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Avengers: Endgame

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.

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Ten Things About Ten Years Of Marvel Movies

The Paradiso is filling the traditional late summer movie doldrums with some repertory at the IMAX. For the last week it has been the spectacular presentation of 2001: A Space Odyssey providing an unparalleled cinema experience. This week, Marvel Studios is celebrating their 10th anniversary with an IMAX marathon. In the Marvel spirit of giving people what they want, here are 10 highlights from the 20 Marvel movies, arranged in the form of a numbered list to give it that little bit of extra narrative tension. Everybody loves lists, right? Let’s do this.

10. The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Marvel

Back in the lean comic years of the 1980s, a struggling Marvel sold the film right to some of its creations. Marvel’s A-list superheroes, The X-Men, Spider-Man, and the Fantastic Four wound up with Fox or with the Sony corporate hegemony, where films of varying quality were made in the early 2000s that whetted the appetite for comic book films. When producer Kevin Feige took over in 2007, just as the studio’s business model was changing from licensing its intellectual property to making their own films, Marvel was forced away from their flagship heroes to mine deeper into comic history. This proved incredibly freeing, and opened up new opportunities. Guardians of the Galaxy (Saturday 3:40 p.m.), for example, was one of the most fun blockbusters of the past decade, even though it comes from one of the more obscure corners of the Marvel comics library.

9. Marvel’s Biggest Failure

Of the 20 films Marvel screening this Labor Day weekend, exactly one, Ant-Man and The Wasp (Monday, 10 PM) has a titular female lead. And Evangeline Lilly as The Wasp gets second billing to the worst lead actor in the entire Marvel universe, Paul Rudd. Black Widow, portrayed iconically by Scarlett Johansson, is arguably the most interesting Avenger. If Marvel had wised up and given her a solo movie five years ago, they could have stolen DC’s Wonder Woman thunder, and we could have possibly avoided the Ghost In The Shell debacle.

8. The Most Comic-Book-y Comic Book Movie

I’m going to offer the hot take that Christopher Nolan has been bad for the superhero genre. He successfully brought gritty realism to comic book movies, but in the process he sacrificed the comic book form’s biggest strength: outlandish visuals. Marvel films, especially the later ones, have embraced the possibilities of CGI. None have veered farther from photorealism than 2016’s Doctor Strange. Director Scott Derrickson channels the Sorcerer Supreme’s creator Stephen Ditko with wave after wave of psychedelic freak outs — while also lifting some licks from Nolan’s Inception for good measure.

7. You Need A Good Villain

You know why Batman is everybody’s favorite superhero? Because he’s got the best villains. Superhero films live and die by the charisma of the bad guy, and the plausibility of their plan. The best recent example was Michael Keaton as Vulture in Spider-Man Homecoming (Sunday, 9:50 p.m.). The sotto voce threats he delivers to Tom Holland’s Spider-Man while Peter Parker is trying to bone his alter ego Adrian Tooms’ daughter Liz on homecoming night may be the single best acted scene in any Marvel movie.

6. The Guardians’ Secret Weapon

Who is the heart of the Guardians of the Galaxy sub-franchise? If you said ubiquitous hot guy Chris Pratt’s Star Lord, you’re mistaken. The correct answer is Karen Gillian as Nebula. Gillian has been low-key walking away with every movie and TV show she’s been in for the better part of a decade. She propped up Matt Smith’s mediocre Doctor Who for three years as Amy Pond, one of the best companions in the show’s 50-year history. Just last year she stole the Jumanji reboot out from under The Rock. Nebula, tortured and twisted and intensely physical, plays nemesis to her sister Gamora, and the scenes between Gillian and Zoe Saldana always crackle with emotion. When she reluctantly teams up with them, in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (Sunday, 7 p.m.) her pouty sarcasm fits right in with the rest of the crew. In real life, Gillian just wrote and directed her first feature film, The Party’s Just Beginning.

5. The Third Act

The “Marvel Third Act” has become a shorthand for a big ending where our colorful heroes fight a horde of grey, identical monsters, with lots of attendant property damage, but no consequences for the heroes. It was perhaps best executed in 2012 by Joss Whedon in The Avengers (Friday, 3:40 p.m.), but its unimaginative imitators have been a plague on the multiplex ever since. Interestingly, Whedon commented on the Marvel Third Act in Avengers: Age Of Ultron (Saturday, 7 p.m.), when the destructive aftermath of the Battle of Sokovia would haunt the heroes.

4. Smaller Is Better

One of the problems with writing stories about superheroes is that they’re larger than life. That means the stakes must always be growing larger to give the overpowered protagonists a decent challenge. But after the fifth time you’ve seen someone save the world, you think maybe it isn’t that hard. The best Marvel stories turn out to the ones where the stakes are smaller, and the heroes alone. Ant-Man (Saturday, 9:55 p.m.) excels despite its flat lead because the conflict is almost beside the point. The real fun is the giddy special effects sequences that are like a jazzed-up version of The Incredible Shrinking Man.

