The New "Avengers" Is Really About the N.S.A.

Baseball games have slowed down because, as players' salaries have increased, the value of each pitch and each swing has increased, as well. When a pitcher gets thirty starts in a season, a hundred pitches each, bucking for a twelve-million-dollar contract, each pitch is worth four thousand dollars. "Avengers: Age of Ultron" cost about two hundred and fifty million dollars to make, and Joss Whedon, its writer and director, appears to have taken his time, too--especially with the script. Whedon has done something similar to what he did in "The Avengers"--namely, to make a film that's in tune with the political zeitgeist as he perceives it. There, it was a post-9/11 revenge fantasy set against a backdrop of unpopular foreign wars.