The Avengers: Age of Ultron Review

So I watched Age of Ultron!

Well, a huge chunk of it anyway, because I went into the theater around 10 minutes late because of shenanigans. I may do a longer, more in-depth post after (and if) I rewatch it, but for now let's just fucking talk about Marvel's Avengers 2: Age of Ultron. Keep in mind, this is going to be a spoiler-heavy review, and being someone who absolutely fucking hates spoilers, I'm going to talk about it spoiler-free for a bit for those of you who haven't had the chance to watch it, while the rest of this review is going to be after a break.

Overall, I really liked the movie! But it definitely isn't as cleanly edited as Marvel's best movies like the Avengers or Captain America: Winter Soldier. Apparently Age of Ultron was intended to be around three hours long, yet the final cut ended up being just shy of 2 hours and a half. And while it's definitely a watchable movie, it does feel a bit rushed regarding certain matters. I wished some stuff were explained more, some of the newer characters be given more screentime and interactions, and maybe for the plot to be tightened up a bit. This movie really tries to do a lot, juggling several multiple plot threads at once: the Infinity Stones, Ultron going wild, the Avengers falling apart, the Avengers dealing with their own fears, foreshadow the Infinity War and Black Panther movies, introduce several new characters into the mix... I feel that it did a serviceable job out of it, but it does feel a bit frayed around the edges.

What it does a remarkable job, however, is to stun with absolutely gorgeous CGI fights. It was gorgeous. The highlight was definitely the Hulkbuster vs. Hulk fight in the middle of the movie, which ran for quite some time. It was my biggest worry while watching the trailer, really, that the fight was just going to last twenty seconds and that's it. No, it was a truly satisfying and epic fight to behold. There were several pretty great action scenes spread here and there. Without going into spoilers, the movie really makes a good job of making each action scene feel tense and awesome.

We also delve deeper into characters, and having a new character go around merrily showing them their deepest, darkest fears also works really well. Everyone got a decent showing this time around, though this also means that without a central focus (Iron Man and Captain America are surely this in the first Avengers movie) and with everyone getting a chunk of the cake, the movie feels a bit ADD. Hawkeye and Black Widow, who barely got any non-action screentime in the first Avengers movie, are thrust into the forefront of their own character threads. The Hulk, Iron Man and Ultron himself also got significant screentime, and while not as much as the others, both Thor and Captain America also had quite a bit of personality and interactions with the rest of the cast. It's a nice and welcome change... I always love character development.

Ultron himself is a pretty compelling and fun villain. We don't really get an in-depth argument about whether Ultron's views on forcing human evolution by triggering extinction makes sense or not, and I thought his origin could've been handled better, but he truly sets himself apart from just being a generic evil rogue AI. Ultron has a real personality, jokes around and truly feels a lot more human than I thought he would be.

What I wished was done was either have the movie restored to its original length which would help out with the pacing, or to exorcise one or two of the new characters and give the rest of the plot threads some breathing room. But really even with its pacing problems, I still truly love Age of Ultron. It's an awesome movie, it's got great action scenes and it definitely helps to move the Marvel Cinematic Universe forwards, with hints on future projects being dropped here and there.

I just wish that they weren't so hell-bent on intertwining all the movies. For someone well-versed with the MCU as I am, I certainly don't mind when they bring up less-prominent characters like Erik Selvig for a short cameo, or reference Wakanda to set up the Black Panther movie and never bring it up again and all that jazz... I love these kind of references, but a good chunk of the audience aren't caught up with every single MCU movie and I wished they kind of tone down the intertwining-ness, or at least explain it. You can make a great stand-alone movie that still has strong ties to the rest of the MCU -- Winter Soldier delivers that absolutely well.

But really, I do love how this movie contributes to the ever-overreaching arc of the Infinity Stones. It's a fun movie, with jokes and sarcastic quips all up the wazoo, but it has its serious moments. Going deep into each character's head is a really great way to help display their individual characterization, and it really goes a long way to forgiving the rather haphazard pacing regarding the new characters. Everyone brought their acting A-game into this movie.

I am just here to say that, hey, Age of Ultron is fucking awesome! I'll talk about it in more length after the break.

Also, no need to hold your bladder until after the credits... only mid-credits scene with this.