3. The Evolving Hero

The creeping Batmanization of the world compels every lead character to be dark, tortured, and brooding. Only manly men who experience no pleasure in their lives can aspire to the title of hero. Marvel has resisted this, and their bread and butter has become redefining what a hero can be. In Captain America: Civil War (Saturday, 1 p.m.), Vision, played by Paul Bettany, wears a sensible sweater/oxford combo and cooks breakfast for his superpowered girlfriend Wanda Maximoff (Elisabeth Olsen). Then, in Avengers: Infinity War (Monday, 7 p.m.), he offers to sacrifice himself to save half the universe.

2. Killmonger Was Right

Why was Black Panther (Monday 3:40 p.m.) so good? The number one reason is that director Ryan Coogler did his homework and delivered a perfectly constructed action movie. Each scene builds on the last and leads to the next. And most importantly, both the hero Black Panther (the unbelievably charismatic Chadwick Boseman) and the villain Killmonger (the unbelievably charismatic Michael B. Jordan) have believable motivations and coherent cases to make for their sides. T’Challa is the king and defender of the status quo in Wakanda. They have been kept safe by their advanced technology for hundreds of years. But Killmonger rightly points out that while Wakanda has stayed safe, they have allowed the colonization and genocide of Africans outside their borders. Killmonger wants to use the power of Wakanda to rectify that situation and colonize the white world right back. Black Panther defeats Killmonger, but T’Challa is moved by his vision and opens Wakanda up to the world, hoping to make it a more just place. It’s a rare bit of moral complexity in a genre that is pretty much defined by its black and white ethical structure.

1. Captain America: The First Avenger

Coming in at number one on our countdown that is in no way an actual countdown is Captain America: The First Avenger (Friday 1 p.m.). Director Joe Johnson hits the superhero sweet spot with this Nazi-punching triumph. Johnson’s influence looms large over the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He is a special effects innovator whose debut film Honey I Shrunk The Kids, was basically a look book for Ant-Man. His 1990 film The Rocketeer, about a man who finds a super flight suit and battles Nazis in the 1930s, was a box office failure at the time, but provided a template for The First Avenger. Chris Evans, who had previously played The Human Torch in Sony’s failed Fantastic Four adaptation, gives a performance on par with Christopher Reeve’s Superman as the once-scrawny kid from Brooklyn who would become the moral center of the Avengers. The overriding theme of all of the Marvel movies is Stan Lee’s maxim “With great power comes great responsibility,” and no one sets a better example than Captain America. 

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Avengers: Infinity War

Doctor Who premiered November 22, 1963. It was an immediate hit, and over the years the hokey show about a time-traveling weirdo became a cultural touchstone. By 1983, the production team was at the height of its powers. The lead role was in the hands of the young and charismatic Peter Davidson, and the budgets were bigger than ever. In the post-Star Wars afterglow, the show finally made the jump to America. The BBC decided to celebrate the 20th anniversary with the greatest crossover event in television history: They would bring together all the actors who had ever played the Doctor for one universe-shattering adventure. After months of hype, “The Five Doctors” premiered on November 23, 1983. It was a disaster.

Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), newly minted beardo Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and supersoldier in perpetual distress Bucky Barns (Sebastian Sam) defend Wakanda in Avengers: Infinity Wars.

Getting the giant cast together was a nightmare of bruised egos and diva behavior. The most important actor, Tom Baker, pulled out late in the process, so writer Terrance Dicks had to rewrite around some clips of Baker salvaged from a scrapped episode. The ratings were good, but not significantly better than a normal week’s viewership.

Worst of all, “The Five Doctors” exposed the weaknesses that the show’s fanbase had learned to overlook. There were still great moments to come—in 1984, the series produced “The Caves of Androzani”, now regarded as an all time high—but viewership faltered, and before the decade was out, Doctor Who was cancelled. In the internet comment board fever swamps, this is what’s known as “jumping the shark.”

I think you can see where I’m going with this.

Spider-Man (Tom Holland) and Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) get lost in space.

Picking up where Thor: Ragnarok left off, Avengers: Infinity Wars gets off to a strong start. Spaceships full of refugees from destroyed Asgard are intercepted by Thanos (Josh Brolin), who slaughters them and extracts the Infinity Stone from the Tesseract held by Loki (Tom Hiddleston). Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) narrowly escapes the destruction and rides the Rainbow Bridge, opened by Heimdal (Idris Elba) to Earth, where he warns Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Tony Stark (Robert Downy, Jr.) of Thanos’ plan to collect all six Infinity Stones, artifacts of immense power that control Mind, Soul, Space, Time, Power, and Reality, and use them to destroy half of all life in the universe.

