After Enter The Wu-Tang set the group's stall out, the first phase of the master plan called for solo LPs, on which each featured member would be supported as required by fellow band mates, and would benefit from Rza's production. Rza's first five-year plan for the Staten Island crew has long been the stuff of music-business legend - the deliberately opaque collective, more brilliant rappers than you could shake a stick at, introduced to the world by a group album but with the contract structured to allow each member to sign their own deals and make solo records. They may have patterned their concepts on kung-fu and mafia movies rather than superhero ones, but it's not just Method Man's occasional use of a persona called Johnny Blaze that amplifies the similarities between the Wu-Tang's discography and the MCU. In the same way Iron Flag belonged to Inspectah Deck, or how you often found yourself thinking that the best verse on an 8 Diagrams song had come from U-God, so I ended up feeling that Age Of Ultron was Hawkeye's film. They come to the fore by dint of their obvious work ethic, the simple fact of their relative ubiquity on the record, and ultimately because the quality of their contributions wins you over. Not Forever, the record which, in terms of project cycles, Age Of Ultron appears to be the corollary of but Iron Flag or 8 Diagrams, records where the Clan members you instinctively look to for highlights are subtly but forcefully overshadowed by less heralded members of the group. It was reminding me of a late-period Wu-Tang Clan album.

Eventually, what I'd recognised in there finally hit me. In particular, the way that the film's centre of gravity was located not around the expected big guns - the smart-alec Iron Man, the haunted Hulk, or Thor, the demigod with the neat line in self-aware humour - but on the relationships developed by Jeremy Renner's Hawkeye and, to an only slightly lesser extent, Scarlett Johanssen's Black Widow, neither of whom have, as yet, had their own film out. Rather, what I found nagging at the back of my mind was the formal similarity the film bore to. There was something oddly, disconcertingly, hard-to-put-your-finger-on familiar about Avengers: Age Of Ultron this summer - beyond, obviously, the fact that all the key players had been introduced and built up as three-dimensional characters via a string of preceding films, and notwithstanding their appearance for years beforehand in the comic books the Marvel Cinematic Universe films are based on. Pardon what appears to be an opening digression, but there's a point here, which I'll get too in reasonably short order, I promise.

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