SPOILERS AFTER THIS

Whoo, where to begin? Let's start with the plot, shall we? We've got a bit too much going on, admittedly, and while they're all tied with each other pretty well, there are still a bit too much and it could've been done with some trimming. The movie starts off with the Avengers assaulting and ending the Hydra threat that is Baron Von Strucker, and obtaining Loki's staff. Tony Stark and Bruce Banner are apparently planning to make this Ultron program -- either it was mentioned before I entered the cinema, or it came out of nowhere -- and tries to extract some kind of AI from within Loki's staff... which turns out to be, surprise, evil. And thus the awesomeness that is Ultron is born. After a bit of a fight, Ultron goes rogue and recruits the Maximoff twins, a pair of metahumans who were let loose after Strucker's death. Again, there's a bit of pacing oddity where the Maximoffs are just forgotten after their intro and then show up to join Ultron.

There's a bit of short detective work and character development before the Avengers and Team Ultron clash again. Ultron's been paying Wakandan criminal Ulysses Klaue a visit to obtain Vibranium. This time around Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch, manages to get into everybody's head and show their greatest fears. We get a couple of cool fight scenes, and then Iron Man fucking fights a rampaging Hulk and that is absolutely awesome. With the Avengers beaten and causing a shit-ton of collateral damage, though, they take cover... in Hawkeye's farm. Hawkeye apparently has a family, and he manages to be the only-sane-man among this team of frayed emotions and vulnerable gods. We get a fair amount of Hawkeye scenes here before Nick Fury shows up, riles the Avengers and they go off to do battle with Ultron... who, while the Avengers are doing their soul-searching thing, is trying to create the ultimate body that's a combination of synthetic tissue, vibranium... and the Mind Gem within Loki's staff. This is apparently Ultron's endgame, to create this super-perfect body and evolve even further.

However, Wanda Maximoff, little miss plot device, realizes Ultron's real intentions and betray him. Ultron himself (or rather, themselves considering he controls multiple bodies) tries to escape with the synthetic body, but engages the Avengers through this awesome road battle. After a bit, though, the Avengers make out with the synthetic body and the Maximoff twins, but Ultron kidnaps Black Widow. With emotions all high, Tony Stark uploads Jarvis (who was damaged by Ultron when he first arrives) into the synthetic body and this causes a fight between Stark and Steve. Steve and the Maximoffs want to just destroy the synthetic body, while Stark and Banner try to create what Ultron is supposed to be. Hawkeye is on Team Stark, but I'm not sure if he knows what's going on. Thor shows up and electrocutes everything... and Vision is born. Thor has been on a vision-acid trip thing, and apparently knows stuff -- this is the part of the movie that suffers a lot from weird pacing. Thor gives a crash course about Infinity Stones, and Vision introduces himself as this weird fellow.

With three new members, the Avengers return to Sokovia, where Ultron has taken this time to create a shit-ton of thrusters to lift up Sokovia itself and is planning to use the momentum to use Sokovia as a makeshift meteor to trigger an extinction event. We get this extended war between the Avengers and Ultron's giant robot army and holy shit it is awesome. Without detailing everything that happens, the Avengers are split between crushing Ultron's plans and helping Fury and his own SHIELD evacuate the Sokovians. Hawkeye, despite all his family moments and all the talk about how he's the heart of the team and all his speeches about what he's planning to do when he gets back, doesn't die despite how much the movie really wants us to believe that he will (and the movie was pulling all the tropes to render sympathy with Hawkeye) but Quicksilver ends up being the one to bite the bullet.

The Avengers manage to defeat Ultron and save the day, and I do like how the final Ultron body meets up with Vision, and after a conversation about the worthiness of the human race, Vision executes Ultron. Throughout the movie, there's also this plot thread about Hulk and Black Widow's romance and by the end of the movie Banner chooses to remove himself from the equation and disappear once more. The movie ends with Thor, Stark and Hawkeye retiring from being permanent Avengers members for various reasons, while Captain America and Black Widow greet the new Avengers: War Machine, Falcon, Scarlet Witch and Vision.

Oh, and there's this mid-credits scene of Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet. He's finally gotten off that chair! And ready to do stuff!