One thing Infinity War has going for it that other superhero movies have struggled with is a compelling villain. Brolin’s Thanos, until now a barely glimpsed, purple skinned mound of muscle, turns out to be surprisingly complex. He gets some fine scenes with his two adoptive daughters, Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Nebula (Karen Gilian, who has emerged as one of the best Marvel actors). Directors Anthony and Joe Russo are at their strongest when they take time to concentrate on pairs of characters, such as the doomed romance between Vision (Paul Bettany) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), or the science/magic rivalry between Stark and Strange. Chris Hemsworth’s Thor gets paired off with Rocket (Bradley Cooper) and teenaged Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), which makes for some pleasantly goofy comedy beats. But everything else seems rushed, thin, and worst of all, calculated for maximum fan service, such as when the Guardians of the Galaxy are introduced singing along to The Spinners’ “Rubberband Man”. Our heroes make a stand in Wakanda, but the snap Ryan Coogler brought to Black Panther is missing. The potentially touching reunion of Banner and Natasha Romanov (Scarlett Johansson) is completely botched.

Thanos (James Brolin) seeks radical glove improvement. Also, genocide.

What ultimately sinks Infinity War is the unsolvable problem that sank “The Five Doctors”—the need to fit in references to 19 other Marvel movies. This is a film designed for superfans, and it could please many. But there inevitably comes a moment in long, episodic serials when the audience realizes that the catharsis they seek will never come. The demands of capitalism means there can never be a satisfying ending, and each installment of the story is reduced to a commercial for the next one. One way to read the ending of Infinity War is as a bold departure from formula. Another, more accurate way to read the ending is the plot equivalent of the moment in A Christmas Story when Ralphie uses his new Little Orphan Annie decoder ring to discover that the secret message is “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine”. It’s the moment when all of the superheroes team up to collectively jump the biggest, most expensive shark of all time.

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Spider-Man: Homecoming

In the flurry of desperate corporate maneuvering in the wake of the 2014 North Korean cyber attack on Sony Pictures in retaliation for The Interview, the most significant move may be the return of the Spider-Man film franchise to Marvel control. Spider-Man is the crown jewel of the Marvel superhero stable, which is why the film rights were sold for big money back in 1985, way before the comic book company was mining its rich vein of intellectual property with Disney. Eventually, Sony ended up with the property, and, after the success of Brian Singer’s 2000 X-Men movie, the studio did three Spider-Man movies with director Sam Raimi starring Tobey Maguire as the webslinger. Raimi’s first two films are among the best blockbusters of the century, and, personally, I like the third one, even though that’s a minority opinion. Then the studio rebooted the franchise with The Amazing Spider-Man starring Andrew Garfield. While Garfield matured into a good actor, the two Spider-Man movies he starred in were clumsy and charmless.

Sony was reportedly planning on creating a Spider-Man series to compete with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but after Kim Jong Il’s minions splashed the confidential contents of their servers all over the web, they needed to raise money in a hurry and preemptively surrendered to the Marvel juggernaut. It turned out to be the best decision Sony has made in a long time.

Spider-Man defines the Marvel approach to superheroes. He’s not a superhuman paragon of virtue like Superman. He’s young, flawed, often scared, and while his heart is always in the right place, his judgment is not always the best. Marvel head honcho Kevin Feige cast Tom Holland as Peter Parker and fed him through the Marvel Cinematic Universe assembly line with relative newcomer Jon Watts at the helm. In a Hollywood that is exhibit A for bad decision-making processes, Marvel got everything right this time.

What’s most appealing about Holland’s Spider-Man is that we get to ride along while he discovers his powers. But this is not an origin story; we don’t have to see poor Uncle Ben die again. Tony Stark recruited Parker for Civil War, and created a high-tech Spidey suit, partially as payment and partially as initiation into the Avengers clan of super-beings. But Parker’s still in high school, so he’s just as invested in his Academic Decathalon team and the homecoming dance as he is in what he calls “my Tony Stark internship.” Spider-Man may be on the A-list in the real world, but in the Marvel universe, he’s C-list at best.

Michael Keaton as Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming

Wisely, the villain of Homecoming is also a C-lister trying to increase his Q rating. In a bit of genius casting that was, in retrospect, blindingly obvious, Michael Keaton, formerly known as Batman and Birdman, plays the villain Vulture. The character is a scrap metal dealer who used the broken bits of alien technology littered around New York after the Avengers saved the city from the Chitauri invasion to build himself a flying super suit. Keaton deftly straddles the line between the realistic and fantastic with a riveting performance. The confrontation between Keaton and Holland prior to the big finish is the best single scene in the entire Marvel movie canon. The world is not in peril in Spider-Man: Homecoming, and it’s all the better for it. Instead of a city-destroying battle between the forces of good and evil, it’s just novice hero vs. novice villain. The human-sized stakes make it more exciting, and it’s considerably easier to follow the action with fewer moving parts. You don’t come out of the film feeling like you’ve been beaten over the head for the last half hour.

