Avengers: Age of Ultron is 2015 production from Marvel Studios, written and directed by Joss Whedon. The movie brings about every Marvel hero we know of to till this point together in one movie. That means everybody is present, including Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner and Samuel L. Jackson.
The main villain is voiced by actor James Spader, who stars alongside a few new or minor returning characters and their actors, including Don Cheadle, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany, Anthony Mackie, Idris Elba and Andy Serkis. The movie scores a 7.3/10 on IMDb and received a 66 Metascore.
A Summary
Age of Ultron sees all the Avengers return, or rather continue, in their hunt for Loki’s sceptre. HYDRA remnants have set up base in Sokovia, where the Avengers manage to retrieve the sceptre, but they also find twins with some extraordinary powers. Back at the Avengers Tower, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) uses the sceptre for his world-saving AI program: Ultron (voiced by James Spader).
Ultron unknowingly takes over Stark’s computer systems and attack the Avengers when they’re having a party. Ultron leaves with the sceptre, back to Sokovia where he meets up with the twins, Pietro (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) Maximoff. They saw Stark Industry’s weapons destroying their hometown and have wanted vengeance ever since.
The Avengers run into Ultron again at the base of arms dealer Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis), where Ultron tries to retrieve vibranium, the strongest metal on Earth. Wanda causes trouble for the Avengers as she uses her powers to show Natasha “Black Widow” Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Steve “Captain America” Rogers (Chris Evans) and Bruce “Hulk” Banner (Mark Ruffalo) their worst fears.
They retreat to a safe house, which turns out to be Clint “Hawkeye” Barton (Jeremy Renner) house. None of the Avengers, except Romanoff, knew that he had family, but he has a pregnant wife and two kids. While Thor leaves to find answers, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) shows up. He tries to rally the team to fight against Ultron once more.
Meantime, Ultron wants to upload his program into a new body, made from vibranium and harnessing the power of the Mind Stone. The Avengers show up to stop this and manage to take the half-finished body as well as the twins who turned on Ultron after discovering his true plans: Creating a mass extinction event. Tony then uses the body to upload JARVIS into, creating Vision (Paul Bettany).
Together with Vision and the Maximoff twins the Avengers head to Sokovia, where Ultron will lift the city and then drop it to the ground. A long fight follows where the Avengers mainly try to keep the civilians safe. However, when the city is high up in the sky, the civilians can’t be saved. At that point, Nick Fury shows with backup: A Helicarrier and James “War Machine” Rhodes (Don Cheadle).
Almost everybody is on board the carrier when a drone of Ultron manages to activate the drop of the city. Wanda, who needed to prevent just that, was busy taking revenge on Ultron, killing his primary body. She gets saved by Vision as Thor and Stark blow up the landmass. The world is saved again and Fury begins a new Avengers base, where Romanoff and Rogers are tasked with training the recruits: War Machine, Vision, Falcon (Anthony Mackie) and Wanda, whose brother got shot while protecting Hawkeye earlier.
The Story
The movie’s main overarching storyline is quite interesting, although not that original it keeps me interested in seeing how it pans out. However, within the movie, there are too many smaller storylines that need exploring. I feel like they tried too hard to cram as many heroes into one movie as possible. While it certainly releases the inner kid in me who enjoys seeing his favourite heroes appear on the screen. From a story perspective, it brought the movie down.
I feel like Whedon tried to teach us a lot of new stuff about the universe, information that foreshadows upcoming events, like Thor’s vision about the Infinity Stones and their capabilities. But it also tried to show us the relationship struggle between Romanoff-Banner-Barton that already was teased during earlier movies. Although, I still don’t see why Natasha is so interested in Bruce out of nowhere, while it seemed they we’re going to set her up with Clint.
The story of the twins, Wanda and Pietro Maximoff, is swiftly touched upon but lacks the real depth to get us invested in the characters. This made me didn’t mind the death of Pietro, which to me also seems a weird choice. His character is brand new and gets killed within one movie, while there are many other options on the team, characters who already had an arc which could be completed. Now it just seems that Quicksilver didn’t matter enough to Marvel to keep around.
Alongside the Infinity Stones, we seem to get a setup for the Civil War movie, with tensions growing within the team and especially between Captain America and Iron Man. I do have some positives as well, for example, the introduction to Wakanda with Ulysses was greatly made as well as Vison’s introduction to the universe.
The Story
The movie’s main overarching storyline is quite interesting, although not that original it keeps me interested in seeing how it pans out. However, within the movie, there are too many smaller storylines that need exploring. I feel like they tried too hard to cram as many heroes into one movie as possible. While it certainly releases the inner kid in me who enjoys seeing his favourite heroes appear on the screen. From a story perspective, it brought the movie down.
I feel like Whedon tried to teach us a lot of new stuff about the universe, information that foreshadows upcoming events, like Thor’s vision about the Infinity Stones and their capabilities. But it also tried to show us the relationship struggle between Romanoff-Banner-Barton that already was teased during earlier movies. Although, I still don’t see why Natasha is so interested in Bruce out of nowhere, while it seemed they we’re going to set her up with Clint.
The story of the twins, Wanda and Pietro Maximoff, is swiftly touched upon but lacks the real depth to get us invested in the characters. This made me didn’t mind the death of Pietro, which to me also seems a weird choice. His character is brand new and gets killed within one movie, while there are many other options on the team, characters who already had an arc which could be completed. Now it just seems that Quicksilver didn’t matter enough to Marvel to keep around.
Alongside the Infinity Stones, we seem to get a setup for the Civil War movie, with tensions growing within the team and especially between Captain America and Iron Man. I do have some positives as well, for example, the introduction to Wakanda with Ulysses was greatly made as well as Vison’s introduction to the universe.
The Characters
The Avengers
Most of the Avengers lack depth in this movie. As I touched upon, the movie is overfilled with superheroes and stories. I feel like Clint Barton was one of the only characters who got enough screentime to produce a good story. And we got one, an introduction to his family, whom the Avengers knew nothing about proved to be an interesting addition to this movie.
Tony and Steve went on where they left on during The Avengers, always arguing. That tension led to a small fight during the scene where Vision was created, a fight that was bound to happen with the rising tensions in the team. That proved to be one of the better story arcs during this movie.
Ultron
Ultron is one of the worst villains ever written in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. His goal to destroy the world is no different than any other villain we’ve seen. He has no backstory as he was created during this movie and he lacks the screentime to create an interesting story for himself. His ability to transport through the internet proved to be interesting, but he never used it to such an extent that it proved beneficial to his cause.
The Production
With this being one of the pillar movies of the MCU, starring loads of it most famous characters and actors for that sense, it only makes sense that the movie would boast a high production value. The special effects were on point, although I felt that I’ve seen silver-coloured enemies before.
On the writing part of the movie, however, I was less intrigued. The writing lacked real depth and often felt forced upon us as filler texts. Especially the lines in between battle scenes were just weird and made not much sense. I also felt it was a bit cheap to reproduce a famous scene from an earlier movie. The scene where the Avengers line up in a circle was almost exactly copied.