Film Feature: Five Ways to Make Sure That ‘The Avengers 2’ Doesn’t Suck

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4. Keep the Villain Personal and Resist the Urge to Go Cosmic

Ultron
Photo credit: Marvel

Loki made for such a fantastic villain in “The Avengers” because, while, yes, he was trying to take over the world, he also waged a very personal kind of warfare on every member of the team. Of course, there were his sibling struggles with Thor, but he also attacked all of the other Avengers on a very intimate level – he tried to make Banner Hulk-out, he took over Hawkeye’s mind, he played head-games with Black Widow, he used Iron Man’s Stark Tower to start his invasion, and so on. Loki wasn’t a nameless, faceless bad guy. He wanted to both rule the world and strip down the Avengers to their soft, chewy centers. THAT is what made him such a great “capital-v” Villain.

And the success of Loki is one of the main reasons why I’m SO hesitant about “Avengers 2” embracing Thanos as its Big Bad. For those unfamiliar – and SPOILERS, BTW – at the end of “Avengers”, we found out that Thanos, a death-obsessed alien conqueror, was pulling Loki’s strings and, after Loki’s defeat, Thanos was looking forward to bringing death and destruction to the Avengers and the whole human race. It was a great comic-nerd wet-dream reveal, but I’m not sure if Thanos is an ideal bad guy for the sequel. I mean, what’s going to be his motivation? “I LIKE DEATH”? That just seems like it’ll be boring and obvious. Plus I also don’t want “Avengers 2” to just be about ANOTHER invading alien force coming from the sky. A Thanos invasion just seems like it’d be poorly motivated and overly familiar.

So, what’s my suggestion for an alternative? Keep Thanos as the mystery bad guy behind the scenes, pulling strings and helping evil along its course, BUT have ANOTHER main bad guy on the ground interacting with the Avengers. Who should be that bad guy? ULTRON. For those of you who don’t know, Ultron, an early Avengers villain, is a rogue sentient robot, an evil artificial intelligence, originally CREATED by Avenger Hank Pym, who wants to exterminate all human life on Earth. First of all, Ultron is a nice, scary bad guy who would have a very different methodology than Loki’s invading army. Instead of aliens from the sky bent on conquest, Ultron would have an evil robot lord commanding Earth’s technology and his robot legions to exterminate all life on Earth. Plus you can EASILY tie Ultron’s creation into the core team of the Avengers – maybe he was a creation of SHIELD or a creation of Tony Stark working with Janet Van Dyne, Hank Pym, or Bill Foster – so there will be PERSONAL stakes when the Avengers have to rise up to slap Ultron down. (Right there, you have your story-driven reason to introduce Van Dyne and Pym as “new” Avengers.)

And Ultron’s mission – kill all humans – fits in PERFECTLY with Thanos’ death-obsessed mission, so you could even have Thanos have a hand in inspiring Ultron’s urge to exterminate. Because what could be more demoralizing to The Avengers than watching Ultron, a being THEY helped create, cause so much destruction? That might be enough to tear the team apart… which is EXACTLY the kind of drama that a good sequel needs. (I know certain fans have been clamoring for Agent Coulson to be reborn as the robot Avenger known as The Vision, but what if that artificial version of Coulson got corrupted and turned into Ultron? How amazing would it be to bring Clark Gregg back and have him rip out the hearts of the team while he cuts a bloody swath across the world? It’d be SPECTACULAR.)

I know, after that last scene in “Avengers”, some fanboys might be sad to not see Thanos slugging it out in a cosmic battle royale with the core team, but I just think that the story needs more than an outer-space despot looking to kill. Loki had wonderfully real, relatable, and emotional reasons for waging his war against the Avengers and, if “Avengers 2” is going to work, the bad guy has to have the same kind of understandable dramatic drive for picking a fight with the world’s mightiest heroes. And, at the moment, I can’t think of a bad guy who could do more damage to the team – both physically and emotionally – than Ultron.

5. Pay Joss Whedon a Whole Lot of Money to Write and Direct It

The Avengers
Photo credit: Disney/Marvel

Wait, did I already mention this one? I did? Well, it deserves to be said twice. Even if Marvel and Disney can’t get Whedon back in the director’s chair, they AT LEAST need to have him write it and serve as an executive creative consultant. His crystal-clear vision of what made each character so unique and entertaining turned a movie that could’ve been the spandex-version of “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” into one of the most crowd-pleasing films in recent memory. Unless Marvel can create a passable life-model-decoy of Joss Whedon – Get the imagineers working on it now, Disney! – they need to acknowledge how much Joss brought to the table and not go ahead with a sequel without Whedon, in some capacity, coming along for the ride.

By TOM BURNS
Staff Writer
HollywoodChicago.com
tom@hollywoodchicago.com