Another vital element done right is the strong supporting cast. Marisa Tomei represents a radical new version of Aunt May, which totally works. Jacob Batalon is excellent as Parker’s best friend Ned, and Disney teen star Zendaya is sharp as smartass classmate Michelle. Comedian Hannibal Buress is pitch perfect as Parker and Ned’s distracted gym coach. Unsurprisingly, Homecoming only falls down when it’s trying to connect with the bigger Marvel universe. Robert Downey Jr. is his usual snarky self as Tony Stark, but an extended subplot with Iron Man director Jon Favreau playing Stark’s henchman Happy Hogan periodically grinds the momentum to a halt. But that’s not enough to derail Spider-Man: Homecoming’s fun.

Spider-Man: Homecoming

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Doctor Strange

I sometimes think it’s strange when people talk about a comic book character’s “true” identity. These characters were, and are, always changing to meet the commercial needs of the publishers. I mean, She-Hulk was briefly a member of the Fantastic Four! The only rules are a complete lack of rules.

Benedict Cumberbatch is Doctor Strange

And yet, there is something about the way Doctor Strange is drawn in the latest Marvel blockbuster that bugs me. I’m not a deep expert on comics. The number of comic book superheroes I have an emotional attachment to is not very large: Spider Man, Batman (90s animated series version), Rom The Spaceknight (that one’s never getting a $100 million movie), Dr. Manhattan, The Tick, and Doctor Strange.

Hiring Benedict Cumberbatch to play the Sorcerer Supreme was the perfect casting choice, which is keeping with the generally good decisions Marvel Studios has made under Producer Supreme Kevin Feige. And, as I’ll get to in a minute, Doctor Strange delivers big time on the visual front, and holds together reasonably well on the writing front. It’s the characterization that left me cold, which is surprising, because the promise of getting the characterization exactly right is what mustered the tiny bit of excitement I have left for Marvel-branded, extruded movie-type product.

After a perfunctory, McGuffin-establishing battle between reality bending mystics, we meet Dr. Stephen Strange, a brilliant neurosurgeon whose massive intellect is outstripped only by his outsized self-regard. And how do the trio of screenwriters and director Scott Derrickson choose to demonstrate his extraordinary brainpower? Turns out he’s a master of 70s pop music trivia. Sure, they reveal this character beat while Strange is in the midst of delicate brain surgery, but wouldn’t a complete mastery of classical music history be more consistent with the character than a fondness for Chuck Mangionie? From the first introduction, they have changed Doctor Strange into Buckaroo Banzai.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Buckaroo Banzai! Far from it. (Where’s my $100 million version of Buckaroo Banzai Against The World Crime League, Hollywood?) But I can’t help but get the feeling that the real reason Doctor Strange listens to dad rock is because everybody loved Starlord’s mom’s mix tape in Guardians Of The Galaxy. Just as Batman and Superman are essentially the same character in Batman vs Superman, so too are members of Marvel’s much more varied hero stable morphing into marketing driven sameness.

Tilda Swinton as The Ancient One shows Stephen Strange what’s up.

But at least Cumberbatch looks the part, and, as appropriate for an origin story, he gains gravitas as the story proceeds. Strange injures his hands in a car accident (don’t text and drive your Lamborghini, people!), ending his neurosurgery career. Medicine fails, so he heads of to Nepal (don’t want to piss off the Chinese market by using the original Tibet) in search of a magical way to restore the full use of his hands. Once there he finds Kamar-Taj, a monastery full of sorcerers led by The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton, hitting her marks with crisp perfection), who teaches Strange the arts of conjuring and inter-dimensional travel. When the magic starts flying, Doctor Strange’s real strength is revealed. There are clear visual references, like the wall- and ceiling-walking martial arts moves taken from The Matrix and the recursive, bending cityscapes from Inception. But like an original beat built out of samples, the visual synthesis feels fresh, even while it pays tribute to artist Steve Ditko’s psychedelic 60s phantasmagoria.

Strange’s journey from adept to master is hastened by the attack of Kaecillius (Mads Mikkelsen), a rogue student of the Ancient One who wants to summon a god of the Dark Dimension to Earth, offering the planet in exchange for everlasting life. Pretty standard stuff for a superhero flick, really, but at least it’s a coherent vehicle to keep the eye-popping visuals flowing.

Doctor Strange is the best superhero movie of the year, but it doesn’t do much to change my hypothesis that we reached Peak Comics with The Avengers: Age Of Ultron. The film’s sturdy competence offers a sharp contrast with the flailing nonsense of the DC filmic universe, which says to me that Disney and Marvel are the only studio today that has an actual good creative process in place. But there’s a thin line between “process” and “formula”, and despite all of its visual bravado, Doctor Strange’s reality bends too strongly towards formula.

Doctor Strange

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Captain America: Civil War

Another May, another superhero movie. How far along are we on this wave of superhero movies? I date it from Bryan Singer’s X-Men in 2000, although you could argue that it goes back to Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. The studios have refined the hit-making formula, crowding all other genres out of the blockbuster space. Only Star Wars brings in that kind of business, and, as great as The Force Awakens was, it clearly showed the marks of the Disney/Marvel method. As long as the returns remain good, the culture will be papered with comic book movies — and with Captain America: Civil War opening to $673 million on a $250 million budget, there’s no sign the returns are going to fall off any time soon.

