Today’s fantastic feature film takes us to 2015 for Avengers: Age of Ultron, to which Civil War is almost certainly a direct sequel.
- Shots fired! We
saw some personality clashes on display in The
Avengers, but here those tensions boil over into physical conflict
regarding the Avengers’ methods. Perhaps not surprisingly, the battle lines
look pretty similar to those we’ve seen teased for Civil War – Team Cap vs. Team Iron Man. This isn’t just Thor
fighting The Avengers for custody of Loki; these are deep-rooted frictions in
the team playing out over a question of whether superheroes are going too far.
Interesting, though, that it’s Cap who argues for restraint while Iron Man
constructs another robotic weapon...
- Movie magic. Age of Ultron throws the MCU into a
world where magic exists. Previously, everything “super” was explainable by
science (either Asgardian or earth-based) – super-soldier serum, iron suits,
flying hammers, gamma radiation. With Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, and the
Vision, though, the Infinity Stones walk us into an age of “miracles,” in which
honest-to-goodness superpowers stand side-by-side with the technologically
upgraded folks we’ve come to love. And to Joss Whedon’s credit, it never feels
like a step too far – in fact, it took me until this latest rewatch to notice
that Scarlet Witch’s magical red energies were something brand new in the MCU.
- Whedon’s got Vision.
If you took everything about Age of
Ultron and boiled it into one character, it’d be Vision (Paul Bettany).
He’s a comics character adapted for the film’s needs, powered by the Infinity
Stones, and something wholly unique yet of a piece with the rest of his team.
In the same way, Age of Ultron bears
a passing resemblance to the Brian Michael Bendis comic of the same name, it
foregrounds the Infinity Stones as the narrative thread holding the MCU
together, and it’s both different and familiar (see #2). Plus, Vision/Age is vibrantly colored, powerful yet
sensitive, funny but packs a punch. And it’s hard to believe they’re barely a
year old.
- And speaking of the
Stones... We’re up to four of six stones discovered thus far, with Vision
powered by the yellow Mind Stone (confirmed, now, to have been previously in
Loki’s scepter). The Space Stone is on Asgard, the Reality Stone is (probably)
still with The Collector, and the Power Stone is in the hands of the Nova
Corps. In terms of the comic book line-up, that leaves Time and Soul Stones yet
to be accounted for, and dollars to donuts says that at least one is destined
to show up in Doctor Strange. Plus we
finally get confirmation that Thanos is looking to collect all six to bind in
an Infinity Gauntlet. Writing sentences like that last one just reminds me that
this is truly the best time to be alive.
- (New) Avengers a-- At any given time in the comics, there are numerous flavors of Avengers teams running around – New, Secret, All-New All-Different, Uncanny, Dark, Mighty, Giant-Size, West Coast, Pet, Young, or just plain The. After the PR crisis caused by Hulk... well, hulking out, it looks like Cap is in charge of the first franchised Avengers team, the New Avengers (only some of whom will take his side in Civil War). But it seems we’ll have to wait a little longer to hear the battle cry “Avengers Assemble!” – Whedon cruelly cuts to black before Chris Evans can enunciate those final syllables. Speaking of franchises, Hydra’s been branching out, too – Baron Von Strucker’s group doesn’t seem in cooperation with the two Hydra heads we’ve seen on Agents of SHIELD (led by Daniel Whitehall and Gideon Malick). Cut off one head on film, it seems two more rise on television.
2 comments:
Per point 1, everyone seems to think Cap and Stark are on different sides here than they will be in Civil War, but I don’t think so. Ultron was meant as a world-policing defense system, which is totally in line with Team Iron Man’s position of regulation in the name of security. It’s easy for Stark to be in favor of such an entity when he is the main face of it. It’s an interesting development for the character, how he started as the bad boy hero who was reluctant to accept SHIELD’s rules, but is now the leading proponent of authority. Cap, on the other hand, was horrified by Ultron. Certainly because he was trying to destroy the world, but it may have also been because the idea of Ultron (something that would potentially limit people’s freedoms in the name of peace and security) was antithetical to what Cap stands for, and he sees Team Iron Man as trying to do the same thing.
And my guess is we’ll get one of the remaining Stones in Doctor Strange and the last one in Guardians 2, leading into Infinity War.
Good point about Cap and Tony, though I would add that Ultron is probably going to be the final nail in Tony's character evolution. He sees now what happens when he's allowed to operate unsupervised (per the joke that if Pepper were in Age of Ultron, this whole thing never would have happened because she wouldn't have stood for it), so he's gone from the guy who wouldn't turn over his suit to the government to someone who realizes that his way of handling the endgame is too dangerous.
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