MORE Spoilery Wekk – “Avengers: Age of Ultron”

Kevin here. This is a kind of companion article to our podcast on “Avengers: Age of Ultron.” It’s more like a jumble of notes I scrawled out after I saw the film. Read them and digest them normally with at least eight glasses of water. And remember:

THERE ARE SPOILERS IN THESE HERE WATERS. TURN BACK IF’N YA HAVEN’T SEEN THE FILM.

1. In our podcast, I was the only one to maintain a less-than-upbeat opinion of the movie. Oh, I definitely enjoyed it, and I’ll be seeing it again, but I still maintain my B+ rating for the film. If I change that opinion, I will update the blog.

2. There was too much happening to really care about anything. Too many characters, too many cuts to this random Avenger uttering a witty line, then jump-cutting to another random Avenger… rinse, wash, repeat. All of this made me dizzy as if the film were trying to make me eat cereal past the point to where I could hold down no more food. The same happened in the film. Lucky I didn’t vomit.

3. What was the drink they were all handed after the Hydra battle? Should I have known what that was? I would have preferred them all to be handed bourbon or scotch and have them act like the characters on Mad Men or Archer.

4. Ultron was not as badass a villain as he was in the comics. I mean, James Spader did a great job, but he was less of a threat than his swarm of minion robots. And I know that the swarm is technically Ultron too, but it felt less menacing to me to see the minion bots attacking as opposed to seeing Ultron’s physical form attacked Iron Man.

5. The film gave the audience zero time to hate Ultron. Ultron literally took micro-seconds to turn evil. The “why” went by so fast that it was almost dismissed as extraneous information. In fact, so many things were expected to be digested so quickly that it was tiring, and I’ve probably forgotten the details on most of the battle scenes already.

6. I’m not sure how the Banner/Romanoff romance was necessary to the plot. There. I said it. It ended as it began, with neither character changed in any way. They just reset their brains to “brood” and moved on.

7. I was very disappointed that the the Avengers’ main beatdown was NOT caused by Ultron, but by Scarlet Witch’s bad dreams. Ultron’s badassery suffered since he never contributed to any of the Avengers’ suffering except through his extension minion-bots. And Scarlet Witch’s induced visions were simply foreshadowing of things to come than having any relevance to the main plot.

8. So, Ultron’s master plan was to turn a city into an object big enough to cause human extinction? Would that have really worked? I felt any object needed to be much bigger, or be it needed to be an object headed at Earth at an infinitely greater speed.

9. Introduce Quicksilver, then kill him off? Okay. Let me phrase this differently: Make us care about Quicksilver, and then shoot him 48 times? Where’s the logic in that? Was that done simply to create a pissed-off and brooding Scarlet Witch in future films? Yay! More Marvel brooding.

10. The Age of Ultron ending was quite anti-climactic to me. There was no build-up to Ultron’s defeat. He just gets shot with beams of energy and Scarlet Witch ripped his heart out. (Which, by the way, didn’t feel very emotional to me. Just sayin’.) Then The Vision talks to Ultron’s last remaining minion bot before destroying it. Not the most gripping climax, to be sure.

Conclusion:
I walked out of the theater feeling a bit unsatisfied. The CGI was great, the dialogue was witty and smart, and the film was a quality effort, but I felt two things: First, that there was just too much happening for me to care. Second, that it felt more like an extended teaser for The Infinity War. I felt like this should have been titled “Act II: Don’t Worry. The Real Movie We Want To Make Is Coming in Three Years.”

That’s some of my reactions. Tell us yours. What did you like about Age of Ultron? What did you not like? Write it up and leave a comment. And thanks for tuning in to Wekk Podcast.