Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

[MekaGojira3k]

[jellydonut25]

[Dr Kain]

[jellydonut25]

[Dr Kain]

Can't comment on GotG because I never even heard of the group until the movie was announced. Still have never read a comic from the series ever and probably will not do so. Love the movie though.

Th thing with Tony is his mind was still messed with by Scarlet Witch. As such, he may not be thinking straight still. Plus, do you really think he is going to show how much he cares about Jarvis to the rest of the team? He never had any screen time by himself alone, so we have no idea what he was like on the inside.

DC couldn't even get Jonah Hex right. And Zack Snyder has no idea who Superman is supposed to be. As such, the movies are not going to be even remotely well written. It is not Marvel fanboysm. Hell, I am the last person you should be calling a Marvel fanboy. Until last month, I hadn't read a single Marvel comic since One More Day and even then, I haven't touched a non-Spider-Man Marvel comic since 2004, if that. I am a DC fan. I will always take DC over Marvel. However, DC has shown me they know next to nothing about making a movie that isn't Batman, and given how much they hate color, and they hate taking their time to build up a movieverse, and they couldn't even make something as simple as Jonah Hex properly, there is no way I could expect them to handle an entire movieverse. Not to mention they are starting to screw over their top notch TV series with their assnine movieverse.

BTW, what are the five good X-Men movies? There is only X2, First Class, and DoFP from my count.

And yes, the movie is still well written. It's issues have nothing to do with the writing but the editing.

Well... okay, Strucker was poorly written, but that was about it.

[jellydonut25]

I like the original X-Men movie, warts and all. And The Wolverine is a good Wolverine movie. I still count that as "X-Men" since it's an X-Man.

[XvGojira]

[Hybrid Gojira]

Some of the gripes in this thread are certainly accurate, but I was so entertained throughout the movie I simply didn't care. The humor was great. The fight scenes were fun. I can agree that Ultron isn't exactly the most engaging villain, but he worked well enough and there was quite a bit of character development elsewhere that it never bothered me. This movie is FUN. To me, that's what matters.

[mr.negativity]

The director reveals that he wanted to include Spider-Man in the film, to no avail.
As it turns out, Avengers: Age of Ultron's battles didn't only happen on screen.

[Benjamin Haines]

I'm glad I read so much negative buzz about this movie before going to see it. I went in expecting a bloated mess but I actually thought this was even better than the first Avengers. There is a whole lot that happens here but I didn't find the intricate plot hard to follow or understand. Maybe rewatching all of the 10 previous MCU films over the past few weeks helped with that. This movie would probably be super confusing to people who haven't seen a Marvel movie since The Avengers three years ago and I can see that hampering the box office take in the long run.

I loved this portrayal of Ultron. There's a real sense of madness to him. Every time he talks to himself or another character we get a glimpse into the jittery inner workings of his synthesized mind. James Spader really sells Ultron's scatterbrained insanity as he comes to terms with his sudden existence by setting out to carve his mark on the world. From the moment Ultron's consciousness comes into being he's like a nightmare version of JARVIS and that continues when both artificial intelligences graduate to physical robot forms. Ultron likens his own creation by Stark to parents creating children; by that measure, Vision is like the ultimate well-behaved child while Ultron is like a kid who grew unrestrained and without guidance from the instant he was born. I think the dynamic presented by those two characters is one of the film's highlights.

Ultron's plot to use a Sokovian city as a meteor to cause global extinction is just fantastic. The MCU has really grown from the point when a mere flying aircraft carrier was considered outlandish.

[XvGojira]

[jellydonut25]

So, I've been chewing on this movie more and more, discussing it with people and here's where I am really starting to come down.

The TL;DR version: It's just too bloated for me. Too much going on. SOMETHING should have been cut in terms of one of the sub-plots for the flow of the movie.

The longer explanation:
Whedon just got lazy with this one.
...and man, I hesitate to use the word "lazy" but it's the lazy way of saying you could really tell everything he said about being burned out is just totally true.

It had four years in development, script-wise. Whedon didn't have anything else to work on in the time between Avengers 1 and 2 and since he just undermines and thrusts aside the plots and character arcs of the various Phase 2 movies, it's not like we can even make the argument that he had to wait for those movies to worry about what they would do.

Maybe I'm putting too much on AoU. It's a fun, fine movie in its own self-contained little bubble, even though it is unnecessarily lengthy and has too many subplots for its own good, it's only SUPPOSED to be a stupid, fun movie with no higher purpose or message or gravitas.
I think that's really the only thing that saves the movie from just completely collapsing under the weight of its writing gaffes and convolutions.


Maybe I've been too hard on Whedon....but honestly, I'd just rather see certain subplots completely OMITTED instead of being given bizarre, momentum-halting moments that don't seem to have any purpose for being in the movie and give me this weird feeling for like 45 minutes that no scene built off the previous scene because he wanted to try to put in EVERYTHING instead of just trying to make a cohesive movie.
Nothing about Black Widow, or Hawkeye, or Banner, or Thor's waterobics really sets up other movies.