Constraints breed creativity, and as formulaic as big-time superhero movies have become, Kevin Feige has a good process in place that both delivers the corporate goods and encourages filmmakers to do good work. Two of the Jon Favreau/Robert Downey Jr. Iron Man movies have been exceptional, but the real heart of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s overarching narrative is the Captain America franchise since Chris Evans was introduced as Steve Rogers in 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger. Directed with a classical flair by Joe Johnston, The First Avenger established Captain America as a link to the country’s most heroic period: fighting the Nazis to save freedom. Steve Rogers has become a stand-in for America’s best version of ourselves. Whether it’s a super weapon in the hands of the Red Skull in his first film or an unaccountable surveillance state in Winter Soldier, how he reacts to the problems thrown at him is in accordance with the best angels of our civic religion.

Much of the credit for the success of the Captain America movies must be laid at the feet of Evans, who plays Steve Rogers as empathetic and fundamentally decent but with a strong sense of melancholy befitting a man out of time. The series has also been bolstered by strong direction, first from Johnston and then from Joe and Anthony Russo, who plunged the stalwart super patriot into a world of spy vs. spy intrigue in The Winter Soldier. The best superhero stories come when the heroes are confronted with challenges they are not well-equipped to face and a villain with enough vision to turn the heroes’ strengths into weaknesses. Captain America, the super soldier created to fight the Nazis, the ultimate external threat, found new depth when he had to tease out friend from foe inside the government he has sacrificed everything to serve.

There are two sides to every story — Chris Evans (above) as Captain America; Robert Downey Jr. and Don Cheadle as Iron Man and War Machine.

The Russos are back at the helm for Civil War and have once again tried to tie into the zeitgeist of a divided America. 2016 gives us two blockbusters about superheroes fighting each other. The first was Zac Snyder’s dismal Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Civil War is much better in every respect, largely living up to Winter Soldier.

To defeat Superman, you must put Lois Lane in danger. He’s too powerful to beat on his own, so you have to trick him into making mistakes. Similarly, the way you defeat Captain America is to put Bucky Barns (Sebastian Stan), aka the Winter Soldier, in danger. Bucky is Steve Rogers’ only link to the life he left behind in the 1940s, and Rogers feels partially responsible for Bucky getting the Soviet super soldier treatment that transformed him into a brainwashed assassin. When Civil War opens, Bucky’s been lying low since his escape at the end of The Winter Soldier. Captain America and his revamped crew of Avengers — Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), Vision (Paul Bettany), and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) — are engaged in their usual business of keeping the world safe by chasing the fabulously named superterrorist Brock Rumlow (Frank Grillo). But, as usual when an “enhanced persons” donnybrook breaks out in an urban area, there are collateral casualties. In this case, a delegation of development workers from the reclusive African kingdom of Wakanda, the source of the world’s vibrainium, the material that Captain America’s shield is made from. The king of Wakanda, T’Chaka (John Kani) leads a movement to bring the Avengers under the formal control of the United Nations, and other countries, seeing the devastation wrought in the Avengers’ former battlegrounds, quickly come on board.

After Tony Stark is confronted by the mother of a young man killed during the final battle of Avengers: Age of Ultron, he decides to back the UN resolution, known as the Sokovia Accords after the city that Ultron levitated into oblivion. But Steve Rogers disagrees. The Avengers were created to keep the world safe from superpowered bad guys, and Rogers is absolutely sure that he is the only person qualified to determine when and how those threats can be identified and neutralized. He and Stark are already on the outs when a truck bomb blows up the United Nations meeting on the Accords, and his old friend Bucky is tagged as the guy to blame. Rogers is torn between loyalties to his friend, to his government, and his own moral sense, and his path splits the Avengers into factions: the Iron Man-led, pro-accord forces, which include Black Widow, Vision, War Machine (Don Cheadle), and T’Challa, (Chadwick Boseman), aka Black Panther, the son of the slain Wakandan monarch who has vowed to kill Bucky. Standing with Captain America are Falcon (Anthony Mackie), Scarlet Witch, Ant Man (Paul Rudd), and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner). To tip the odds in his favor, Stark tracks down Peter Parker (Tom Holland), who has only been Spider-Man for six months, and recruits him with an offer of a new spider suit.

The introduction of Spider-Man, the Marvel comic book empire’s greatest character creation, is just one demonstration of how superior the Marvel touch is to the DC regime. The Russos know we’ve seen Spider-Man’s origin story onscreen twice in this century, so when Stark asks Parker how he got his powers, he just mumbles “It’s complicated,” and leaves it at that. Holland’s version of Parker is closer to Toby Maguire’s goofy persona than the Andrew Garfield iteration, which is a big improvement.

