Not so happily, Joss Whedon’s Avenger films, the second of which has just appeared, work as a sort of antidote to Tolkien and Lewis, shaping the imaginations of young people with a distinctly different message. Whedon, the auteur behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and many other well-received films and television programs, is a self-avowed atheist who has, on many occasions, signalled his particular dissatisfaction with the Catholic Church.
In the plot of Avengers: Age of Ultron the world is threatened by an artificial intelligence named Ultron who has run amok and incarnated himself in a particularly nasty robotic body. Ultron wants to destroy the human race and has produced an army of robots as his posse.
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