The summary itself was a bit of a read, but really it doesn't show what I really liked about Age of Ultron -- the development of the individual characters. Tony Stark gets to develop pretty well after his PTSD in Iron Man 3. As Wanda's fear magic thing shows, Stark is really afraid of another alien invasion... but that's not the impetus of his fear. What Stark truly fears is causing the deaths of everybody by not being good enough, by not trying hard enough, and there's also a distinct fear of helplessness with how he describes aliens and the unknown. It works really well to help sell why he wants to make this peacekeeping Ultron program and why he's so adamant on making it work. Sadly we don't really get much interaction between Stark and Ultron himself beyond general arch-nemesis antagonism. But we do get conflict between Stark and Thor, and more importantly Stark and Steve. Their brief clashes in Hawkeye's farm and later when they actually physically fight over activating Vision is pretty great hints on the upcoming Civil War... but all the same I do like how the centerpiece of Stark's vision is a dead Captain America, showing that despite bickering like a married couple, Stark does care.

Banner and Natasha take the biggest chunk of screentime after Stark, I'd wager. Banner himself is really great. We see that he's starting to learn how to control the Hulk early in the movie, with Natasha acting like an anchor to keep the Hulk from rampaging too much. And he's definitely struck a great camaraderie with Stark, Natasha and the others, and throughout the course of this movie develops a relationship with Natasha... which kind of feels shoehorned in. In the context of this movie Banner and Natasha are really sweet, and they do have these conversations about being monsters -- Banner being a literal one and Natasha being this bred-and-trained human weapon -- and they have some serious talk about leaving everything and just settling down somewhere. But the fact that Banner and Natasha don't have any real interaction beyond their first meeting, and Hulk nearly squishing Natasha in the first Avengers movie. It doesn't annoy me, though, so yeah. Hulk leaving so as not to hurt Natasha (physically at least) is a bit sudden considering how they were all accepting of each other before this, but doesn't particularly bother me. I do like how the Hulk himself actually gets some quiet screentime especially near the end, showing that the Hulk isn't just a rampaging monster and actually channels some of Banner's emotions.

While arguments could be made about reducing Natasha Romanoff into a love interest character, I won't try to defend or argue against it. Natasha naturally gets a lot of badass robot-murdering scenes, especially her little team-up with Captain America in the Korea scene. She gets some backstory as well through Wanda's flashbacks, and we finally see her actually vulnerable for once. We see her training -- which is similar but not identical to the Black Widow camp in Agent Carter -- and apparently before she became a Black Widow, Natasha was fucking sterilized because the people running the Black Widow program are assholes. And Natasha herslef is dealing with her own issues of not being able to be more than just a monster... and I guess that's why she latches on to Bruce. She sees herself in him. Again, not a lot about this romance makes sense outside the information given in this movie, but thanks to them they do feel like a rather sweet little couple.

Hawkeye gets a shit-ton of screentime this time around, and not a single second was spent under mind control. Huzzah! Hawkeye gets to be the only sane man in a team with high-strung egos, and being the only one to have been spared from Wanda's fear things and actually having a healthy family with children to go home to... it was a hilarious moment, really when Clint goes home to his wife and Stark is just all 'she's an agent of some sort. Those kids are smaller agents' and all that. Having an actual family also kind of explains why Hawkeye has been MIA since 2011. He also makes some jokes about being an archer among an army of gods. I do like Hawkeye and Black Widow's BFF relationship with Hawkeye naming his third child after Natasha... well, after sorts, anyway. Hawkeye's wife is a charming person, and I do like how, having children of his own, he knows best how to interact with the scared and confused Wanda. Also there's a shit-ton of 'oh no look at this guy talking about his family and what he'll do after the war is over he's totally going to die' moments thorughout the movie, but Hawkeye does finally manage to return to his family. Yay Hawkeye!