I liked all the Banner/Hulk stuff, but I personally would rather have had 90% of Ruffalo's Bruce moments just left on the cutting room floor for the sake of a briefer, more fun, better flowing movie. And that was my favorite subplot because we can't/won't get other Hulk solo movies.
I'd rather Whedon just wholly left stuff out instead of trying to leave everything in. Like Black Widow's training program, dude needs to learn to kill his babies.

If there's gonna be an extended version, then I'd just rather the theatrical release FLOWS instead of being a jumbled mess of scenes stitched together from the corpses of a 4-hour movie. Leave some of the unnecessary (and I mean WHOLLY UNNECESSARY, not the stuff that sets up future movies) stuff just completely off and let the movie FLOW.

I'm starting to agree it's an error of trying too hard (to cram in everything), but I still think it was kind of "how LITTLE can I cut and still leave in everything?" instead of "what should I just cut out completely?" which is what I think it should have been.

Especially since to me now, the 3.5 hour version or whatever probably won't add something COMPELTELY new, it'll just take longer to do what the 2.5 hour version does a poorer job of doing. I dunno if that makes sense, but kinda like DOFP had the sense to just excise Rogue except for a BRIEF cameo, I wish Whedon had the sense to just completely leave something out, so the extended version could really, truly add something NEW, and the theatrical version wouldn't seem SO haphazard.

[XvGojira]

[Shin_Edda_Robo!!!!!]

Saw this movie.

Damn...I uh... this movie felt like a mess at times. I'm a guy who watches Power Rangers/Super Sentai, Shaw Brothers Kung Fu movies, whatnot where the badguys outnumber the good guys by huge ridiculous margins.

However, they never looked messy. It was big and congested, but the cinematography, ESPECIALLY in the Shaw Brothers movies looked superb. It was crowded, but it never felt messy. You could tell what was going on.

When the Avengers were fighting those hordes of Ultron putties I lost track of what was going on.

But that isn't the only problem I had. Just too many things going on in the story to keep track off, and in some parts the movie just drags.

It wasn't a BAD movie per say. But it could have been much better. It's going to make a "OH GODZILLA! WHAT TERRIBLE LANGUAGE!" of money either way.

[Benjamin Haines]

[jellydonut25]

Re Infinity War predictions:


As for the 2.5 years thing...I think that may have been the OFFICIAL announcement, but was there ever any doubt Whedon would return? Did he spend the 1.5 years before that time NOT thinking about any potential storylines? And anyway, it's not like 2.5 years is a short schedule.

I get that we're starting to see/hear a lot about how much studio interference there was, but I also think there's still fault to lay down on both sides of things. I think Whedon really bristles at studio interference and Marvel wants/needs their directors to be open to lots of notes from Feige and the other producers. The story of the Thor pool really gets that across, to me. The way it reads to me is: Whedon didn't want to do it at all, the producers said "No you have to set up Ragnarok and Infinity War" so he did it begrudgingly, then when it screened poorly they were like "Okay, you can take it out now if you want" and he was like "well, not the editors are telling me not to just completely take it out, so screw it"
I think that attitude of Whedon just bristling against these studio notes and not wanting to deal with it comes across in the movie, and though it's easy/common to just shout at the studio to leave the artists alone to make their movie, it actually sounds like Marvel is going about it the right way "Here, TRY this, because we want to see it in there and if it doesn't work THEN you can cut it, no harm done other than a couple hours or whatever of a shoot lost"

[Benjamin Haines]

[Tom R VanSlambrouck]

I agree with you prediction Ben.

After Infinity Wars where does the MCU go? Hopefully by that time Marvel has the rights back to FF and X-men or at least can strike a deal with Fox to include them in a Secret Wars movie.

[Mysterio]

I guess I can sum up my feelings this way... In almost every movie I see, even the ones I enjoy, there are things I would do differently or that I can entirely pick apart. I enjoyed this movie a lot, but for a movie I enjoyed this much it probably had the most things I would do differently had it been up to me. a bit of a mess, a bit nonsensical at times, plot points glossed over or rushed. I still was able to sit back and enjoy it for the comic book spectacle that it was. We didn't get this stuff when I was a kid.

Being a team-based movie I'm entirely ok with the deeper character development being saved for the movies for the individual characters wherever possible. I don't mind that it's a long movie, heck I wish it were longer, and I'm looking forward to getting an extended edition. Hopefully some things won't seem so rushed or vague.

Even though the Ultron hordes were handled differently than the Chitauri army from the first Avengers movie I really wish they wouldn't resort to the "huge mass of tissue-paper weak enemies" any more. I think a smaller group of tougher enemies that can really put up a fight could do the trick just as well.

[Hybrid Gojira]

[Mysterio]

[Hybrid Gojira]

[MekaGojira3k]

I'm thinking this general structure on Infinity War is probably right. I'm also hoping we get glimpses of Xandar and other places getting jacked up.

Another thing....can there not be an army? Can it just be one dude beating the Avengers senseless?

[jellydonut25]

[klen7]

That is one of the things I liked about Ronan in GoTG.