Saw it Tuesday in 3D. Ho-hum movie for 5 year olds that was too long by a country mile. I was disappointed that they didn't explore Ultron and his ability to "escape into the internet". Instead of making him omniscient and ever present (a la Skynet in Terminator 3), they made him another cookie cutter bad guy who can "clone" himself but not in an intelligent fashion. Instead of cloning himself 100x all over the world and backing his personality up on iPads all over the world, he makes copies of himself and destroys old copies (umm..ok) and then puts all copies of himself on a self made meteorite (good use of resources there supervillain - let's attach engines to a small city in Europe) so that the Avengers can show up and clearly DEFEAT the bad guys. Black and white, who is good and evil, who is alive and dead, in very juvenile terms so your 5 year old won't scrunch his forehead too much at the end of the movie.
I'm not sure if it was ironic or not to have Stark's robots telling non-English speakers in English to evacuate. I laughed really hard at that, but in retrospect maybe they figured we couldn't handle subtitles or we're to assume they're speaking the native tongue, like WWII nazis with english accents.
The decision to fly to a "safe house" was superfluous and the introduction of Hawkeye's family was a waste of 15 minutes of screen time. They brought absolutely nothing to the table, not even as a weak reason for the other Avengers to try to sacrifice themselves to save Hawkeye so he can go back to his family. The person who ended up sacrificing himself to save Hawkeye didn't even meet his family and did it for the little boy Hawkeye was holding. But Hawkeye acts like he did it to save him? Ok. I actually thought the Safe House was going to be an attempt for the Avengers to get back to their non-Computer roots, but nope, they go through some paper files for about 5 seconds and then they're back to flying around in computerized jets and using computers and whatever else, even though Ultron should easily be able to take command of all that junk. Cappy and Hawkeye and Black Widow don't need computers to kick your ass, but they didn't focus on that at all.
Everyone's fears? Talk about a snooze fest. Black Widow's flash-backs were vague - I thought she was tripping because they made her kill someone for her graduation, but she later says it's because she was sterilized. O..k...
Cappy's fear? O...k...
Iron Man's fear? That one makes sense.
Thor's fear? Good way to tie in the Infinity Stones and the plot for Thor 2 (or 3? I forget)
Hawkeye's rant about it not making sense that he was there was funny but not well delivered.
The final "battle" did not feel epic and did not feel special. I mean, it's Let's fight and then Here's Ultron and he's summoning all his bots and Let's Fight again - no epic-ness beyond "Here's an even BIGGER mass of bad guys that we need to fight!" In fact, the whole "Calvary to the rescue" deus ex machina ending was contrived - SHIELD and Vision included. At that point, it felt like the Editor just wanted the movie over as soon as possible.
Scarlet Witch came off as a weak willed Jedi knock off. And what happened to her accent - it kind of disappeared after the first scene.
I also like how they made Don Cheadle's War Machine and Hawkman very, very, very token characters. Like, pop in at the end as "Avengers" token. And how they're clearly inferior to the other Avengers, even though I'd take War Machine over a guy with a bow and arrow any day.
Just trash. The people hooked will continue to watch these movies for the overall arc, but I'm already tired of it. I was hoping we'd get more Winter Soldier (the action was well paced, the Villains were excellent, the mood was very modern), but we got Avengers: Lite - now with 80% more punching!
I did enjoy a couple of scenes, but none of the Banner/Widow scenes.
-Don Cheadle's story about carrying a tank. Hilarious when he tells it to the Avengers. Made worse by the callback 2 1/2 hours later.
-Cappy's point about the Hammer and elevators - priceless
-Quicksilver clearing out a police station by running out and coming back in with a gun after everyone ignores him the first time. Or when he tried to grab Thor's hammer in mid-air. I enjoyed Quicksilver very much, actually. Sad they "killed" him
That's about it. The endless jokes about the "language" line Cap uses should have stopped after the first one.
It was pointless. We had just scenes that followed after each other in sequence, with nothing that constituted an actual story. There were no stakes in the fight scenes. The villain's character was nonexistent and his plan and motives incomprehensible.
There was one scene that actually worked, and it was a scene between Banner and Black Widow during a quiet moment about halfway through the movie. That's it. Something towards the end almost worked, and would have if the character who was in the scene had any development over the course of the movie. But that didn't happen.
Gone is the management of the characters and the finesse that made the first Avengers movie work. Instead we have nothing. This had to be the product of executive meddling. Each scene feels like someone going through a checklist, a way of filling the quotas for these characters to appear and have this many scenes rather than to actually create a coherent narrative.