Thor, meanwhile, doesn't really get to do much. Apparently he's just been hanging out since the Dark World, and he gets to laugh and be jolly and explode in anger at one point against Tony Stark. We naturally get a lot of awesome fight scenes, but beyond the scenes with the hammer and some talking moments with Vision I don't think Thor really gets a proper characterization scene. We did get to see Thor's greatest fear, which is this disturbing image of a corrupted Asgard with a crazy Heimdall (foreshadowing Ragnarok, perhaps?) and Thor himself unable to control his power and it lashing out and killing random people. We did see how Thor realizes that he might be too powerful for those around him when he accidentally crushes the lego set of one of Clint's kids, and when said child tries to hang out with Thor he just panics and storms off. That was a nice little moment there. Of course, we've got the weird thing with the magic pool of shirtlessness and Eric Selvig and Thor returning to electrify Vision and that doesn't really make sense. By the end of the movie, however, Thor heads off to Asgard once more.

Captain America also gets some characterization in-between being mocked for going all 'language' at others. He's still a bit wooden, but after Winter Soldier, Steve has been developing pretty well. We've got some great conversations and arguments between Steve and Stark, some generally awesome snarky moments and general action scenes, but for the most part beyond just being Captain America and the unbreakable virtue and whatnot, Steve kind of takes a backseat character-wise. Both Steve and Thor shows up all the time, fights all the time and is in the forefront all the time, but they don't really get much characterization. Steve's flashback is the weirdest of all, just seeing Peggy Carter and the dance and whatnot and just flashbacking to the past. Doesn't really make much sense.

Let's talk about other returning characters before going to tackle the four newcomers. Nick Fury shows up to give an awesome speech, disappears, then shows up in the climax with a goddamn Helicarrier and then stabs an Ultron straight through the head. Nick Fury is awesome even if he doesn't show up a lot. I'm betting that Theta Protocol being hinted in Agents of SHIELD has something to do with Nick Fury.

Maria Hill ends up being their homebase communications fellow. She doesn't really do much beyond hanging out with Tony Stark and being useful, but apparently she's been working for Fury all the time (no surprise there) though she does get some fun scenes with the rest of the cast during Stark's party. She gets some action scenes shooting Ultron drones in both the party and the Helicarrier, but otherwise she doesn't get to do much. In the same token, James Rhodes the War Machine doesn't really do much but have fun in the party and show up all suited up in the climax to murder a bunch of Ultrons, but otherwise doesn't do much beyond being one-scene wonders.

Falcon gets to talk about Bucky for a bit with Steve during the party and make excuses about why he's not helping out, but doesn't stick around to see Ultron's awakening nor does he show up in the finale. I honestly expected him to hang out with the War Machine and arrive as part of the cavalry, but I guess that might lead to unfortunate implications. He does show up in the end as a new Avenger, though, so there's that.

Love interests Pepper and Jane are apparently just off-screen, running a company and publishing papers and whatnot respectively. Jane's absence is a bit odd, though, considering Thor actually returns to Asgard by the end of this movie. Eric Selvig makes a short cameo showing the mystic pool and later hanging out in the Avengers building in the end but is an even more cameo-y returning role than the rest. Heimdall only appears as a crazy vision.

Jarvis gets eaten by Ultron early in the movie, disappears and then gets assimilated and transformed into Vision. It was not a good day for Jarvis.

So let’s talk a bit about the new characters introduced in this movie. There’s Baron Wolfgang Von Strucker, of course, premiering for like twenty seconds in the post-credits scene of Winter Soldier and foreshadowed and built up as this untouchable overlord of Hydra in Agents of SHIELD… granted he might have done some stuff in the fifteen minutes or so that I missed, but he totally went down like a bitch to Captain America and later on gets killed off-screen by Ultron. Welp, what a waste of a fucking awesome name right there, if nothing.

Ulysses Klaw (or Klaue, as the movie insists on spelling his name) is a whole different matter altogether. Putting aside the fact that he’s played by Andy Serkis and I’m a big fan of that fellow’s work, Klaw is a pretty awesome and imposing villain for the short role he plays. And he sets up a fair bit for future movies, too… Black Panther, obviously, with Banner identifying one of his tattoos as Wakandan for ‘thief’ and whatnot. He’s apparently the chief black market importer of Vibranium and Tony Stark met him at a convention. He gets a couple of fun little conversations with the Maximoffs and later Ultron and after his plot usage of giving the Vibranium to Ultron is over, he doesn’t stick around. I like secondary characters like that – cool, but doesn’t overstay his welcome. Ultron totally chops off his hand, too! Bet that’ll be replaced with some kind of robotic appendage.

