This film review has been submitted by Ryan Mitra for the CLATGyan Blog Post Writing Competition. If you think it’s a good read, ‘Like’ the article on Facebook (the button is at the bottom of this piece) or post a comment using the ‘Comments’ section below.
Confusing. Avengers has returned to the cinemas to leave the audience awe-inspired but honestly it kind of left me confused. Avengers: Age of Ultron is an extremely powerful, action-filled spectacle, without a purpose. Throughout the movie, the viewer will be in awe of seeing comic-inspired characters come to life and will be spell-bound with the mind blowing animation, that they’ll overlook the fact that the plot only moves because of an obsessive fit of the villain, Ultron.
The movie starts with The Avengers raiding through Wolfgang von Strucker’s (Played by Thomas Kretschmann) base looking for Loki’s sceptre, which was shown in his possession in the post-credit scene of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The movie starts with an epic battle scene that grips the viewers right from the start. With Captain America AKA Steve Rogers (Played by Chris Evans), picking up his motor cycle and throwing it like a rock, to Hulk turning back to Bruce Banner (Played by Mark Ruffalo) with a lullaby and weird hand-touching by Black Widow (Played by Scarlett Johanson). It has it all. Iron Man AKA Tony Stark (Played by Robert Downey Jr.) is at his sarcastic best. The movie quickly introduces two new characters to the story, Quicksilver (Played Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Scarlett Witch (Played Elizabeth Olsen). They are shown as results of successful results of human experimentations which is egregiously wrong compared to their origin in the comics. Quicksilver’s origin especially bugged me a lot because Quicksilver is the son of one of the most prominent villains, Magneto. But when you think of it, the movie wouldn’t be the same without the two and Elizabeth Olsen was my second favourite actor in the movie.
After retrieving, the sceptre, Tony convinces Thor (Played by Chris Hemsworth) to let him keep the sceptre for three days. Stark and Banner discover that the sceptre had the ability to think on its own and believed that this was the key to artificial intelligence. Stark is shown to be completely out of his depth. He asks Jarvis (Voiced by Paul Bettany) to keep running tests and we see, one of the tests is successfully applied to one of the bots and voila! Ultron (Voiced by James Spader *starts drooling*) is born. Ultron manages to cripple Jarvis and completely annihilate him. Honestly from this point, the movie started to take a slow spiral down story-wise. The movie is full of comic-satire and puns and hilarious interjections. But after a while, it gets a little difficult to bear. The movie has loads of references from the past movies and links via back-stories and scenes. Like when The Maximoffs (Quicksilver and Scarlett Witch) narrate their story to Ultron, about how they say a missile sit in the rubble with only one name on it, Stark. Well in Iron Man 1, Tony went through something similar. Only in his case, the missile actually blew up in his face. With loads of tid-bits in dialogues from old movies. Avengers 2 gives us a refreshing new change in Marvel movies. Also, it was recently reported that there was an unrealised Star Wars Easter egg in all Marvel movies. Like in every Star Wars movie, a character has to get his arms chopped off, it’s the same in all Marvel movies. But only in this movie, it’s a little more special. Klaw is a black-arms dealer who sells Ultron vibratium and then gets his arm chopped off by the same, by mistake of course. (You gotta watch the scene to understand the comic value, it’s hilarious.) But Klaw is played by none other than the legend, Andy Serkis. Yes, the Andy Serkis from Star Wars. Yes, so, a Stars Wars character got his arm chopped off in a Marvel flick. Take a moment, to let that sink in.
Ultron’s character starts off with a bang, with suave, class and overwhelming confidence. And with Spader’s ‘butter on a hot pan’ voice, he just couldn’t get better. In the trailer, Ultron is shown as this omnipotent villain, which is coherent with the comics. In one of the series, Ultron actually breaks Captain’s sheild and kills all the Avengers. But as the movie progresses, his character seems to lose the patience and equanimity he had in the start, which is understandable because the Avengers have to win. But this was a huge cross in my books because Ultron is a very powerful being and not as vulnerable as shown in this film.
A very intriguing part of the movie was the birth of a new character, The Vision (Played by Paul Bethany). The vision is an android is the brain child of Ultron, but has Jarvis’ program in him and has his own conscience. He also has an infinity stone, in his forehead, which makes him one of the most powerful beings in the universe. The Vision in the comics is Green in color but, in this movie, they haven’t stuck to do that. Talking about infinity stones, there are loads of Guardians of the Galaxy references and also Thanos wearing the Infinity Gauntlet in the mid-credit scene and saying he was going to do the job his pawns couldn’t finish. For all those who don’t know, Thanos is arguably the strongest character in the Marvel Universe.
The final action scene is as usual mind-blowing. I’m not going to describe it because I want you to experience it first hand. Jeremy Reener who played Hawkeye/Agent Barton, is the best actor for me in this movie. He has managed to do complete justice to the role and the character felt more natural to him than Tony Stark to RDJ. There were various parts of the movie that were unexplained or unnecessary. The animation as usual was mind-blowing. I believe Disney can create anything a human can imagine. What I didn’t like about this movie was that the main villain loses the zeal of his own goals, and what is a villain without a goal, a thug. Only one villain can be a villain without a goal, and that’s The Joker. The origin stories of many characters where shown, and all of them in my honest opinion were horrible and disappointing. Also, the movie somehow doesn’t show too much scope of connection to the next movie except for references to the ‘past incidents’. So that’s where the movie also lost out. Joss Whedon though has done a mind-blowing job with the script and direction of the film and it’s an absolute treat for a non-comic book reader.
My rating for Avengers: Age of Ultron – 7.7/10
