what they were building" wink for the people already watching and nothing more. The cross-pollination did not work in 2015, and rather than absorb that, Marvel ran the exact same experiment at vastly greater scale after Endgame, this time betting the whole post-saga strategy on Disney+ shows being mandatory canon. It hit the same wall, made worse by a pandemic that taught audiences to watch everything at home, and worse still by the cynical bad-faith narratives that got attached to minority-led projects like The Marvels under cover of the "homework" complaint. The whole apparatus was built to prove value in the Fox acquisition and value in Disney+ at the same time, and serving both masters meant serving neither.
Age of Ultron sits at the bottom of the Avengers films, and not because it is the worst Marvel movie, since it is plainly more watchable than that. It sits there because it is the first one that mistook setup for substance, and because everything that came after proved how much better these movies could be when they trusted themselves. It is a film you can enjoy with the lights low and your attention half-engaged, and that, in the end, is both its modest pleasure and its quiet indictment. Hopefully the studio one day internalizes what this movie keeps trying to teach it, which is that the surest way to build a universe is to make one great thing at a time.
★ ★ ★ ★
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