The one good thing I can say about the movie is that I thought the twins were compelling and a good addition to the character roster. Hell, Scarlet Witch was a far more interesting villain than Ultron. She and Quicksilver should have been the focus. Also, hats off to Aaron Taylor-Johnson. I did not realize Quicksilver was Kick-Ass.
But yeah, I don't have any faith in the Marvel Cinematic Universe any more. Its cornerstone is the Avengers franchise, and if that doesn't hold weight, then what does that say about the franchise?
Actually I will add one more moment to the list that worked, and that is when:
Vision hands Thor back the hammer. That was a cool moment.
I was thinking about the movie today, and there's a thing revealed about Loki that makes zero sense.
How the hell did Loki get his hands on an Infinity Stone? Isn't Thanos trying to get hold of them? Why would he give Loki the Mind Stone? And furthermore, if Loki has the Mind Stone, and it has THAT much power, why was Loki not able to accomplish more than just tapping people with it? The thing contains BOUNDLESS energy, right?
I was thinking about that too. It must be that either Thanos let him use one stone in the hopes of gaining a second, or he was unaware that the stone was in the scepter.
I am wondering why they killed off Quicksilver. He's super popular - enough so to be in two different franchises. I was half expecting a second post-credits scene where he was getting his body reconstructed in The Cradle.
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tl;dr: It's superficially entertaining, but it really doesn't work. Very much the Iron Man 2 of the Avengers franchise.
Simultaneously too much and too little happened in this movie. We're never really introduced to Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. Seriously, what do we know about them as characters? Not their powers, them. (Although I'm still not sure what the Witch's powers are, either.) Well, I guess they don't like people who try to blow them up. That's relatable, to be sure, but not exactly distinctive.
Oh, and the powerful female character is emotionally unstable and has a total fetal-curl breakdown. Really exploring new territory there, Mr. Whedon.
The Vision is quite possibly the most literal deus ex machina ever to appear on film. He appears at the eleventh hour to save everybody, we've got nothing invested in him at all, and Whedon has to resort to beating us over the head with a hammer to tell us he's a good guy. This could have been salvaged, too. If he took more time to get us invested in Jarvis the way we got invested in Stark's robot crew in the first Iron Man, then his apparent death would mean more. Then tell us that the Vision is Jarvis incarnate instead of that he isn't. And boom, all of a sudden we care about this weird painfully Kirby-looking red fellow - he's not new, we've known him for years.
And then there's Ultron. James Spader gives an entertaining delivery - I especially enjoyed his final "Oh, for God's sake!" - but his motives are incomprehensible. He's human, really really human. Which could have been interesting, except we have no idea why. There are some lines to indicate Whedon is going somewhere with it, but he doesn't. Ultron just... is, for some reason. And wants to blow up the world, for some reason.
So the movie needed to take more time fleshing out these characters and explaining their motives. It tried to cram too much into too short a running time. The first Avengers was really adroit at juggling its ensemble cast; the sequel tried the same task and dropped all the balls. And with all these new characters running around, nothing much actually develops in the plot. Early on, Ultron taunts the Avengers about merely maintaining the status quo - and sure enough, by the resolution things are back to normal. I thought the Avengers movies were supposed to be MCU game-changers, but apparently that's actually Captain America's job. Ultron does not come off as a global threat, even though he's threatening to destroy the world. Why? Because there was not enough show and too much tell. It's called "Age of Ultron", but the "Age" is, what, 48 hours at the most? I was expecting him to actually take over the world, institute some sort of evil robot overlordship that the Avengers have to take down. We're told that Ultron is doing stuff offscreen all over the planet, but what we see are just a few set-piece battles. The threat on screen is to a small Eastern European country, not to the world at large - or even to New York City, which decades of books and film have taught us to take as a surrogate for the world at large. So what Age of Ultron felt like more than anything else was a villain-of-the-week episode of a TV show.
Things that don't make physical sense:
- Ultron's plan to destroy the earth.
- The Avengers' plan to stop Ultron's plan.
Both run into the problem of a little thing called potential energy. Maybe it's just me, but I don't see this as an obscure and handwaveable physics nitpick. What's going on on screen just viscerally looks and feels wrong. Like watching a toddler lift a fat man on a see-saw: the intuitions revolt.
And on a related note, some of the CGI was just surprisingly bad. I was really noticing the ragdoll physics when the big guys were tossing around mooks.
That's the bad. What's the good? Well, you've got the usual Joss Whedon banter between the leads, which is always fun. As I mentioned earlier, Ultron's performance is entertaining. I didn't think the Bruce-Natasha relationship was anything special, but Clint Barton's family was nice. And they were telegraphing Barton's death for the whole damn movie, so having Quicksilver take the bullets instead was an interesting twist - though the "I bet you didn't see that coming" line was Whedon being more than a bit smug about it.
