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Weird science

Here's what I liked about Avengers: Age of Ultron: the goofy dialogue, the clever homages to some of the great (and not-so-great) science fiction and fantasy films of years past, the chance to see Robert Downey Jr. at work.

As to what I didn't like--well, that's a bit of a list.

I didn't care for the science, for starters. I'm not talking about the superpowers, which you obviously have to concede if you're going to watch movies about superheroes. I'm talking about a titanic object falling rapidly toward the ground, with a predicted impact that is supposed to cause horrific damage, only to be blown into a large number of smaller pieces. The kinetic energy of the onrushing pieces would remain the same, but here they somehow shower harmlessly into a lake. If only Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics, once my favorite website, were still in the review business.

Then there's that old movie trope, the lone genius. Tony Stark, this time with occasional assistance from Bruce Banner, once again solves scientific problems that baffle everyone else in the field. But successful science is a cooperative enterprise. As the astrophysicist Katie Mack put it in commenting on a different film: "Physicists don't work like that. We talk to each other. We read the literature. We compare notes and work in teams and divide up problems amongst ourselves. We don't sit in a room with ... maybe one assistant and just think it out." Except that in the movies, that's what the best scientists always do.

And once again Hollywood treats us to the notion that the command codes for nuclear missiles are somehow connected to the internet. And this time, there's also a single server in Oslo through which flows every bit of data that traverses the Web. The ease with which we can imagine these two factoids combining to bring about disaster helps explain why neither is close to true.

I also didn't care for the overwhelming maleness. No Jane Foster (although admittedly she never had much to do in the Thor films). No Pepper Potts. Nothing that Black Widow was called upon to do that no one else could have done.

And although some of the implicit ethical messages were intriguing, I didn't care for those that were explicit.

To take just the most egregious example, about midway through the film, Captain America pronounces what is evidently supposed to be a profound moral point: "Every time somebody tries to win a war before it starts, innocent people die." Note the implication that innocent people don't die when one tries to win a war after it starts. So stated, the proposition is incoherent. The innocent always die in war. This is a principal reason that war is morally problematic: It's impossible to fight in a way that harms only those who have signed up to take the risk.

I suspect that what writer-director Joss Whedon was trying to get across is the very different notion that one shouldn't attack the enemy until the enemy attacks first. Not all adherents of just war theory would agree with this proposition, but even those who do make no claim about the number of innocent likely to be killed.

Don't get me wrong. I understand that Ultron is only a movie. I don't watch summer blockbuster movies for ethical lessons or science instruction. I go for the fun, and this offered plenty of that. But behind the fun are always messages, intended or not, and it can be worthwhile to take the time to puzzle out what they are.

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Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg News columnist and a law professor at Yale.

Editorial on 05/08/2015

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