So now the biggest film of the year has been released. That movie is of course "Avengers: Age of Ultron". With how well received the first "Avengers" film was, both critically and financially, everyone had hopes for the sequel. For a lot of people, it lived up to those expectations. I...am not one of those people.
Now, let me just go ahead and say that I thought that this was a good movie. The cast does a great job as usual and the action is, as always, awesome. And yes, I thought the first "Avengers" was an awesome movie and I had high expectations for this film. However, it just fell short of those expectations.
First, let's go ahead and get the action part of the movie out of the way. This is the one area I felt they did a better job with. Now the action itself was just as good as the first "Avengers" movie, but this time around, there is a much better balance of plot and action. By that, there are more action scenes, and they are spread nicely throughout the film. To put it another way, I could count the number of action scenes in the first film on one hand. For "Age of Ultron", the number of action scenes can be counted on two hands.
It's a good thing that the action is as good as it is, since it saves the rest of the film from a plot that needed a lot more work and which clearly has sizable gaps. What do I mean by that? Well, the film takes on a more complex plot. It has more characters and a lot more plotlines to boot. Unfortunately, since there are so many of them, none of them are properly fleshed out and made compelling or interesting to care about any of them. Also, it seems like there are certain scenes and elements that seem to left on the cutting room. Because of that, elements of the film and certain scenes either show up with no explanation, or should've been prefaced by another scene. For an example of the former, I point to the actual Ultron program itself that Tony Stark and Bruce Banner had been working on. Apparently, he and Tony had been working it for quite some time. It comes out of nowhere, because these Marvel films usually have a post-credits scene that foreshadow a later film, but to my knowledge no such scene exists that eludes to the Ultron program. As for an example of scenes that seem to be missing, there is the scene in the film where Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch first meet Ultron, and the scene plays out as if they had planned this meeting. Two problems, though, first, in the scene, Ultron has a brand new body, but the last time we saw him, his original body had been destroyed, though his programming had spread throughout the world by that point. How was he able to build himself a new body and was he able to get in contact with Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch to plan their meeting? I don't know, but I suspect that explanation ended up being scrapped.
So for these reasons, "Avengers: Age of Ultron" ends up feeling like an incomplete film. An entertaining, incomplete film, but incomplete nonetheless. The first "Avengers" was definitely a complete film. It was simple and fun. This is fun as well, but is more complex, which I do appreciate, but the execution of that complexity leaves something to be desired. Overall, I enjoyed "Avengers: Age of Ultron", but I feel that it could've been much better. I give it a 7.5/10. It's a good movie.