So what's the bottom line? If you want to eat popcorn and be entertained for a couple of hours, this will do the trick. It keeps things moving; it's not boring. But you can't think about it. Like, at all. If you do, it just falls apart faster than one of Ultron's androids when punched by an ordinary human being.
I've been cramming prior Marvel movies (Thor, Captain America 1, The Avengers; got Thor 2 queued up for later today, and I've seen all the rest up to this point) in preparation for seeing Avengers 2 on Sunday. I'm curious - does the writing for the protagonists get any better? I thought nearly everyone sans Steve Rogers and Loki were poorly scripted in the first Avengers, and was seriously disappointed with the meekness of Bruce Banner. Tony Stark was basically a parody of himself, and Thor was completely underwhelming. (I had no issues with Hulk's script, for obvious reasons.) Black Widow's only important part was bringing Hawkeye back (anyone could have used the scepter on the Tesseract), and Hawkeye's only important part was getting taken over by Loki and then sniping a bit at the end. On that note, why was the scepter so weak? It had an infinity stone in it, right? Loki should have stomped anyone he blasted with it, no problem. Was it ever explained why he wasn't able to take over Tony Stark? I thought the implication had to do with the arc reactor in his chest, but it still seemed questionable at best that a gem of INFINITE POWER couldn't sway the mind of a non-powered human.
But this is all tangential to my main point, that being that I hope the second one is better than the first. (I have heard good things about James Spader's performance.)
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This post started out as a post about James Spader, but I ended up talking plot spoilers.
I only saw this movie because I am a giant fan of James Spader. I, personally, was not disappointed, especially when Ultron delivered every line with Spader's signature cocked head (seriously, look at how Ultron's head is facing in every scene. he almost never has it in a natural position). I had heard he did mocap and I went in really hoping that he would do this. Though, he didn't do the "Napoleon" with his hand, as far as I can remember. That makes sense considering that he was a more physically active character than he usually is, but I was hoping to see it nonetheless.
I was a little taken aback by his performance, though, as it didn't really fit the character of Ultron, at least in the logic of the film. Why is this homicidal AI cracking jokes? For example, the "smaller people" joke toward the beginning just seemed off to me. It was very Spaderesque, yes, but why is a robot cracking that kind of joke? He wasn't particularly menacing, which I felt he needed to be. This is an inherent issue with using Spader in a role. Here's a secret: Spader can't act. Or, well, he can, but he plays the same basic character in everything. Charismatic. Intelligent and witty. Cocky. Humorous. Go watch an episode of The Blacklist and compare his performance there to Ultron.
So when you're casting Spader you have to take this into account. It works in The Blacklist because that show is so serious overall that Spader's humorous take on the character adds some balance and levity to a show that otherwise wouldn't have any. When you have a team of SUPERDRAMATIC FBI agents trying to take down a guy whose job is to dissolve human bodies to eliminate all forensic evidence, it helps when something is funny somewhere in there to relieve some tension. It's also genuinely frightening when Spader is preparing to dismember you while telling some funny story about a woman he had a tryst with twenty years back in Bulgaria because of the stark contrast between his words and his actions. It works.
In Age of Ultron, to contrast, every character is quipping one-liners at all points (thanks Joss), so when Spader does it, it doesn't add anything to the film and in fact just feels wrong. The humor loses impact because he's not providing any contrast to the heroes. I also feel like Ultron is not a character that needed depth. The key conflict in this film was (and should have been) with Tony Stark. From what I understand this movie is building up to Civil War, which is Cap v. Iron Man, yes? We saw some of that in this movie, but it was mostly abandoned by the end. I wish that conflict would have been more pronounced. At the end of the film it just felt like everybody went their separate ways while completely ignoring the events of the movie. Tony's hubris nearly caused the destruction of the entire world? Whatever! Here's the New Avengers! Isn't that cool? (no.)
Ultron was the perfect opportunity for a "moustache twirler," meaning a villain that is just evil for the sake of being evil. With that threat looming in the background we could have had more conflict in the Avengers, a reluctant teaming-up to defeat Ultron in the end, and then a real, consequential falling-out at the end of the film. Then I want to see the next film. Yes, I realize that the conflict of Civil War comes about due to something that hasn't been introduced later. I'd still like it if that conflict was set up now. I don't give a ***** about the New Avengers honestly.
I was thinking about the movie today, and there's a thing revealed about Loki that makes zero sense.
