Anghus Houvouras is getting a sense of deja vu with Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron…
No doubt the second most anticipated movie of 2015 is Avengers: Age of Ultron. The sequel to the most successful comic book adaptation of all time hits theaters this May. After watching the trailer a few times I’m noticing a ridiculous amount of similarities between Age of Ultron and the original Avengers.
Oh, yes. I did say the ‘second most anticipated movie of 2015’. The first is, of course, Adam Sandler’s Pixels. I mean it’s got Happy Gilmore AND Donkey Kong. By the end of the summer I’m guessing Avatar will be the SECOND most successful film of all time.
Here are a few things making me say ‘deja vu’ about Avengers: Age of Ultron. (And I’m skipping the easy stuff like ‘Avengers fighting Avengers’. Apparently superheroes can’t appear in a movie without getting into a slap fight against one another.)
1. Hulk and Iron Man sliding on a skyscraper
The first Avengers’ most iconic shot came in the form of the Hulk leaping high into the air and using a building to break his fall. Age of Ultron features the same shot in reverse. Hulk and Iron Man in his ‘Hulkbuster’ armor smashing more property and increasing everybody’s premiums. This time they’re going up instead of down, so it’s totally different.
2. Both have plots involving infiltration
The first film hinged on Loki’s strange and unsatisfying plan to infiltrate S.H.I.E.L.D. in order to get the Avengers to fight one another. As a master of manipulation, he would be able to pit the heroes against one another which would give him time to facilitate his Tesseract portal which would bring forth the most useless army of alien invaders ever. Age of Ultron has the titular villain using Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch in his Trojan Horse strategy.
3. Mindless Drones
So the Avengers concludes with Earth’s Mightiest Mortals fighting the Chitauri legions who basically got their ass kicked by a Thunder God, a drunk in a fancy robot suit, a rageahololic smashing machine, and three guys who couldn’t even fly but knew some radical kung fu. Age of Ultron gives us a similar army of enemy combatants: Ultron Drones who can be smashed and beaten to a pulp without the Avengers having to kill anyone. Just like the original Avengers, I’m guessing that once Ultron is defeated they all just fall to the ground in defeat leaving most of the work to the sanitation engineers of whatever metropolis the finale takes place in.
4. MIND CONTROL
The first Avengers featured Loki using his magic scepter to control S.H.I.E.L.D. agents including Hawkeye rendering him useless for most of the movie. In this version we get the Scarlet Witch who has gone from super powered hex conjurer to mind control madam. The trailer shows her using her bewitching abilities on Black Widow, and there’s been reports that Iron Man is fighting an enchanted Hulk who is under her spell.
5. Speaking of Hawkeye being useless…
Yeah, he still looks pretty useless in Age of Ultron. In spite of Whedon saying the least popular Avenger will have a more significant role, there is very little you can do to make the guy with the bow and arrow look cool next to Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, and Captain America. Even Quicksilver looks more useful. ‘Super speed’ versus ‘Bow and arrow proficiency’ is still kind of a no-brainer. The Age of Ultron trailer features him leaping from a car in slow motion about to unleash the fury of a single arrow.
Perhaps Hawkeye will end up saving the day in Avengers: Age of Ultron and not be the Aquaman of the Avengers. Right now, it’s not looking so good.
Is Age of Ultron going to be another familiar formulaic sequel, or is there some originality hiding under familiar tropes? We’ll find out next month.
Anghus Houvouras is a North Carolina based writer and filmmaker. His latest work, the novel My Career Suicide Note, is available from Amazon. Follow him on Twitter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ONsp_bmDYXc&list=PL18yMRIfoszFLSgML6ddazw180SXMvMz5
Originally published March 29, 2015. Updated April 15, 2018.
