A long form review originally posted in 2015:
I’ve just returned from two back-to-back viewings of Avengers: Age of Ultron , and I do not regret one bit going in for that second helping.
I lost my steam on the Age of Ultron wagon at a very inopportune moment. About three days before it came out. I was so heavily anticipating it for such a long time, that I was actually much more excited to see this movie when it was still two months away than I was waiting in line to get into the cinema it was playing at. The combination of the market-saturation and the fact that the _Ultron _hype-train has been running for literally years, with a first trailer dropping seven months before the damn thing came out, meant I got weary of the thing just a fraction too soon. But I’m a sucker for the MCU, and there was no way I was missing the sequel to my favourite superhero movie of all time.
I won’t harp on too much, because I don’t want to spoil anything (especially given that the movie isn’t even out in most parts of the world), I will put out a spoilertalk on this blog at some point down the line, but for now just let me leave you with a couple of quick thoughts.
Age of Ultron is not the best film of all time. It’s not the best superhero film of all time, it’s not even the best MCU film. Honestly, I personally feel it’s not even the best MCU Phase 2 film. But it is still good. And that’s what’s important here. But what do I mean by that?
Well, for starters, in and of itself, I loved it, a breach past an 80% approval rating from me is no small thing. The things we enjoyed from the first _Avengers_are here. The mesmerising action spectacles of course, but I more mean the character moments we got between the Avengers themselves, that was my favourite part of the first film and we get it here again in spades.
Every new thing Joss has added to the plate works splendidly as well, real Hawkeye story, new heroes, a new villain, an updated world, all of these things are big ticks in lots of boxes.
So if everything from The Avengers works and everything they’ve added works great too, why is Age of Ultron not a perfect film? For spoiler-free purposes I will not go into detail, but that’s okay because the answer is quite simple: Everything in Age of Ultron is great. It’s what’s not in Age of Ultron that’s the problem.
Joss Whedon said that the film had to be cut by nearly an hour. That way you get more showings in, and that means more money. Now I’m not saying we need every minute of that hour back, but what we ended up being left with, was just enough for Age of Ultron to be the Thor: The Dark World of the _Avengers _franchise (it was a far superior film to Dark World , but hear me out). Age of Ultron is little more than a holding pattern. The set-ups for future films take up too much time for the story to bear the weight of some actual story, but everything that occurs in the film itself somehow also has virtually no consequence on world it is a part of. I can’t say it more plainly than that: It’s a holding pattern. It introduces some stuff, but it doesn’t stand alone the first film did. It’s not such a big deal when the solo-movies do that (like the aforementioned Dark World ) because we have The Avengers films for those to pay off in. But when an Avengers entry is just more of the same, I can’t fully get behind it.
That all said, Age of Ultron is of course a lot of fun. A huge amount of fun, I can’t state that enough. And there’s literally nothing more important something in the entertainment industry can be. These are just the things holding it back from taking it up to the next level (or if I’m being completely honest, even taking it to the level the first film was at).
75%
-Gimly