How the hell did Loki get his hands on an Infinity Stone? Isn't Thanos trying to get hold of them? Why would he give Loki the Mind Stone? And furthermore, if Loki has the Mind Stone, and it has THAT much power, why was Loki not able to accomplish more than just tapping people with it? The thing contains BOUNDLESS energy, right?
It is implied that Thanos let Loki use an Infinity Gem to get another Infinity Gem. Thanos is extremely intelligent and figures if someone notices him going after the Infinity Gems, someone is going to take notice and make it harder for Thanos to acquire the Gems. However, I think he gives up on relying on others since Loki and Ronan both failed to get the Gems to him.
The movie was decent but exactly what I expected, and I expected it to be more of the same.
Though I threw up in my mouth a little when Captain America said pre-emptive wars all cause innocents to die, REALLY Mr. WW 2. Im sure the people of eastern europe would have prefered a pre-emptive strike instead of a good old fashion 60 million dead non-premptive war.
Ultron could have been better his motives dont make sense there was never that point of clarity were your like ahhh now I see what he wants, and I think they should have kept the half mechanized voice it wa off putting that he sounded soo human.
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...and was seriously disappointed with the meekness of Bruce Banner.
Why? That's what gives his character such contrast with the Hulk.
It felt so forced. He was pretty much wearing a glowing neon sign that said, "I'm the Hulk but I hate it! That is what defines me as a character!" and that was about it. I guess I thought his bitterness was just a bit overplayed in contrast to Edward Norton's mild acceptance of it and growth as a result.
Black Widow's only important part was bringing Hawkeye back (anyone could have used the scepter on the Tesseract)...
I think her key scene is her interrogation of Loki.
It doesn't make any sense that a twenty-something(?) spy could fool the immortal god of lies, but it establishes her character and it's cool to watch.
Ah, right - that, too. I was surprised that she was able to succeed in that, but I recall really liking Loki's savagery in that scene. I also liked the shout-out to that later. When she reported Loki's motives to the others, she sounded fine, but her later conversation with Hawkeye near the end of the film indicated that Loki actually shook her up pretty badly.
I will say that I felt like Loki was meant to lose from the start, though. He got outsmarted (or outsmashed) by every single member of the Avengers at some point (except Thor, IIRC) and simply felt outmatched. Especially with the inhibitor on the infinity gem.
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It is implied that Thanos let Loki use an Infinity Gem to get another Infinity Gem. Thanos is extremely intelligent and figures if someone notices him going after the Infinity Gems, someone is going to take notice and make it harder for Thanos to acquire the Gems. However, I think he gives up on relying on others since Loki and Ronan both failed to get the Gems to him.
But that completely contradicts The Avengers.
When Thanos learns Loki fails at the end of Avengers, he reacts as though it was all part of his plan. If he lost the chance at TWO Infinity Stones, the Tesseract and the Mind Stone, you'd think he'd be pissed off, right? Look at how he reacted when Ronan the Accuser stole the Power Stone.
It felt so forced. He was pretty much wearing a glowing neon sign that said, "I'm the Hulk but I hate it! That is what defines me as a character!" and that was about it. I guess I thought his bitterness was just a bit overplayed in contrast to Edward Norton's mild acceptance of it and growth as a result.
What? Banner is forced to spend the rest of life afraid that he'll go off and murder untold numbers of people. Exactly what is forced about his not wanting to have that as a burden?
It is implied that Thanos let Loki use an Infinity Gem to get another Infinity Gem. Thanos is extremely intelligent and figures if someone notices him going after the Infinity Gems, someone is going to take notice and make it harder for Thanos to acquire the Gems. However, I think he gives up on relying on others since Loki and Ronan both failed to get the Gems to him.
But that completely contradicts The Avengers.
When Thanos learns Loki fails at the end of Avengers, he reacts as though it was all part of his plan. If he lost the chance at TWO Infinity Stones, the Tesseract and the Mind Stone, you'd think he'd be pissed off, right? Look at how he reacted when Ronan the Accuser stole the Power Stone.
He expected Loki to win, and failed. I think he was smiling because the comment of courting Death, not at what happened with Loki.
He expected Loki to win, and failed. I think he was smiling because the comment of courting Death, not at what happened with Loki.
Yeah it was an homage to Thanos being obsessed with death thing.
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Don't you see that the whole aim of Moderators is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make infractions literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.