Boseman’s Black Panther is a welcome addition to the MCU. He gives T’Challa a regal bearing that suggests he would fit in on Game of Thrones. The end of Civil War charts an interesting future for him, which we’ll get to see more of in his solo movie scheduled for 2018.

The centerpiece of Civil War is a great set piece inside the evacuated Leipzig airport where the two factions go at it for what feels like a good 15 minutes. Here the Russo’s major inspiration for the film comes into focus. The Empire Strikes Back brought moral complication into the Manichaean Star Wars universe, and Civil War attempts to do the same by making Rogers choose between competing goods at every turn. While defending Winter Soldier from Iron Man, Captain America says he’s doing it because Bucky is his friend. “I was your friend, too,” the wounded Stark says.

The shifting allegiances give the Russos a chance to bounce different pairs of characters off of each other, and it’s obvious this is where their interests really lie. Especially good together are Downey and Renner, who capture the raw anger of a longtime friendship betrayed.

Civil War is massively overstuffed with characters and fragmentary storylines intended to connect to the bigger universe but which bogs down the present story. Captain America: Civil War is a fun time at the movies, and among the best of its breed, but you can be excused if you feel superhero fatigue setting in.

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Daredevil

Marvel’s Daredevil: Season One (2015; various dirs., including Phil Abraham, Farren Blackburn and Brad Turner)— Although it eventually succumbs to its own primal fan-service instincts and climaxes with a final-episode alley brawl between two grotesque, guilt-wracked gargoyles seeking imaginary control over a city they will never truly own, Drew Goddard’s brutal, film noir-inflected 13-episode Daredevil reimagining is, along with Iron Man 3, Guardians of the Galaxy and Jessica Jones, one of the smartest and most rewarding recent additions to the oh-God-will-it-ever-stop-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Set in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen, the show’s visual scheme is typically dark and atypically striking; so many scenes and framings recall writer/penciller Frank Miller’s influential work on the Daredevil comic in the early 1980s that it’s easy to imagine the whole production team poring over individual panels from those issues every night and then re-decorating the sets for maximum angular moodiness the following day. The show’s cinematographic signature is an invasive, piss-yellow light that leaks down rain-slicked streets and into shadeless tenement windows.

Daredevil’s first nine or so episodes display unusual courage and tenacity in that they refuse to let the titular hero—a.k.a. blind, combat-savvy vigilante Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox)—off the hook for his actions. While the show has plenty to say about fatherhood, the sins of the past, and an individual’s ability to change a system from either within or without, its central question—and the only superhero question that truly interests me anymore—is “Why would someone take to the streets as a masked crime-fighter in the first place?” In spite of the massive institutional corruption in and around Hell’s Kitchen, why does Matt bother working within the law as a criminal defense attorney by day if he’s going to subvert his beliefs in rules, regulations and due process at night? If he’s going to spend his evenings pummeling thugs and breaking bones before staggering home to stitch himself up, where will he draw the line?

Such questions plague Murdock and hamper his already-aloof relationships with his partner Foggy Nelson (Elden Hanson), his secretary Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) and a compassionate nurse named Claire (Rosario Dawson). Yet Cox’s handsome, smallish Murdock remains unreachable; he’s only really alive during the regular after-hours missions that are one-third personal penance, one-third suicide attempt and one-third (I’m so sorry, everyone) blind rage. His spinning kicks, flips and acrobatics throughout the many unusually well-choreographed fight scenes compare favorably with Gina Carano’s work in Stephen Soderbergh’s great Haywire. And, almost unique among today’s superheroes, he never escapes unscathed. This masked man bleeds. A lot.

As Murdock’s rich and powerful nemesis Wilson Fisk, Vincent D’Onofrio feasts on the huge slabs of supervillainy-glazed ham thrown his way. His Fisk is a giant, glabrous, all-powerful baby overdressed for picture day and simmering with barely suppressed rage and pain that nearly shoot out of his ears like cartoon steam whenever he loses control. D’Onofrio dramatizes Fisk’s moral dilemmas by making every sentence he utters a clenched-throat combination of measured negotiations and hissing threats. As unsettling as Fisk in the flesh is, he is more frightening earlier in the series, when he exists only as an idea, a phantom, or a voice on a walkie-talkie.

Episode highlights include “Cut Man,” (the one with the astonishing single-take fight scene that I love without reservation), “World on Fire,” (the one that has the only Matt Murdock POV shot) and, best of all, “Stick” (the one guest-starring an inconceivably leathery and ornery Scott Glenn as Murdock’s mentor). The new season airs on Netflix March 18; here’s hoping its rehabilitation of the Punisher and Elektra is as successful as its resurrection of Kingpin and “The Man Without Fear.”

Grade: A- 

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Film/TV TV Features

Jessica Jones

As Marvel continues to infect our lives with stridently competent comic book adaptations, it’s nice to see what they produce actually be about something. Previous incarnations dealt with joy (Guardians of the Galaxy) and the security state (Captain America: The Winter Soldier). Jessica Jones deals with rape.

