Avengers – Memphis Flyer

J.K. Rowling was a godsend for the publishing industry. Her seven Harry Potter books, published from 1997 to 2007, shifted more than 500 million units worldwide for Scholastic, and taught a generation to love reading.

But in recent years, a question has arisen: Did Harry Potter really teach a generation to love reading, or did it just teach them to love Harry Potter?

When Warner Bros. came calling to J.K. Rowling in 2001, it would prove to be a fateful moment in film history. Film franchises were nothing new, but movie audiences were not expected to keep track of plots longer than a trilogy. Rowling’s dense plotting and expansive dramatis personae made Star Wars look like a family squabble. Like publishers before them, producers tried to reverse engineer the Potter magic. The only person to crack the problem was Kevin Feige, an associate producer on 2000’s X-Men who was hired to wring maximum value from Marvel Comics.

Robert Downey Jr. (above) faces his fate as Avengers: Endgame closes out the Marvel Decade.

Feige looked at an audience raised on Rowling’s serialized storytelling, and saw that Marvel’s rotating staff of underpaid fabulists had produced ample material to feed the formula. With Marvel’s most popular characters under the control of Sony, he turned to the Avengers to provide the spine of the 22-film story. The Marvel movies are literary adaptations, but they’re not high fantasy. A cool character on the cover is what moves comic book units. So is it with the Marvel films, which always choose character moments over coherent plotting. Crossovers are good cross marketing, which is why She-Hulk was briefly a member of the Fantastic Four, and why the Hulk is the co-star of Thor: Ragnarok.

Like Potter, the Marvel series milked the ending by splitting the finale into two movies. Deathly Hallows put most of its sentimental character beats in part one, then loaded on the action in part two. The final two Avengers attempted the reverse: Infinity War hewed to the model Joss Whedon had laid down, until the good guys lost. Endgame‘s first hour is about dealing with loss. Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) throws himself into service. Natasha Romanov (Scarlett Johansson) numbly keeps trying to superhero in a world beyond saving. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) has hung up his super suit and had a baby with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) has made peace with his Hulk-nature and gone green full time. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) gets drunk. Then, five years after Thanos’ (Josh Brolin) snap heard ’round the universe, Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) escapes from the Quantum Realm with an idea. If you had “time travel” in the “How are they going to write their way out of THIS one?” pool, please collect your winnings.

Star Wars taught Generation X to love movies. Since the films were spaced three years apart, kids had to try other genres to find a fix to tide them over, thus expanding their tastes. But the average moviegoer sees four films in a theater annually, and Marvel has been averaging 2.5 movies per year for the last decade. There was no need to try other genres, because Marvel simply subsumed them. You want a paranoid thriller? Here’s Captain America: Civil War. Space opera? Guardians of the Galaxy. Endgame shuffles through genres in its three hour running time. It’s a Steven Soderberg heist film. It disses Back to the Future, then lifts the structure of Back to the Future Part II to create a kind of clip show of the Marvel Decade. And just when you thought we’d escape without a Marvel Third Act, everybody you’ve ever met fights everybody else. Surprise!

The real meat of the Marvel films is not the wham-bam, but the little character moments. Endgame delivers those by splitting its gargantuan cast into unexpected pairs. Hulk finds himself negotiating with The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) in the middle of a raging battle. As the time war escalates and cause and effect starts to go all loosey-goosey, secret acting weapon Karen Gillan as Nebula pairs off against her past self, and Tony Stark makes peace with his dead father.

To say Feige succeeded in his decadal quest to perfect the formula is like saying “the atomic bomb exploded.” It’s true, but it fails to convey the scale. Endgame‘s $350 million opening weekend is the most profitable three days in the 120-year history of the American movie theater industry. Is it actually good? Not as a movie — but it’s not designed to be a movie. It’s a series finale. It’s a last chance to hang out with your super friends. Its bladder-busting length will be much more digestible when consumed on the new Disney+ streaming service.

As the dust clears, Disney stands like Thanos astride Earth-616. They have won, but what kind of world is left behind? The House of Mouse’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox has led to 4,000 layoffs and dozens of projects which can’t be Potter-fied have been cancelled. For all intents and purposes, the theatrical film industry is now Disney and a few minor players. We will soon discover whether Marvel taught a generation to love movies, or just taught a generation to love Marvel.

In “The Freshman,” the first episode of the fourth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, our heroine, having killed the villainous Mayor by exploding her high school, discovers that the vampires have followed her to college. Buffy’s trusty sidekick Xander knows what to do: Get the gang back together.

“Avengers assemble!” he exclaims.

Now, 16 years later, Buffy mastermind Joss Whedon has released his second, and if the director is to be believed, final, Avengers movie to a different world. In 1999, “Avengers assemble” was a reference to Marvel Comics’ B team — it was funny because it wasn’t the X-Men. Now, Captain America (Chris Evans) helms the flagship of the biggest film franchise in the world. Disney’s success with Marvel has set the standard for the 21st-century blockbuster, and all other Hollywood studios are trying to emulate it. Even Star Wars, the original modern film franchise, is adapting the model. It’s no accident that Furious 7 has the same number of main characters as The Avengers. Whedon’s 2012 film, the first to unite all of the different strains of the Disney-owned end of the Marvel Universe, was used as a blueprint, with Vin Diesel playing the Captain America role and Dwayne Johnson playing Nick Fury. The results of that cargo cult appropriation was laughably bad but extraordinarily profitable for Universal. Even car chase movies have to be superhero movies now. Comic books are rewriting film in their own image.