The Maximoffs are cool visually, they have their little arc of soul-searching… but it’s a bit poorly handled especially compared to the others. We get them giving a little backstory of hating Tony Stark because one of Stark’s weapons killed their family and traumatized them mentally, and that was why they submitted to Von Strucker’s experiments. No word on whether they are mutants or receive their powers from experimentation with Loki’s staff, but it’s kept ambiguous. Their ‘father’ was killed by the shell in the past. Poor Magneto. Or whatever schmuck acted as their stepfather. Pietro Maximoff, Quicksilver, has super-speed. Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch, has mind-reading capabilities, fear gas things, telekinesis and general red beams that explode stuff. Kind of unfair for poor Pietro.

Pietro is a bit underwhelming, to be honest. He is a spectacle visually, just tearing through Ultron drones and being a gigantic badass, but other than being a good brother to Wanda and being a bit of a douchebag to the older Avengers he doesn’t really have much to his character, right up until his death where he redeems himself by, uh, taking bullets meant for Hawkeye who is protecting a kid. Defrosting over the final battle, sure, but that really ain’t much. Again, it really felt like a big OMG moment with a good chunk of the shock factor being the fact that Hawkeye didn’t die instead of Quicksilver dying in an awesome blaze of glory. That’s one of the weaker moments of the movie, to be honest, since the death scene didn’t really have much impact other than the big shock. And we’re not touching the MCU’s tendency to revive characters as soon as they die… in a movie where we see Quicksilver shrug off a bullet and we see these super-grafting machines that can apparently create organs and shit, and the conspicuous lack of finality, I won’t be surprised if two or three movies down the lie someone revives Pietro. Would be annoying because they didn’t make the death stick, but on the other hand they wasted a perfectly good character – especially since Quicksilver is the only case where two studios have their own live-action version and they killed him off.

Wanda is a bit more fleshed out, with her experiencing the worst fears of the other Avengers and eventually going through a defrosting process herself that feels a lot more organic than her brother. That short scene with Hawkeye who doesn’t give a shit what she’s done as long as she fights for them is also great, and Scarlet Witch’s big ‘splody powers are extremely impressive visually. The fact that she’s, y’know, really nice to look at is another big factor. A lot of the shit that went down in the movie is her fault, though… Tony Stark being paranoid and going to extreme measures to create Ultron? Wanda. Hulk rampaging and destroying a good chunk of that South African town? Wanda. One of the Ultron drones managing to activate the plot device? Wanda was busy tormenting another Ultron. But I do like her nonetheless. Again, though, I really wished these two got some actual development.

Ultron is the centerpiece of this movie, and he is quite a unique villain. I truly, honestly expected just another generic-but-awesome evil robot with a cool voice and great lines, but Ultron snarks all over the place and makes crazy dramatic things and he just feels… well, human. The scene where he tears apart one of his older bodies just to shock Natasha, or when he throws a small tantrum (cutting off Klaw’s arm) and immediately apologizes, his little penchant for showing off, his absolutely fun lines… His motivations are a bit odd and disjointed, jumping from world peace, to wanting to surpass daddy Stark, to wanting to help humanity evolve, to wanting to create the perfect body to playing god and launching meteors and whatnot, but apparently he’s just nuts. So. I also like how every single Ultron drone is Ultron himself, not just an army of faceless mooks like the Chitauri were. That is, Ultron can migrate his consciousness from his ‘Prime’ body to any of the generic Ultron bodies and that is awesome. He’s just awesome in general and is truly one of the highlights of the movie – he does feel like a threat, too. In addition to having multiple bodies and thus being basically indestructible, each one gives whichever Avenger he is fighting a run for his/her money.

