Movie Review: Avengers: Age of Ultron

Avengers: Age of Ultron [2015]

Putting aside the otherwise-standalone Ant-Man, This movie is essentially the climax of Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phase Two... and if we're being honest, the movies that lead up to this one is really only just Captain America: Winter Soldier. The other two, Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World only really tangentially tie in to this one, insomuch that they feature characters that also show up here. And seeing that the Tony in this movie is basically back to his regular tricks, it does mean that his 'big lesson' at the end of Iron Man 3 is kind of forgotten. 

Avengers: Age of Ultron isn't very fondly remembered by most of the fanbase. And while Dark World and perhaps Iron Man 2 or Incredible Hulk would be remembered for being the worst, Age of Ultron is a movie that's jam-packed full of way, way too much plot points, and the movie suffers a lot from it. One thing that saves it, however? The sheer amount of cast members and just how batshit-fun this movie is. It is unapologetically just trying to be a comic-book movie, jumping from one joke to the next, from one fun action scene to the next, from one new character introduction to the next. When I sat down to watch Age of Ultron last month, it actually baffled me just how much they tried to stuff into this movie when a lot of them really could've been done... basically elsewhere. 

Just on top of my head, this movie tries to foreshadow the 'Civil War' conflict between Iron Man and Captain America; it tries to foreshadow both Ragnarok and the Infinity Gauntlet, while also introducing the concept of Infinity Stones to the Earth-bound cast; it stealthily introduces Wakanda and Ulysses Klaue... and all of that while also debuting the characters Scarlet Witch, Vision, Quicksilver and Ultron. Oh, and we get Hawkeye's biggest character moment in the MCU, as well as a terrible romance between Black Widow and Bruce Banner tossed randomly into the movie. If you couldn't tell... the movie is pretty bloated. Thankfully, it's fun! I enjoyed watching the movie, because I enjoy watching superheroes beat up waves and waves of generic robots. But take a step back, and, well, no one can deny that the movie's pretty bloated. 

The movie starts off with a cold open -- the Avengers dealing with a relatively minor threat, and it's fun! I actually like this fun implication that these superheroes have fun beating up minor villains in their spare time. Baron Wolfgang von Strucker is one of the final members of Hydra, and he's got goons with alien lasers and a castle with a forcefield! We get to see our heroes show off what they can do, with a new Iron Man armour and Captain America's magnet-shield gauntlet thing and the Hulk just bashing people up... pretty cool stuff. Without describing this action scene too much, it basically ends pretty quickly, with Strucker unleashing 'the twins', a pair of enhanced metahumans created by Hydra experiments with Loki's Scepter. Pietro/Quicksilver and Wanda/Scarlet Witch are... well, they're basically ciphers in this movie. What Maria Hill would describe them as -- "he's fast and she's weird" -- basically applies to how they are in the entire movie. Just a pair of superpowered humans who clearly are kind, but are oppressed enough that they fell in with the wrong crowd. 

As Tony finds Loki's Scepter in the Hydra compound, Wanda does her ambiguously-defined magical tricks to give Tony a terrifying vision of the Avengers being shattered in the face of a large alien invasion. Wanda's powers are basically just handwaved as fear illusions and limited telekinesis in this movie, but it does kind of fit just how galvanized Tony becomes after this scene? It's just that the movie itself moves so fast, and watching this so closely to Iron Man 3 does make the character feel like he's kind of going through the same motions that he went through in that movie. It is perfectly believable that he would regress back to paranoia, but I really wished that it was handled better, and that we're given just a bit more time for this plot point to impact on us. 

I did like Tony basically manipulating the rest of the Avengers to let him investigate Loki's Scepter for a couple of days, and he gets Bruce Banner into helping him. They decide to use the supercomputer intelligence they develop with Loki's Scepter (it contains the Mind Stone, but the script just kind of handwaves it as generic superhero sci-fi) into "Ultron", a global defense program that Tony sees as the natural development of his Iron Legion. 

Of course, Ultron becomes sentient. And James Spader's performance as Ultron is easily the best part of this movie! He might ultimately just boil down to being a generic evil robot supervillain, but Spader's voice and mannerisms, especially in this early conversation where he and JARVIS converse in the strange void of computer systems, really does sell the scene of Ultron's confusion on waking up and his realization on how much humanity sucks. 

