It’s been an especially exciting, edifying 24 hours for fans who have been anxiously awaiting Avengers: Age of Ultron. With the buzz generated by the new trailer still resonating heavily, an interesting new featurette has been released that focuses on the various high-tech weaponry, both new and familiar, that will be brandished by the Marvel mega-team in the upcoming super-sequel.
The featurette from Cineplex has the film’s prop master, Barry Gibbs giving a quick walkthrough of his department, which contains a vast array of MCU artifacts that end up on screen and carry out the illusion of their seemingly supernatural utilitarianism. Have you ever noticed the subtle color variations on Captain America’s red, white and blue version of his shield throughout the films? I sure as hell didn’t, but, it's certainly apparent to me now. Did you know about the various versions of Thor’s hammer, Mjolnir, varying in multitudes of rigidity? Not me. Hey, knowledge is power, right?
Probably the most informative portions of the featurette involve the archery-centric weaponry wielded by Jeremy Renner’s Clint Barton, aka, Hawkeye. Gibbs carefully goes through the Avenger Ace Archer’s cavalcade of killing instruments, highlighting the most notable change in weaponry in the film -- Hawkeye’s bow, itself. Coming into Age Of Ultron, we see that director Joss Whedon wanted the hero's weapon to have a more compact, ergonomic feel. As we’ve seen in the trailer, its streamlined nature lets Hawkeye carry it unencumbered in a smaller form, allowing it to extend when action is about.
However, we are also treated to a brief tour of Hawkeye’s vast array of arrow heads. In the trailer, we saw Hawkeye doing some serious slaying when it came to the multitude of metallic Ultron bots attacking our heroes. Now, we see more than ever that his quiver contains some superbly potent stuff like "mind-warping" and "acid-tipped" arrows. In fact, Gibbs even supplies some important context to one of the new pieces of footage in the latest trailer with the "speed loader," which was the compact 9 arrow cartridge we saw Hawkeye utilize, as the arrows seemingly popped up in his hand like some type of Wolverine claw. (In a moment that probably had people thinking, "OMG, Black Panther!" for a brief second.)
Unfortunately, the featurette would fail to answer the most vexing of hardware questions pertaining to the duo of glowing weapons that Black Widows seemingly whipped out from thin air. We’re guessing that to identify them at this point might be treading precariously into the territory of spoilers. So, it may be the case that the "lightsaber knives" (as we are calling them, for now) may carry some plot-specific points and could be designed to exploit a potential weakness we eventually learn about the villainous Ultron.
All of this very cool stuff will be on full display when Avengers: Age of Ultron hits with an impact harder than Barry Gibbs’ squishy rubber Mjolnir prop when it arrives at theaters on May 1.
