Movie Review: The Avengers -- Age of Ultron

The Avengers: Age of Ultron opened last April 22 much to the delight of many a geek. Here is this geek's reactions. SPOILERS AHEAD


By itself, The Avengers: Age of Ultron (AoU) is pretty much what one would expect from a contemporary superhero movie: Lots of fun comicbook action, explorations into the characters and motivations of the heroes, a really scary antagonist (though I can't help but see less of Ultron and more of The Blacklist's Raymond Reddington (the latter being a frighteningly chaotic neutral character), and an epic battle where you're not very sure if the good guys will win or who will die in the fight (I blame Game of Thrones for this uncertainty). Call me shallow, but these are good points in the movie that made me enjoy the adventures of Earth's Mightiest Heroes.

But that is not to say that the movie has no depth. I particularly enjoyed Cap's insight when he said something along the lines of, "Any attempt to win a war before it starts always lead to more people getting killed" when he argued against Iron Man's Machiavellian approach to world security. There is also the exploration of Hawkeye's family life, which is, for me, an interesting contrast to the lone-hero-cannot-have-a-family-because-it-is-too-dangerous trope of contemporary action TV and cinema. Hawkeye's insecurity about "walking among gods" mirrors that of Tony Stark's in Iron Man 3 and gives good insight into his character. I would love to see Black Widow's/Natasha Romanov's take on that, as someone who is not a metahuman.   

But of course, it is not without its flaws. Ever since the first The Avengers movie, I've reveled in how well Earth's Mightiest Heroes have been translated into movie form. Adding excitement to that is the way all of Marvel Studios' releases are set in the common Marvel Cinematic Universe. So it is not much of a stretch to connect events from Marvel's Agents of SHIELD to Thor: The Dark World and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and how events in The Avengers lead to Tony Stark's frame of mind in Iron Man 3. It was because of this interconnection in the MCU that made The Avengers: Age of Ultron (AoU) slightly disappointing in its seeming disjointedness from the current MCU narrative:

First is Iron Man. When Iron Man 3 ended, Tony Stark practically quit being Iron Man and there has been no indication in any MCU release after that (that I've seen) that he "bounced back" to put on his metal suit again, much less create an Iron Legion. To be fair, some of his sentiments from Iron Man 3 still surface, especially in his desire to end the fighting once and for all andAnother is the opening scenes where the Avengers were staging a full-scale assault on a Hydra base. In Agents of SHIELD, Hydra is still fairly disembodied and playing well the anti-SHIELD sentiment it created with its emergence in The Winter Soldier. True, Coulson managed to orchestrated a play that wiped out the heads of Hydra, but nowhere is there any indication that anyone, much less the Avengers, is going after Hydra.

All these aside, AoU is a pretty good movie. Not that epic-great, but not so bad either. It is a movie I wouldn't mind seeing again, but I would not go out of my way to do so.