While the Avengers are celebrating their victory (featuring some fun cameos by Maria Hill, Falcon and War Machine in the party; as well as the fun Mjolnir scene), Ultron kills and absorbs JARVIS, and then takes over Stark's Iron Legion armour. This leads to another fun action scene where most of our heroes are out of costume, and, again, Ultron delivers some absolutely fucking creepy line readings in this scene. They beat up the Ultrons, but turns out that these are just hollow puppet bodies, and the real Ultron has basically uploaded himself into Baron Strucker's Hydra base in Sokovia.

(Which the Avengers didn't properly clean up, I guess? Or is there a second secret room? I've never thought about this until writing that paragraph.)

Things go very quickly here as we kind of jump around different scenes quickly. Ultron recruits Pietro and Wanda and promises them revenge against Tony Stark, who the twins blame for creating the weapons that fucked up Sokovia. Ultron also kills Baron Strucker off-screen. The Avengers figure out that Ultron is looking for vibranium, and both teams end up in Johannesburg to meet with the arms dealer Ulysses Klaue, the only person to have sufficient quantities of vibranium after stealing it from the African nation of Wakanda. 

And... can I say just how much I adore Ultron's scene in here? We don't really get a whole ton about Ultron since the movie's mostly action scenes, but the dismissive way that he wires a bunch of money into Klaue's account and notes in disgust how greedy humans are; or him actually sounding like he felt bad for accidentally slicing off Klaue's arm in a temper tantrum... it's fun. 

And then we get yet another action scene, with Iron Man fighting against Ultron, while the twins fight the rest of the Avengers. Wanda manages to whammy Captain America, Thor and Black Widow to show them their greatest fears, but then Hawkeye manages to zap her. And... and I am someone who really likes these sort of 'personalized hell' stuff. And there's great moments here! Captain America's greatest fear is seeing everyone from his World War II days becoming old and that he'd be the only one still alive when everyone else is a corpse -- in essence, a continuation of his 'soldier out of a war' theme that we explored in Avengers. Black Widow gets a flashback to ominous showcases in the Red Room, which we wouldn't really explore until a decade later in her solo movie. Thor gets to see... kinda-Ragnarok? Thor's part is the most nebulous one of it all. But none of these are even explored in this movie, which makes it so frustrating because in the grand scheme of things, I really did feel like these Wanda-nightmares could really have been something that the other movies take great mileage out of. 

But then we had to have the big fighty-fight! The Maximoffs retreat after getting spooked by how Hawkeye manages to dispatch Wanda, and they send the Hulk into a rampage. Which leads to, of course, the big, trailer-friendly action scene between the Hulk and Iron Man in the "Veronica" Hulkbuster armour. Which... not going to lie, is a very, very fucking badass scene. Without making this review as bloated as the movie (since we're only in the halfway point!) suffice to say that this fight scene really appeals to the inner child within me. 

The backlash from the Hulk causing widespread destruction turns public opinion against the Avengers, causing them to take a breather in Hawkeye's farmhouse. And the scenes here... it's good for Hawkeye! It's very good for Hawkeye. Easily the character who gets nothing to do outside of action scenes in the first Avengers movie, Clint ends up being so humanized by simply just being an everyman who has a wife and kids, being just an everyman that holds the rest of the big egos in the group together. That's amazing. And while it's a bit on-the-nose, Tony and Steve's argument next to the log-cutting macho stuff also works pretty well, albeit it's, again, not explored as much. 

What's not so amazing, however, are all the other plotlines going on here. There's a very good scene of Thor stepping on one of the children's toys and maybe realizing that he's more destructive than he cares to admit... but then we don't follow up on this at all, Thor goes off to recruit Erik Selvig, and then goes off into a pool for a completely irrelevant vision and disappears until the third act. Throughout the first chunk of the movie we get a frankly out-of-nowhere romance between Bruce and Natasha, which... I don't know. It's just something that feels particularly bizarre, and feels particularly shoehorned in Natasha's part, especially when she waxes lyrical about how she can't have children because of the Red Room... something that feels bizarre for this character specifically. With how well Natasha was handled in Winter Soldier, this honestly feels like a huge step back. Also something that's perhaps a bit less noticeable but still grating are the many, many obvious 'ooo death flag' around Hawkeye. 