In Age of Ultron, to contrast, every character is quipping one-liners at all points (thanks Joss), so when Spader does it, it doesn't add anything to the film and in fact just feels wrong. The humor loses impact because he's not providing any contrast to the heroes. I also feel like Ultron is not a character that needed depth. The key conflict in this film was (and should have been) with Tony Stark. From what I understand this movie is building up to Civil War, which is Cap v. Iron Man, yes? We saw some of that in this movie, but it was mostly abandoned by the end. I wish that conflict would have been more pronounced. At the end of the film it just felt like everybody went their separate ways while completely ignoring the events of the movie. Tony's hubris nearly caused the destruction of the entire world? Whatever! Here's the New Avengers! Isn't that cool? (no.)
I think that James Spader not being a strong contrast to the heroes was a deliberate choice because a recurring theme throughout the movie was that Ultron is a reflection of Tony Stark. This leads to the central problem that's been mentioned a few times: the movie's too crowded.
If Ultron and the nature of the Avengers was the central conflict as epitomized by Tony Stark's narcissism, then the movie should have been Iron Man 4: Age of Ultron. Hawkeye, Quicksilver, and Scarlet Witch could have been their own movie. Black Widow and Hulk could have been their own movie. And while Captain America, Vision, and Thor were the only characters that felt like they were involved in all the plot threads, only Captain America felt like he was in an Avengers movie rather than a plot stitched onto an Avengers movie because someone thinks the rest couldn't carry their own movies (... and to be honest, there might be some truth to that, but not in the way I think the average person would guess). *Although don't get me wrong in this, Hawkeye was the most interesting character this movie, possibly to make up for his absence in the first one.*
Overall, I liked Age of Ultron enough to likely see it a second time... on theater cheap movie night...or if someone else is paying... after catching Ex Machina because it's higher on the to watch list. There were interesting points, even philosophically, but the sum of this movie from that perspective is "underdeveloped". I could see what Joss wanted, but ripping off HAL 9000 is apparently not Marvel's forte.
So, while I enjoyed the film, I can't say it was a great film. It was a standard superhero film, and it suffered from a weak villain and from being overcrowded. I think a lot of the complaints with this film might have been answered if this wasn't 2/3rds of the film. While I'm not sure 3.5 hours would have been a good business decision, I think it's obvious that everything that wasn't one liners was left on the cutting room floor. Maybe the extended cut will be better, as it's sure to have more character development. There were a few scenes or transitions in particular that seemed like we just made a big jump with no explanation. I'm hoping the next couple Avengers films tighten the cast significantly.
I will say that while it wasn't a great film, I also wouldn't call it a bad film. It was entertaining (for me) from beginning to end, it just didn't resonate as strongly as the first Avengers did. It's not going to live on in my imagination like that one did, but I'll still bring it out for popcorn viewing.
I also think the sound was having problem in the my theater, and everything was way too quiet so I'm going to have to rewatch (on Blu-Ray) to say for sure - moments that felt like they should have a score emphasizing the feel of the scene just fell flat because of that.
Nine team members, before you even get to any supporting characters, was just untenable. Add in Ultron and at least another nine supporting cast members, and you've got an ensemble that just doesn't work, because all character focus is lost.
And frnakly, while Ultron was funny at times, the menacing, sinister Ultron from the trailers just doesn't show up in the film. Instead, he's almost goofy.
He expected Loki to win, and failed. I think he was smiling because the comment of courting Death, not at what happened with Loki.
Ok, upon rewatching, you are correct.
Still it's weird that Thanos is smiling when he just gave a trickster god an infinity stone in an attempt to gain another and failed at both.
I would say that is woefully inept, but then again, it's not like ANY Infinity Stone in this damn franchise has actually been well-guarded. Hell, in Guardians of the Galaxy, Quill finds one with really no defenses at all and nobody guarding it.
While I'm not sure 3.5 hours would have been a good business decision, I think it's obvious that everything that wasn't one liners was left on the cutting room floor. Maybe the extended cut will be better, as it's sure to have more character development.
You're joking, right? After that schlock, you want an hour and ten minutes added to it?
I'm hoping the next couple Avengers films tighten the cast significantly.
Well the sequel is "Avengers: Infinity War Part 1." So no. There is exactly zero chance of them tightening the cast.
Especially since we all know this is going to culminate in a franchise-wide fight with Thanos.
Part of the Infinity Gems is no one knows what they were and/or their real power. The Comic Explained guy went into detail about how Thanos got the original six, and it was through trickery and rarely raw strength. I don't think Thanos is happy that both his plots to get the Gems hence
why he decided to take the matters into his own hands because of the failures of others.
