What Could Have Been: Character Arcs with Miscalculated Trajectories
Age of Ultron is a good movie with a great Director's Cut we will never see. The film is full of interesting tidbits on the theme of parenthood, legacy, evolution, and extinction, but they're so undercooked they never get baked into the sumptuous feast they should be. It's clear that the moment Joss Whedon screened the film for the studio, somebody—perhaps Creative Committee head Isaac Perlmutter, perhaps not—told him to cut it down to the bone, which likely prompted Whedon's departure from Marvel Studios.But the film's biggest fumble is its two leads, Steve Rogers and Tony Stark. If the film's central theme could be summed up as "what we leave behind", then surely what the two lead characters leave behind should be the focus, right? Yet they're curiously buried in the mix, providing sweet ghost notes to the symphony of destruction without ever bursting out into a nice, juicy melody.
Iron Man carries the heavy burden of this near-death experience in space, and his foreboding feeling that a greater threat (Thanos) is coming. So, like every tinkerer with PTSD, he builds things. Specifically, he builds an advanced AI capable of shielding the world from the dangers that lurk in the vast void, so he can retire and leave his baby—his legacy, Ultron—behind to guard the planet.
Captain America, however, has had as much as much as he can stand of presumptive AI guardians. After dismantling Project Insight, he has come to believe neutralizing threats through preemptive action is the first step to tyranny. As he states in Civil War, he knows that good-hearted individuals stepping up when they're needed are the safest champions of liberty. This neatly aligns with Clinton-era foreign policy, that the United States should not be a heavy-handed Reaganite bully, but a peacekeeper that steps into conflicts only as a last resort. "This is what SHIELD is supposed to be," he states at the end, as the Helicarrier arrives in Kosovo—Sorry, Sokovia—to rescue the civilians caught in the conflict. To Captain America, Clintonesque foreign policy is seen as SHIELD's redemption for its infiltration by Hydra. It's his own legacy, what he leaves behind after cleansing the agency of Hydra influence, and what he will leave behind after he cleanses Sokovia of its own Hydra influence.
But Ultron insinuates a darker motivation for the Captain: that he cannot live in a world without war. His stated belief in the importance of acting as a peacekeeper may not be idealism, but the subconscious desire to make sure the war never ends. Ultron's function as a global peacekeeper would strip Captain America of his reason for existing, analogous to the military-industrial complex that keeps so many Americans employed and able to enforce American policy abroad. It's no coincidence the confrontation takes place in the bowels of a ship owned by Ulysses Klaw, a man who became rich by plundering natural resources from third-world nations. It's an accusation leveled at the United States itself many times. The military-industrial complex's patron saint, Tony Stark, has his own sordid history in Sokovia, manufacturing the bombs that killed the Maximoffs. After the events of Iron Man, Stark has begun moving away from being a warmonger and towards being a peacekeeper when confronted first-hand with the impact of his reckless and careless behavior. But Steve may be doing the opposite, sliding from a peacekeeper into a warmonger, who is hiding under a mask of nobility to feel complete. Both heroic men believe in their ideologies, but both men also need those ideologies to believe they are heroes.
Throughout the film, these two men are circling each other like an ouroboros over what they think is best for the world and what they want to leave behind. Two men, with two visions of global peace—one through a surveillance state, the other through individualism—that are mutually exclusive, while both carrying the events of their past films with them—Tony's premonition of a threat from the stars, Steve's past as a tool of a nefarious AI—and these same issues would explosively come to a head in the next film to feature the two characters.
So it seems like those two character arcs would be an integral counterpoint to Ultron's plan to create a better world through mass extinction of the human race, right? Making the film a three-way conflict between characters forcing the world to evolve towards a future they think it deserves? And yet these issues, which should be the centerpiece of the film, are curiously underserved by the theatrical cut. Tony Stark has no real resolution with his robotic progeny and his guilt over Ultron is relegated to the sequel; Steve Rogers is largely a Standardized Leader whose chiseled visage remains almost entirely unfazed and whose chiseled ideology remains almost entirely unchallenged. Their arcs are present in the film as throwaway lines and background details, like random graffiti of the Avengers with dollar signs painted over their faces. They exist only to advance the relentless grind of the plot on a purely mechanical level, each one a fascinating dangling thread you want to grab hold of and pull, but the film simply continues marching towards its climax with the robotic determination of Ultron himself.