Kilgrave (David Tennant) is a walking nightmare. His power is mind control. He’s constantly using and throwing away people to serve his immediate needs, sexual and otherwise, which results in support groups, self-medication, discussions of the cycle of abuse, and post-traumatic stress disorder. This is unique for a mainstream narrative. Like Preacher‘s Jesse Custer, he can compel someone to his will just by speaking to them. At any point in the story, he will walk into the room with a purple suit and a sneer and demand strangers do his bidding. His attitude is one of entitlement to other people’s bodies, and dismissive sarcasm to empathy. His most frequent dictum is a short, curt “Leave.” His one passion is stalking Krysten Ritter’s title character, a superpowered private eye who deals with having been in his mental grasp by descending into alcoholism.

Krysten Ritter in Jessica Jones

Jones is a Hulk-Buffy variant wrapped in friendly Marvel packaging. She can’t kill her nemesis because she needs to prove he compelled a victim to murder; he won’t kill her because he professes love. This makes for a wonderful fluidity between hero and villain. He shows up to talk, and it’s terrifying. We could have gotten a version of this character that delves into the mind control aspect as wish fulfillment, and his British accent as suave. (He is often seen with women and money, or having people take his insults literally.) Instead the emphasis is on what it feels like to have your mind scrambled.

In the support group Jones starts, victims talk about a loss of identity and being overcome by shame for things as simple as Kilgrave asking for their jacket. Ritter is great at both snappy dialogue and weightier PTSD moments. She enlists a large number of allies, including fellow comic book heroes Luke Cage (Mike Colter) and Trish Walker (Rachael Taylor). Kilgrave’s horror is the show’s star, unusually scary for a Marvel villain. His dialogue is often textbook chauvinistic defenses of sexual assault, and his psychology based on abuse as a child: the medical experiments which gave him his powers, done by his parents.

Like other Marvel entertainment, there are tonally off supporting characters, once and future comic-book plots awkwardly grafted on, and wastes of good actors. The ending is anticlimactic, the action repetitive kick-punching.

Overall, it says something. Showrunner Melissa Rosenberg has said she was trying to make a blatant corrective to the use of sexual assault as a plot device on shows like Game of Thrones, where no time or realism is given to the psychology of victims or perpetrators. The result is a corporate product that has the ring of something honest and direct.

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Film Features Film/TV

Trainwreck vs. Ant-Man

Last weekend’s box office race involved two seeming opposites: Marvel’s Ant-Man and Trainwreck, the collaboration between comedy titans Amy Schumer and Judd Apatow. But after a Sunday double feature of the two films, I was struck by their similarities and what they say about the current risk-averse environment in Hollywood.

Ant-Man stars Paul Rudd as Scott Lang, a former electrical engineer whom we first meet as he is being released from San Quentin, where he was doing time for a Robin-Hood robbery of his corrupt former employer. His wife Maggie (Judy Greer) has divorced him and is living with their daughter, Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson) and her new boyfriend, Paxton (Bobby Cannavale). Scott tries to go straight, but after he’s fired from his job at Baskin-Robbins, in one of the more creative product placement sequences in recent memory, he takes his friend Luis (Michael Peña) up on his idea to break into a Victorian mansion and clean out a mysterious basement vault.

But, as the comic book fates would have it, the mansion is the home of one Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), an old-school superscientist who discovered a way to reduce the space between atoms and thus shrink himself down to the size of an insect. For years, he and his wife operated in secret as a superteam of Ant-Man and the Wasp. After a desperate mission for S.H.I.E.L.D. to stop World War III, she disappeared into subatomic space, and he took off his supersuit and vowed to keep the world-changing and potentially dangerous technology under wraps.

Under Pym’s tutelage, Scott sets out to stop the scientist’s former protegee Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) from selling his own version of the shrinking technology to the evil forces of Hydra by stealing a high-tech Iron Man-type suit called the Yellowjacket.

Ant-Man is not as good as this year’s other Marvel offering, Avengers: Age Of Ultron, but it scores points for originality. Written by Attack the Block‘s Joe Cornish and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World‘s Edgar Wright, who was originally slated to direct, the film tries — and mostly succeeds — to combine an Ocean‘s Eleven-style heist flick with a superhero story in the same tonal range as Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. It’s burdened with the traditional origin-story baggage, but the sequence where Scott discovers the powers of the Ant-Man supersuit by shrinking himself in the bathtub and fleeing running water, hostile insects, and a vacuum cleaner is another triumph for special effects wizards Industrial Light & Magic. Rudd, a veteran of many Apatow comedies, including Knocked Up, is exactly the right guy to sell the mix of comedy and superheroics, and some sparks fly with furtive love interest Evangeline Lilly as Pym’s double agent daughter Hope van Dyne. For the sections of its 117-minute running time when it’s focusing on its core plot, Ant-Man is a good time at the movies.

