The Sunday Mail
I have been absent from these pages for little over a year now and I have a lot to get off my chest.
While I have been unable to voice my displeasure on these pages, I have been forced to sit through and watch as Marvel Studios slowly but surely changes the direction of the movie industry.
Change it from the traditional tenets of well-rounded plots and twists, solid narratives and basic storytelling techniques to the drivel that has been coming out for some time.
The tenets have been sacrificed for cheap gimmickry, computer-generated imagery (CGI) and aggressive marketing strategies.
The result has been a bunch of overloaded, CGI dominated action-packed blockbusters that make tonnes of cash but leave audiences cheated.
Take “Avengers–Age of Ultron”, for instance.
This addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe has seen the set overtake The Harry Potter series as the highest grossing franchise of all time.
The film, just weeks after launching, has earned over US$900 million internationally. But the movie “ain’t all that”.
The latest Avengers movie is the embodiment of what Marvel stands for today; all form and no substance.
It picks up a few years after the first “Avengers” movie and sees Tony Stark/Iron Man trying to jump-start a dormant peacekeeping programme.
However, things go awry when he inadvertently creates an artificial intelligence system called Ultron (James Spader), which seeks to destroy humanity.
The team of Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) are called upon to save the day once more.
But there is no proper plot, characters remain undeveloped and the humour falls a little flat.
The film is heavy on big names and it’s difficult to give all of them adequate screen time. The potential romance between Black Widow and Bruce Banner (Hulk) was referred to but never dealt with.
Hawkeye is also a character developed halfway and then abandoned; while Spader, a brilliant actor, is reduced to nothing more than a robot voice.
As for the plot, it had several holes: the refinement of old was missing.
