Posted in General

I don’t know if anyone who reads this will see it, but the little-known independent flick Avengers: Age of Ultron is showing up theaters today. Well, we saw it, and here are our thoughts:

As the crown jewel of Marvel Cinematic’s phase II, the Avengers 2 promised to be a spectacle of explosions, super-powers, and heroic eye-candy. Did it live up to its hype and expectations? Yes, absolutely. Like its predecessor, the film offers us scenes of thrilling heroics that kept us glued to the screen.

Somewhere after Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Tony Stark (Iron man) and Steve Rogers (Captain America) got the team back together so they could eliminate the remaining heads of Hydra. After a nasty battle against an enemy cell, they run afoul of two new superhumans, Pietro and Wanda Maximoff (Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch). Meanwhile, Stark finds a way to finish his passion project: a peacekeeping AI that would render the Avengers moot. It goes wrong in exactly the ways you might expect, and the Avengers get a new supervillain to deal with.

Unlike a lot of sequels, we don’t have to watch any boring “getting the band back together” montage, nor do we wonder what they were up to in the interim. By the time we catch up to them, they’re a cohesive unit fighting the good fight. This allows Whedon and Co. to jump right into the action, and the film takes off at a breakneck pace. This comes as quite a contrast to the original Avengers, which built up to its final act at a slow, steady burn. That being said, the film is more balanced than its predecessor, intermixing its moments of drama and character development with its crazy set-piece battles. Every Avenger is given something to do this time around rather than just focusing the film on Stark. Everybody moves forward and changes, though not always to their benefit. Even Hawkeye actually does stuff this time around! So does Black Widow, though a lot of it is stupid (spoilers to come).

The action sequences are an interesting, well-choreographed mix of powers and explosions. It’s clear to us that the Avengers know how to work together as a team, and it looks impressive. However, it’s not the best we’ve seen from Marvel. In several sequences, Whedon relies shaky-cams and extreme closeups, as if it were intended to be a 3D ride rather than a 2D film. This seems odd, as he kept his shots fairly clear in the first Avengers film (presumably so we could tell what the hell was going on). Unfortunately, we never get the feeling of tension or danger that we do in Captain America: The Winter Soldier or Daredevil. This might be because we rarely see people actually getting hurt or killed, even though buildings are collapsing around them like they’re in a Michael Bay film.

In typical Whedon fashion, the script centers on snappy one-liners and subversive dialogue. It lands about 75% of the time, which is a decent success ratio, though the jokes occasionally feel forced or hokey. Sadly his emphasis on dialogue overtook the film’s plot or characterization. At numerous points in the film, the Avengers do things that are nonsensical, out of character, or just plain stupid. Worse, several plot elements are rushed or under-explained, as if the film was missing twenty valuable minutes of expository dialogue to fit more robot fights into it.

One of these elements is the titular villain: Ultron. While Spader has generally received deserved praise for his portrayal, I found the character a forgettable villain of the week. There’s no buildup to his villainy, and he isn’t developed nor explained. His motivations are flat, sci-fi carboard cutouts he shares with pretty much every other AI gone wrong. Sadly, dropping the components that made the comic character unique just turned him into a mean robot. His evil master plan is actually pretty silly, and didn’t seem to push the Marvel Cinematic Universe forward in any meaningful way.

Overall-7.5 out of 10. The film is good, but not great. It did exactly what I expected but didn’t blow me away. Whedon deserves props for balancing so many elements and still making a fun, enjoyable film (out of a sequel, no less), but it suffers from a few problems. It recaptures most (if not all) of the magic of the original, which is pretty heroic. Look out for our spoiler-filled reaction post.