Nick Fury shows up to whip everyone back to shape, and they go off to Seoul. Ultron uses Loki's Scepter to mind-control Dr. Helen Cho (who shows up in the party earlier) to steal her synthetic-tissue technology. And combining that with the stolen vibranium and the Mind Stone within Loki's scepter, Ultron plans to create a brand-new body. Wanda does some mind-reading, sees that Ultron's a complete lunatic that wants to cause human extinction, and the two immediately turn on Ultron. I really wish I could pretend that there's something more to this, but nope. 

And then...  action scene! Again, it's a pretty cool action scene! Captain America fight Ultron on top of a truck while Black Widow chases them with a motorcycle. It's all pretty cool and stuff! Later on, thanks to a runaway train, the Maximoffs change sides and help Captain America stop the train. Black Widow manages to push Ultron's weird super-special-awesome synthetic-cyborg body into the Quinjet, but she herself gets captured by Ultron. 

Tony being Tony, he uploads what's left of the JARVIS A.I. (who he had been recovering) into the synthetic body. There's something very sweet about this act considering what a constant JARVIS has been throughout all the movies prior to this one, but it's an act that's really kind of glossed over. We get a bit of a prototype civil war because Captain America and the Maximoffs don't want to activate another super-robot, while Tony, Clint and Bruce want to. Thor shows up and ends the conflict by zapping the synthetic body with his lightning, creating the birth of Vision. 

And, yes. All of this goes on super-duper quickly. Thor's mystical vision isn't really elaborated on; Vision basically tells us that he's basically kind of the evolution of JARVIS but not the same thing, plus he earns the team's trust by lifting Mjolnir; the Maximoffs join the team basically wholeheartedly regardless of their past sins or motivations; Black Widow sees Ultron in a new (barely different) vibranium body and manages to contact the Avengers... and then we gear up for the final battle. 

And the final battle is awesome. From an action movie standpoint, for all of the rush that we had to get to this point, it's awesome. It takes up a significant portion of the movie, and it involves Ultron creating a delightfully comic-book plan of putting rockets to lift up an entire city and then drop it back to the Earth to create an extinction event to wipe out humanity. Thanks to Ultron being a giant swarm of robots, we get all out heroes fighting all the little Ultron robots, while all of them also being able to taunt and engage with our heroes with James Spader's delightful voice. 

There are some character moments here, which I'll briefly highlight. There's probably the very bland resolution to the Widow/Hulk storyline, with Natasha pushing Banner off a cliff to trigger his transformation into the Hulk, which... yeah, I guess there's a point to be made to her caring more about the mission or something? Hawkeye delivers a very, very awesome speech to Wanda when she gets a bit of a panic attack about being an Avenger, and I love that he gives the young woman a choice to escape. There's the badass arrival of Nick Fury and the good SHIELD with the Helicarriers (also, War Machine!), with Captain America telling Quicksilver that this is what SHIELD should be. And, of course, there are the action scenes. So many great action scenes, culminating in all the eight Avengers fighting a bunch of Ultrons while the camera spins around them. 

Ultimately, though, the main Ultron body gets tossed around, and attempts to kill Hawkeye... but Quicksilver runs in the way to take the bullets. I really want to say that this is some sort of huge heroic sacrifice, but honestly... the movie really doesn't take that much time to develop the Maximoff twins at all, and when any development happens it is for Wanda. So other than the shock value, it really is hard to say that I care all that much about this incarnation of Quicksilver dying. I know that the Maximoff twins are, at the time this movie was made, being 'shared' between Marvel and Fox (who uses Quicksilver more prominently), but even then it really does feel like Pietro's role in this movie feels so minimal. 

Hulk also leaves the movie in a very confused manner, beating and tossing Ultron Prime out of a Quinjet but then just... shuts off communications. We really don't know too much about Hulk's mindset throughout all this. Or Banner's. Or how they relate to each other. We do get a bit of a resolution with Thor: Ragnarok, but I did remember this being such a randomly tacked-on part to the movie. 

Anyway, our heroes rescue the day -- Iron Man and Thor do the plot device thing to blow up the landmass; Scarlet Witch hunts down Ultron Prime and rips out his heart for revenge; Vision hunts down the final Ultron drone and zaps him. We then get a pretty quick montage showing where the heroes go, with Thor leaving back to Asgard, Iron Man buggering off and basically becoming an independent guest star/consultant, Hawkeye retires to be with his family, and Captain America and Black Widow have a brand-new team of Avengers -- Scarlet Witch, Vision, War Machine and Falcon. 