For Trainwreck, Amy Schumer’s vehicle for transforming basic cable stardom into a feature film career, she surrounded herself with some very heavy hitters. First and foremost is Apatow, the producer, director, and writer with his fingers in everything from The 40-Year-Old Virgin to Girls. The pair execute Schumer’s first feature-length screenplay with verve. Schumer stars as Amy, a New York magazine journalist who is basically a fleshed-out version of her public persona. In a sharp inversion of the usual romantic comedy formula, she is a quick-witted, commitment-phobic hookup artist dating a hunky man-bimbo named Steven (John Cena), who just wants to get married, settle down, and raise a basketball team’s worth of sons in a house in the country. Soon after her chronic infidelity torpedoes her relationship, she is assigned to write about a prominent sports doctor named Aaron (Bill Hader), who counts LeBron James among his patients. The two hit it off, and she soon violates her “never sleep over” rule with him.

If this were a traditional Rom-Com, and Amy’s character were male and played by, say, Tim Meadows (who is one of the dozens of comedic talents who have cameos), I would be calling him a ladies man. Schumer is practically daring people to expose the double standard by calling her a slut. Her effortless performance proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that she has chops to carry a feature film. Apatow is savvy enough to give her a long leash, giving her scenes time to breathe, selecting some choice improvs, and letting barrages of comic exchanges live in two-shots. Hadler finds himself in the unfamiliar role of the straight man to Schumer’s cutup, but he acquits himself well in what is essentially the Meg Ryan role from When Harry Met Sally. Practically everyone in the film’s supporting hoard of comics and sports figures also gives a good turn. Tilda Swinton is stiletto sharp as Dianna, Amy’s conscience-free magazine editor boss. Dave Attell is consistently funny as a homeless man who acts as Amy’s Greek chorus. Daniel Radcliffe and Marisa Tomei slay as the leads in a black-and-white art film called The Dogwalker that the film’s characters keep trying to watch. Matthew Broderick, Marv Albert, and tennis superstar Chris Evert share a funny scene. But the biggest surprise is LeBron James, who shines with confidence and humor every time he’s on the screen. For the sections of its 124-minute running time that it focuses on Amy’s romantic foibles, Trainwreck is a good time at the movies.

But that’s the rub for both Ant-Man and Trainwreck. They both spend way too much time straying from what an M.B.A. would call their “core competencies.” In the case of Ant-Man, the distractions are twofold. First is the now-predictable, awkward shoehorning of scenes intended to connect the film to the larger cinematic universe. As his first test, Pym assigns Scott to steal a technological bauble from a S.H.I.E.L.D warehouse, prompting a superclash between Ant-Man and fellow Marvel C-lister Falcon (Anthony Mackie). The allegedly vital piece of equipment is never mentioned again.

Second is the turgid subplot involving Scott’s efforts to reconnect with his daughter Cassie, and her would-be stepfather Paxton’s attempts to put him back in jail. When Scott is having trouble using Pym’s ant-control technology, Hope tells him to concentrate on how much he wants to reunite with his daughter. The moment rings completely false in context: If you’re trying to talk to ants, shouldn’t you be concentrating on ants? The intention seems to be to make Scott a more sympathetic character, but Rudd’s quick-quipping charisma makes that unnecessary. Why spend the time on flimsy sentiment when we can be playing to Ant-Man’s strengths?

Similarly, Trainwreck gets bogged down in a superfluous subplot involving Amy’s sister Kim (Brie Larson) and their father Gordon (Colin Quinn). It starts promisingly enough in the very first scene of the movie when Gordon explains to young Kim and Amy why he and their mother are getting a divorce (“Do you love your doll? How would you like it if you could only play with that one doll for the rest of your life?”). But then, we flash forward to the present day, and Gordon has been admitted to an assisted living facility, which becomes a source of friction between the sisters. Quinn is woefully miscast as a disabled old man, especially when he’s sitting next to veteran actor and actual old man Norman Lloyd. The subplot is seemingly there only for cheap sentiment, and it drags on and on, adding an unacceptable amount of running time to what should be a fleetly paced comedy. As we left the theater, my wife overheard a woman asking her friend how the film was. “I like it okay,” she said. “I thought it was never going to end, though.”

When Ant-Man is kicking pint-sized ass and Amy Schumer is schticking it up, their respective movies crackle with life. Hollywood is filled with smart people, and I can’t believe that an editor didn’t point out that the films could be improved by excising their phony sentimental scenes. So why didn’t these films achieve greatness? I submit it is another symptom of the studio’s increasingly crippling risk aversion. All films must be all things to all audiences to hit the so-called “four quadrants” of old and young, male and female, so raunchy comedies get extraneous schmaltz and lightweight comic book movies get weighed down with irrelevant family drama. Both Ant-Man and Trainwreck end up like rock albums with lackluster songwriting filled with killer guitar solos. They’re entertaining enough but haunted by the greatness that could have been.

Ant-Man
Now showing
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Trainwreck
Now showing
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Film Features Film/TV

Avengers: Age Of Ultron

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.