I also do like his fascination with the Maximoff twins. Part of it is surely because of his own love for evolution and mutants are like the next step in evolution or whatever… but Ultron does seem genuinely heartbroken when the Maximoff twins decide to break off from his side. He certainly doesn’t kill them, and sounded actually sad when he gloats to Natasha that he wants to show off his new body to someone but ‘doesn’t have anyone else’. And while he did kill Pietro, I’m sure it was by accident – dude’s fast and Ultron is aiming for Hawkeye. He also warns Wanda to escape the falling town and whatnot. It’s not made truly explicit but I did like that aspect of him. Beyond, y’know, all the absurdly human things he does – throwing tantrums, making jokes at the expense of those around him, eschewing efficiency for rule of drama…

One thing that wasn’t handled quite well is just how Ultron came to be. Or there might be something I missed. Apparently he’s a super-advanced AI from within the Loki staff (or Mind Gem), but why is an AI inside the thing in the first place? Did Thanos put Ultron in the staff knowing humans will poke around it? After all he did sound like someone just failed him in the stinger. Is the entity known as Ultron born out of the AI combined with Jarvis, or is the AI from Loki’s staff purely undiluted Ultron? Why does he call Tony Stark his father if he’s just the staff’s AI? A bit weird, there, thanks to using the staff as a gateway to bring Ultron to life instead of just letting Tony Stark create Ultron from scratch. Or alternatively have Dummy (who doesn’t appear in this movie and makes me sad) turn into Ultron.

A good chunk of the movie is built up to introducing Vision, who is as wildly coloured as his comic-book counterpart, albeit a bit muted. He’s like the definition of Mary Sue, except he is awesome. First up, I do like the circumstances leading to his birth, Civil War undertones and all… he’s made a bit of everything, turning him into this glorious, functioning Frankenstein’s monster. Stark and Banner made his AI (well, put Jarvis into Vision), part of his programming came from Ultron, dr. Cho made the organic body, we’ve got Vibranium injected into his frame, and Thor supercharges the whole thing with a shit-ton of lightning. And to top it all off, he’s powered by the Mind Gem as well. And in addition to being able to fly, phase through things, shoot Mind Gem beams and materialize capes out of will, Vision can also lift Thor’s hammer – the only other person in the MCU who can do so. That is an epic scene.

And Vision is basically an evolved version of Jarvis. Vision makes it clear that he is not Jarvis and definitely not Ultron, and acts more like a disinterested omnipotent perfect being earlier before kind of bonding with the others. He’s more of a plot device than an actual character in my opinion, but he’s still cool. I really wished we spent more time on explaining just what the fuck Vision is and why Thor suddenly does a 180 about his stance on Stark weaponizing AI beyond ‘random vision in a pool’. But Vision’s action scenes are pretty cool, his dry snarky wit is pretty funny… again, like Pietro and Wanda, he just suffers from not really getting that much screentime to give him that oomph that he needs. He certainly wasn’t a disappointment, though, especially since every single one of his scenes have been carefully exorcised from promotional materials and all we get about him are little teases and glimpses. Good show on making Vision’s role a surprise, Marvel. The Mind Gem being part of Vision is certainly not a thing I saw happening, and will certainly be interesting when Thanos goes Infinity Stone hunting.

In Thor’s vision (hee hee) we also see the four stones that already played a role in Marvel’s movies: the Mind Gem within Loki’s scepter (which is a nice subtle way of hiding it, since people were expecting different colours), the Space Gem within the Tesseract, the Power Gem within that Orb and whichever one the Aether is. Thor’s vision about hell coming to Asgard might just come true, with Asgard ruled by Loki, and housing the Tesseract and the last known place of the Aether (now under the Collector’s care, but Thanos might not know that), and we know Thanos is at least going after the former. Yeah, Thor: Ragnarok might have more ties to Thanos and the Infinity War than I initially expected…

One of the new characters introduced this time around is dr. Helen Cho, who comes out of nowhere just to be this plot device to bring up artificial organic tissue creation and therefore spearhead Vision’s creation later in the movie. Except Helen Cho shows up everywhere in already-crowded scenes like the party and she really doesn’t need to do that. She also doesn’t really need to survive being electrocuted by Ultron because really what the hell is that going to accomplish?

The Barton family was fun. They don’t really have any super-distinguishable traits beyond being a great family and cute kids and they like to hang out with Aunt Nat. That was a cute bit for Natasha, as is the soft ‘traitor’ Natasha says to the soon-to-be-born baby when he turns out not to be a she. Nathaniel Pietro Barton, wasn’t he? Yeah, he can be the new Quicksilver.

Oh, and Thanos gets a glove.

T'was an awesome glove. And an awesome movie. That's all I have to say about it for now.