Is this a bad thing? If it means more quality movies like Avengers: Age of Ultron, maybe not. It’s a sprawling epic that represents the best work the corporate Hollywood studio system can produce. With Whedon’s work, that’s not damning with faint praise, it’s just a statement of fact.

Contemplate, for a moment, the extraordinary difficulty Age of Ultron‘s screenplay alone represents. Whedon had to juggle Captain America, Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), from the first film, while introducing new villain Ultron (James Spader), as well as three new members of the team, Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), and Vision (Paul Bettany), and integrating Don Cheadle’s War Machine from the Iron Man sub-franchise and Anthony Mackie’s Falcon from Captain America: The Winter Soldier into the outfit. That’s 11 superheroes and a supervillain. The Batman franchise has repeatedly choked on one superhero and two supervillains. Only a few of the X-Men movies were able to pull off something so complex, and Whedon moonlighted as a script doctor on the first one of those back during the Buffy days.

Creativity often flourishes while pushing against restraints, and in this case, Whedon is in one of the tightest straitjackets any writer/director has ever had to don. With so many subplots and characters to deal with, every beat in the screenplay has to be accounted for. Whedon pulls it off, even accounting for the fact that the first cut he turned in to the studio was reportedly more than 40 minutes longer than the final 2-hour-20-minute running time.

Whedon is the best in the business at teasing out real human emotions from fantastical characters in unbelievable situations. One of the ways he does this is by being honest with the audience. As Hawkeye, who seems to serve as Whedon’s voice in Age of Ultron, points out late in the picture, here’s a guy with a bow and arrow fighting an army of robots in a city that is currently being levitated into space. “None of this makes any sense!” He’s telling Scarlet Witch, the new member of the team who just a few minutes ago was an enemy, to cowboy up, and it works, both in plot as a motivational speech and as a Shakespearian aside to the audience.

Shakespeare looms large in Whedon’s world. When he worked himself into exhaustion on the first Avengers movie, he directed an all-star cast in a low-budget adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing to unwind. He has also absorbed the greatest lesson from the English language’s greatest humanist: “The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth

Early in the film, while our heroes are busting up yet another Hydra base in Eastern Europe, Scarlet Witch uses her mind-bending powers to trap each of the heroes in a hallucinatory world where they are confronted by their fears and desires. At that point, Whedon has been in action mode from the word go, but things suddenly slow down and get weird. Captain America sees what his life would have been like had he not been frozen in ice before World War II ended. Black Widow relives her childhood dream of being a ballerina perverted into a life of killing in a brutal Soviet training camp. Thor sees Asgard ruled by evil. And Iron Man sees himself unable to prevent the destruction of the Avengers and the world. The sequence, which cuts back and forth between frantic action and reverie, is the single greatest moment in any Marvel movie to date.

Ultron is a creation of Tony Stark’s hubris. Tony’s worst fear is the destruction of humanity by superpowered cosmic forces, but his solution is to create an artificial intelligence that wants to accomplish just that. Ultron is the best kind of villain: One who honestly believes he is the hero of the story. He thinks if he can just explain the plan in clear enough terms, everyone will be on board with human extinction. Think of the benefits! The cyborg race he will create to replace us will be a great improvement over this mortal coil. Spader’s performance is mostly a voice performance laid on top of motion capture and CGI work, but that doesn’t make it any less brilliant.

Age of Ultron has one of the things The Avengers lacked: romance. It pairs the most emotionally vulnerable of the team, Bruce Banner, with the most emotionally cut off, Natasha Romanoff. But, this being a Whedon joint, the gender roles are switched. Johansson’s Natasha pursues Ruffalo’s Bruce, who flees like Cinderella from the ball at the stroke of midnight. The two actors have great chemistry together, even when one of them is a green CGI creature the size of a front-end loader. When Natasha, faced with a choice between love and duty, inevitably chooses duty, her solution will look very familiar to Buffy fans.

Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr.

That Banner, for the first time, has a possible future outside of super science and “Avenging” gives the big, mandatory fan service moment emotional heft. When the Hulk, driven insane by Scarlet Witch, goes on a rampage in a populated area, Iron Man has to super-size his armor to subdue him. Iron Man fighting the Hulk has been a fanboy favorite ever since it played out on the comic pages 30 years ago, and Whedon’s interpretation proves just how good at this stuff he is. He out-Transformers Michael Bay in the giant robot fighting department while simultaneously echoing and outdoing the city-destroying brawl between Superman and General Zod in Zach Snyder’s Man of Steel.

Most importantly, Age of Ultron does what big studio movies have been trying to do since before Errol Flynn took up his bow and rapier in 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood: It’s a fun flick to watch in a big theater full of people. Is it a perfect movie? No, but its failings are set by the limitations of the genre. Is it the kind of movie Whedon would be doing in this critic’s ideal world? Not really. His skills and vision are bigger than men in tights. Historically, we’ve had Westerns, adventure movies, spy movies, science fiction, war movies, and all the other action movie variants to deliver swashbuckling good times. Now, with Marvel banking $187 million in three and a half days, and Warner Brothers planning at least 10 more movies set in the DC Comics universe, the superhero template is all we’re going to get for the foreseeable future.

Whedon’s contract with Disney/Marvel is up next month, and he’s been telling everyone who will listen that he’s not coming back. Marvel’s still got a crackerjack team, but Whedon is the secret sauce. Age of Ultron seems like the end of an era.