Avengers: Age of Ultron - The Marvel Equation

My 7^th grade math teacher told me that the great thing about math is that in math, if it’s true once, it’s always true.  For example, two plus two will always be four.  That was hugely comforting to me.  So even though I hated math (though I was good at it) from about 8^th grade until my second college career when I had my next amazing math teacher, math always made sense because of its constancy.

Math is full of formulae.  They are extremely useful if you want to find the volume of a cube, the average of a set of numbers, or the percent of wax that a piece of corrugated board picked up in a wax cascade.  Of course, to get meaningful results, you need to plug the right numbers in the right places into the appropriate formula.

By now you’re probably thinking, “Is this a math lesson or a movie review—‘cause I don’t see any movies here.”  Don’t worry.  Just keep reading.

There are some entries into the visual media of television and movies that can be said to follow formulae.  Often times, that can make them (especially if they’re TV shows with a new episode nearly every week) very boring very quickly.  That happened with “House”.  It was interesting for a little while, but then it just became the same thing over and over again.  The “House” formula was:

Episode = R + B + H + D

Where:

                R = Rare disease

                B = Baffled doctors

                H = House has an epiphany

                D = A little bit of the current character drama

The formula was too simple, with too little variation.  After a couple seasons I couldn’t take it anymore, so I gave it up.  Personally, I think the writers were lazy.

There are other shows that are also formulaic, but the formula is more like a recipe where the writers tweak it—adding different spices here and there, cutting back on certain ingredients depending on their mood.  I think shows like “The Closer” and “Major Crimes” fit that bill.  The basic formula is very similar to that of “House”, but different things are emphasized from episode to episode that it takes much longer to get old.  So those formulae look more like this:

Episode = aC + bP + cS + dD

Where:

               a, b, c, and d are fractions and a+b+c+d = 4          

                C = Crime

                P = Police investigate

                S = Solved crime via confession, usually obtained through trickery

                D = Current character drama

Enough introduction.  Here’s the point I want to make.  The Marvel movies are formulaic.  There’s no getting around that.  In my opinion, this is what it looks like:

Marvel Movie = aI + bN + cF + dA + eT + fD + gH

Where:

                a, b, c, d, e, f and g are fractions and a+b+c+d+e+f+g = 7

                I = Introduction (often an initial triumph)

                N = New Situation (usually disasterous)

                F = Failure to Resolve the New Situation (possibly more than one try)

                A = Action (d is the largest of the fractions)

                T = Final Triumph

                D = Character Drama

                H = Humor

For the most part, Marvel movies have followed this formula with huge success.  There have been some that haven’t gotten the proportions quite right, but even the weakest of the entries since the first Iron Man have been very entertaining movies.

Avengers: Age of Ultron (hereafter Avengers 2) is one of the better entries in the Marvel cinematic universe.  In my opinion, the proportions of each element were nearly perfect.

Here are some specifics (hopefully without any spoilers).  The Avengers fought as a team—they relied on each other’s strengths and combined their abilities to great effect.  An effort was made to make the action sequences less confusing.  That was accomplished with the use of artful slo-mo.  There was still a lot going on, but it was shown at a speed that was easier to follow.  There was a good amount of fan service, rewarding those who have seen the previous movies with some Easter eggs and foreshadowing of where the overarching story might be heading.  (Admittedly, that last one could be a turn-off to people who haven’t seen certain previous movies in the Marvel collection.  I’ll supply a list of what I think is essential watching before watching this movie for maximum “understanding”.)  And one of the new characters introduced in this film was extremely well designed and acted.

My major gripe with Avengers 2 was the humor.  It was still very Joss Whedon-esque, as it was in Avengers, but this time it felt a lot more forced.  That didn’t detract much at all from my enjoyment of the movie.

In conclusion, Marvel has hit on a formula that works really well.  There are times when being called “formulaic” is a criticism.  I think that in Marvel’s case, it is not.

 

Watch list:

Avengers

Thor: The Dark World

Captain America: Winter Soldier

Guardians of the Galaxy