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Saw it Tuesday in 3D. Ho-hum movie for 5 year olds that was too long by a country mile. I was disappointed that they didn't explore Ultron and his ability to "escape into the internet". Instead of making him omniscient and ever present (a la Skynet in Terminator 3), they made him another cookie cutter bad guy who can "clone" himself but not in an intelligent fashion. Instead of cloning himself 100x all over the world and backing his personality up on iPads all over the world, he makes copies of himself and destroys old copies (umm..ok) and then puts all copies of himself on a self made meteorite (good use of resources there supervillain - let's attach engines to a small city in Europe) so that the Avengers can show up and clearly DEFEAT the bad guys. Black and white, who is good and evil, who is alive and dead, in very juvenile terms so your 5 year old won't scrunch his forehead too much at the end of the movie.
I'm not sure if it was ironic or not to have Stark's robots telling non-English speakers in English to evacuate. I laughed really hard at that, but in retrospect maybe they figured we couldn't handle subtitles or we're to assume they're speaking the native tongue, like WWII nazis with english accents.
The decision to fly to a "safe house" was superfluous and the introduction of Hawkeye's family was a waste of 15 minutes of screen time. They brought absolutely nothing to the table, not even as a weak reason for the other Avengers to try to sacrifice themselves to save Hawkeye so he can go back to his family. The person who ended up sacrificing himself to save Hawkeye didn't even meet his family and did it for the little boy Hawkeye was holding. But Hawkeye acts like he did it to save him? Ok. I actually thought the Safe House was going to be an attempt for the Avengers to get back to their non-Computer roots, but nope, they go through some paper files for about 5 seconds and then they're back to flying around in computerized jets and using computers and whatever else, even though Ultron should easily be able to take command of all that junk. Cappy and Hawkeye and Black Widow don't need computers to kick your ass, but they didn't focus on that at all.
Everyone's fears? Talk about a snooze fest. Black Widow's flash-backs were vague - I thought she was tripping because they made her kill someone for her graduation, but she later says it's because she was sterilized. O..k...
Cappy's fear? O...k...
Iron Man's fear? That one makes sense.
Thor's fear? Good way to tie in the Infinity Stones and the plot for Thor 2 (or 3? I forget)
Hawkeye's rant about it not making sense that he was there was funny but not well delivered.
The final "battle" did not feel epic and did not feel special. I mean, it's Let's fight and then Here's Ultron and he's summoning all his bots and Let's Fight again - no epic-ness beyond "Here's an even BIGGER mass of bad guys that we need to fight!" In fact, the whole "Calvary to the rescue" deus ex machina ending was contrived - SHIELD and Vision included. At that point, it felt like the Editor just wanted the movie over as soon as possible.
Scarlet Witch came off as a weak willed Jedi knock off. And what happened to her accent - it kind of disappeared after the first scene.
I also like how they made Don Cheadle's War Machine and Hawkman very, very, very token characters. Like, pop in at the end as "Avengers" token. And how they're clearly inferior to the other Avengers, even though I'd take War Machine over a guy with a bow and arrow any day.
Just trash. The people hooked will continue to watch these movies for the overall arc, but I'm already tired of it. I was hoping we'd get more Winter Soldier (the action was well paced, the Villains were excellent, the mood was very modern), but we got Avengers: Lite - now with 80% more punching!
-Don Cheadle's story about carrying a tank. Hilarious when he tells it to the Avengers. Made worse by the callback 2 1/2 hours later.
-Cappy's point about the Hammer and elevators - priceless
-Quicksilver clearing out a police station by running out and coming back in with a gun after everyone ignores him the first time. Or when he tried to grab Thor's hammer in mid-air. I enjoyed Quicksilver very much, actually. Sad they "killed" him
That's about it. The endless jokes about the "language" line Cap uses should have stopped after the first one.
I was thinking about the movie today, and there's a thing revealed about Loki that makes zero sense.
I am wondering why they killed off Quicksilver. He's super popular - enough so to be in two different franchises. I was half expecting a second post-credits scene where he was getting his body reconstructed in The Cradle.
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Oh, and the powerful female character is emotionally unstable and has a total fetal-curl breakdown. Really exploring new territory there, Mr. Whedon.
The Vision is quite possibly the most literal deus ex machina ever to appear on film. He appears at the eleventh hour to save everybody, we've got nothing invested in him at all, and Whedon has to resort to beating us over the head with a hammer to tell us he's a good guy. This could have been salvaged, too. If he took more time to get us invested in Jarvis the way we got invested in Stark's robot crew in the first Iron Man, then his apparent death would mean more. Then tell us that the Vision is Jarvis incarnate instead of that he isn't. And boom, all of a sudden we care about this weird painfully Kirby-looking red fellow - he's not new, we've known him for years.