And... I'm not going to say this is an unenjoyable movie, because I had a lot of fun watching this. And I do know that a lot of the stuff and themes built up here would be followed up -- albeit later on -- in movies like Thor: Ragnarok, Captain America: Civil War, or in TV projects like WandaVision. But that really doesn't excuse the fact that this movie is so bloated. It tries to do way too much, to fit in way too much, and while it's kind of inevitable when you try to adapt so much comic-book history and try introduce as many characters as possible in a single movie, Age of Ultron is definitely when they stretched it a bit too thin. The Maximoff twins and Vision's introduction are very rushed, Thor's visions feel so redundant, but the worst part is definitely the scripting for the Bruce/Natasha romance. Bless the actors for trying their best, but the direction just feels so forced for both characters and the rest of the MCU would rightfully later just ignore this romance. 

Thankfully, there's a clear line after this movie where they scaled things back a bit, and for the most part did a pretty good job at keeping each individual movie focused on something without making it feel way too bloated. This movie, meanwhile, feels like I'm reading the bare bones of a superhero comic-book crossover TPB without any of the accompanying build-up. It's still at least a fun action movie, though, and I'll give the movie credit for that. .

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Post-Credits Scene: Thanos takes the Infinity Gauntlet and claims that he's going to 'do it [himself]'. Knowing what we do from subsequent movies, this event presumably takes place immediately before his Infinity Stone search prior to Avengers: Infinity War.
• Stan the Man: Stan Lee is a WWII veteran that the credits identify as 'himself', as one of Steve's friends that ends up getting really hammered from Thor's Asgardian alcohol. Stan Lee did actually serve in World War II, and he gets to say his real-life catchphrase of 'excelsior'.
• Future Movies Foreshadowing: So many. The nation of Wakanda, its association with Vibranium, and Ulysses Klaue's role as a minor antagonist, foreshadow Black Panther. Thor's weird vision foreshadows (in a way) the destruction of Asgard in Thor: Ragnarok. More of a backstory revelation, but Black Widow gets a flashback to the Red Room that would eventually be explored in Black Widow. Going through Thor's vision frame-by-frame is a nebulous shot of Thanos's Infinity Gauntlet with the Infinity Stones. Steve is also shown to be able to budge Mjolnir.
• Past Movie Continuity: Hydra and Baron Strucker was introduced as antagonists in Captain America: The Winter Soldier; and Hydra smuggling powerful weapons and artifacts is a plotline from that movie. Loki's scepter from The Avengers return, and is revealed to be the Mind Stone. Also from The Avengers are Chitauri technology, including a Leviathan, show up in Strucker's base. Hawkeye references his brainwashing in The Avengers. Falcon briefly references their 'missing persons' case, referencing the search for Bucky from Winter Soldier. 
• Movie Superhero Codenames: Ultron and Vision are referred to as those, since they don't really have any other names to go by. Wanda and Pietro Maximoff are never called 'Scarlet Witch' and 'Quicksilver', though Tony does call her a 'little witch' exactly once in the movie. The movie mostly calls the Avengers by their civilian names (though 'Hawkeye' finally gets name-dropped in this movie) by everyone except for Ultron -- Ultron very consistently calls everyone by their superhero names. 
• Favourite Action Scene: Hulk-vs-Hulkbuster. The one with all the Avengers assembled tossing a giant horde of Ultron robots in a room at the end is a runner up. 
• Funniest Line: Less of a line and more physical comedy, but Vision casually handing Thor Mjolnir and everyone just looking dumbfounded. 
• Among Tony's spare A.I. discs is one labeled 'Jocasta', another A.I. from the comics.
• Ulysses Klaue's dossier, if you pause to read it, references that he was sent to kill King T'Chaka (who would show up in Captain America: Civil War), and his ancestor was killed by a previous bearer of the Black Panther mantle. 
• Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch did start off their comic-book career as members of the evil Brotherhood of Mutants. Baron Strucker also experimented on two mutant twins, though they were his own children, codenamed "Fenris" in the comics. 
• Ultron introduces himself to the Maximoffs with a red shroud over his head, a reference to how in the comics he was initially introduced as a villain called "Crimson Cowl". 
• When talking about his alcohol, Thor name-drops Brunnhilde, the alter-ego of the superhero Valkyrie. Brunnhilde/Valkyrie would actually show up in Thor: Ragnarok, but it's clear that that is their first meeting. It could be a different Brunnhilde, though!