And then there's Ultron. James Spader gives an entertaining delivery - I especially enjoyed his final "Oh, for God's sake!" - but his motives are incomprehensible. He's human, really really human. Which could have been interesting, except we have no idea why. There are some lines to indicate Whedon is going somewhere with it, but he doesn't. Ultron just... is, for some reason. And wants to blow up the world, for some reason.
So the movie needed to take more time fleshing out these characters and explaining their motives. It tried to cram too much into too short a running time. The first Avengers was really adroit at juggling its ensemble cast; the sequel tried the same task and dropped all the balls. And with all these new characters running around, nothing much actually develops in the plot. Early on, Ultron taunts the Avengers about merely maintaining the status quo - and sure enough, by the resolution things are back to normal. I thought the Avengers movies were supposed to be MCU game-changers, but apparently that's actually Captain America's job. Ultron does not come off as a global threat, even though he's threatening to destroy the world. Why? Because there was not enough show and too much tell. It's called "Age of Ultron", but the "Age" is, what, 48 hours at the most? I was expecting him to actually take over the world, institute some sort of evil robot overlordship that the Avengers have to take down. We're told that Ultron is doing stuff offscreen all over the planet, but what we see are just a few set-piece battles. The threat on screen is to a small Eastern European country, not to the world at large - or even to New York City, which decades of books and film have taught us to take as a surrogate for the world at large. So what Age of Ultron felt like more than anything else was a villain-of-the-week episode of a TV show.
Things that don't make physical sense:
- Ultron's plan to destroy the earth.
- The Avengers' plan to stop Ultron's plan.
Both run into the problem of a little thing called potential energy. Maybe it's just me, but I don't see this as an obscure and handwaveable physics nitpick. What's going on on screen just viscerally looks and feels wrong. Like watching a toddler lift a fat man on a see-saw: the intuitions revolt.
And on a related note, some of the CGI was just surprisingly bad. I was really noticing the ragdoll physics when the big guys were tossing around mooks.
That's the bad. What's the good? Well, you've got the usual Joss Whedon banter between the leads, which is always fun. As I mentioned earlier, Ultron's performance is entertaining. I didn't think the Bruce-Natasha relationship was anything special, but Clint Barton's family was nice. And they were telegraphing Barton's death for the whole damn movie, so having Quicksilver take the bullets instead was an interesting twist - though the "I bet you didn't see that coming" line was Whedon being more than a bit smug about it.
So what's the bottom line? If you want to eat popcorn and be entertained for a couple of hours, this will do the trick. It keeps things moving; it's not boring. But you can't think about it. Like, at all. If you do, it just falls apart faster than one of Ultron's androids when punched by an ordinary human being.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
"Avengers..." [smashcut]
There is a point at which self-awareness becomes self-destructive.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
But this is all tangential to my main point, that being that I hope the second one is better than the first. (I have heard good things about James Spader's performance.)
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I only saw this movie because I am a giant fan of James Spader. I, personally, was not disappointed, especially when Ultron delivered every line with Spader's signature cocked head (seriously, look at how Ultron's head is facing in every scene. he almost never has it in a natural position). I had heard he did mocap and I went in really hoping that he would do this. Though, he didn't do the "Napoleon" with his hand, as far as I can remember. That makes sense considering that he was a more physically active character than he usually is, but I was hoping to see it nonetheless.
I was a little taken aback by his performance, though, as it didn't really fit the character of Ultron, at least in the logic of the film. Why is this homicidal AI cracking jokes? For example, the "smaller people" joke toward the beginning just seemed off to me. It was very Spaderesque, yes, but why is a robot cracking that kind of joke? He wasn't particularly menacing, which I felt he needed to be. This is an inherent issue with using Spader in a role. Here's a secret: Spader can't act. Or, well, he can, but he plays the same basic character in everything. Charismatic. Intelligent and witty. Cocky. Humorous. Go watch an episode of The Blacklist and compare his performance there to Ultron.
So when you're casting Spader you have to take this into account. It works in The Blacklist because that show is so serious overall that Spader's humorous take on the character adds some balance and levity to a show that otherwise wouldn't have any. When you have a team of SUPERDRAMATIC FBI agents trying to take down a guy whose job is to dissolve human bodies to eliminate all forensic evidence, it helps when something is funny somewhere in there to relieve some tension. It's also genuinely frightening when Spader is preparing to dismember you while telling some funny story about a woman he had a tryst with twenty years back in Bulgaria because of the stark contrast between his words and his actions. It works.
Ultron was the perfect opportunity for a "moustache twirler," meaning a villain that is just evil for the sake of being evil. With that threat looming in the background we could have had more conflict in the Avengers, a reluctant teaming-up to defeat Ultron in the end, and then a real, consequential falling-out at the end of the film. Then I want to see the next film. Yes, I realize that the conflict of Civil War comes about due to something that hasn't been introduced later. I'd still like it if that conflict was set up now. I don't give a ***** about the New Avengers honestly.
Spoiler tags are [spoiler=][/spoiler].
Keep in mind that the Mind Stone was imprisoned within the gem. It is possible that it was some type of container that prevented it's full potential.
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Ultron could have been better his motives dont make sense there was never that point of clarity were your like ahhh now I see what he wants, and I think they should have kept the half mechanized voice it wa off putting that he sounded soo human.
I think her key scene is her interrogation of Loki.
It doesn't make any sense that a twenty-something(?) spy could fool the immortal god of lies, but it establishes her character and it's cool to watch.
Nnnnnope.
I'd really rather not. Can I do Boston Legal instead?
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It felt so forced. He was pretty much wearing a glowing neon sign that said, "I'm the Hulk but I hate it! That is what defines me as a character!" and that was about it. I guess I thought his bitterness was just a bit overplayed in contrast to Edward Norton's mild acceptance of it and growth as a result.
Ah, right - that, too. I was surprised that she was able to succeed in that, but I recall really liking Loki's savagery in that scene. I also liked the shout-out to that later. When she reported Loki's motives to the others, she sounded fine, but her later conversation with Hawkeye near the end of the film indicated that Loki actually shook her up pretty badly.
I will say that I felt like Loki was meant to lose from the start, though. He got outsmarted (or outsmashed) by every single member of the Avengers at some point (except Thor, IIRC) and simply felt outmatched. Especially with the inhibitor on the infinity gem.
Fantastic.
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I mean, the Power Stone was held in a metal ball where it couldn't even be detected much less used.
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Because Stark didn't have organic matter there. Everyone else had the usual flesh and ribcage covering their heart. Stark had an arc reactor.
Again, another reason why it's REALLY DUMB for Loki's staff to have been revealed to house an Infinity Stone.
What? Banner is forced to spend the rest of life afraid that he'll go off and murder untold numbers of people. Exactly what is forced about his not wanting to have that as a burden?
Yeah it was an homage to Thanos being obsessed with death thing.
If Ultron and the nature of the Avengers was the central conflict as epitomized by Tony Stark's narcissism, then the movie should have been Iron Man 4: Age of Ultron. Hawkeye, Quicksilver, and Scarlet Witch could have been their own movie. Black Widow and Hulk could have been their own movie. And while Captain America, Vision, and Thor were the only characters that felt like they were involved in all the plot threads, only Captain America felt like he was in an Avengers movie rather than a plot stitched onto an Avengers movie because someone thinks the rest couldn't carry their own movies (... and to be honest, there might be some truth to that, but not in the way I think the average person would guess). *Although don't get me wrong in this, Hawkeye was the most interesting character this movie, possibly to make up for his absence in the first one.*
Overall, I liked Age of Ultron enough to likely see it a second time... on theater cheap movie night...or if someone else is paying... after catching Ex Machina because it's higher on the to watch list. There were interesting points, even philosophically, but the sum of this movie from that perspective is "underdeveloped". I could see what Joss wanted, but ripping off HAL 9000 is apparently not Marvel's forte.
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~~~~~
I will say that while it wasn't a great film, I also wouldn't call it a bad film. It was entertaining (for me) from beginning to end, it just didn't resonate as strongly as the first Avengers did. It's not going to live on in my imagination like that one did, but I'll still bring it out for popcorn viewing.
I also think the sound was having problem in the my theater, and everything was way too quiet so I'm going to have to rewatch (on Blu-Ray) to say for sure - moments that felt like they should have a score emphasizing the feel of the scene just fell flat because of that.
And frnakly, while Ultron was funny at times, the menacing, sinister Ultron from the trailers just doesn't show up in the film. Instead, he's almost goofy.
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Still it's weird that Thanos is smiling when he just gave a trickster god an infinity stone in an attempt to gain another and failed at both.
I would say that is woefully inept, but then again, it's not like ANY Infinity Stone in this damn franchise has actually been well-guarded. Hell, in Guardians of the Galaxy, Quill finds one with really no defenses at all and nobody guarding it.
You're joking, right? After that schlock, you want an hour and ten minutes added to it?
Well the sequel is "Avengers: Infinity War Part 1." So no. There is exactly zero chance of them tightening the cast.
Especially since we all know this is going to culminate in a franchise-wide fight with Thanos.