Well we're back on earth and just in time to see Earth's greatest heroes take down a menace that is entirely the fault of Tony Stark and Bruce Banner. But since this is the first movie that actually expands on Clint Barton AKA Hawkeye as a character and not just "that one guy with the bow and arrows" I'll toss in the link to his debut appearance in the 616 universe before we get to the movie itself.
http://atopthefourthwall.com/tales-of-suspense-57/
We waste absolutely no time as we open on the Avengers attacking a Hydra base in the Eastern European country of Sokovia to capture Baron Strucker and recover Loki's scepter. But not before Wanda and Pietro Maximoff demonstrate their newly perfected powers and lay the Avengers out like a mat. Pietro by running over them with his super speed and Wanda screws around with Tony's egg salad to make him see his greatest fear, the Avengers dead, the Chitauri invading Earth and him still alive unable to do anything with Cap's last words to him being "you could have saved us, why didn't you do more?" Nevertheless the team recovered the scepter, Strucker is taken into custody and in four days time Thor will return the scepter to Asgard so there's only one thing left to do, party like it's 1999! But before the festivities Tony and Bruce discover that there's an A.I inside of the scepter, one so advanced that Tony believes that if the two harness it properly, they could finally create their perfect global peace keeping program; Ultron.
Bruce smartly argues that messing around with alien tech is kind of nuts but Tony's vision coupled with his desire to end the Avengers by creating a world that wouldn't need them (peace in our time as he puts it) convinces him to pressure Bruce to help harness the A.I from the scepter. While the party goes on the scepter brings Ultron to life, granting him full sentience and sapience. But instead of a peace keeping program he instead becomes a genocidal A.I with a god complex and daddy issues voiced by James Spader. After spreading himself all over the internet and destroying Tony's A.I. J.A.R.V.I.S (played by Paul Bettany) he cobbles together a body from scraps of Tony's Iron Legion drone bots to crash the party and declare his mission to his creator. That being "peace in our time" and after all he's seen and learned on the internet and seeing all of humanity's history of war and chaos, he declares that to achieve his mission, the Avengers must die.
While they're successful at stoping Ultron's initial attack it was just a stalling tactic while he stole the scepter and transferred his consciousness to Strucker's base that was building thousands of mass produced drones and a new larger, stronger body for himself. Once he finished he called out the twins so they can see the fruits of their labor, their way of getting revenge against Tony Stark. What did he do this time? Well apparently the two were trapped under a Stark industries missile for two days straight when they were children, scared to death that any second could be their last and now seeing Tony and the Avengers acting as heroes? That was more then they could stomach, so they volunteered for Strucker's experiments with the scepter and now they have their powers and Ultron to exact their revenge.
Their first act was killing Strucker in his cell and deleting all of his data from the net to keep his contacts quiet. Specifically Ulysses Klawe, and his supply of Vibranium that he stole from Wakanda. The trio pay him a visit at his hideout off the African coast and after a deal involving cuttlefish and literally disarming Klawe the trio engage the Avengers. During the fight Wanda gets inside of Cap, Thor and Widows heads forcing them to see what they fear. For Widow it was her reliving her training in the Red room, Steve sees the life he could have had, partying and dancing with Carter back at the end of WW2 and Thor sees Ragnarok, also something else he couldn't make out.
While Tony engages Ultron he tells Tony that he's not only getting away with all of Klawe's Vibranium but that the Hulk is on a rampage in the nearby city thanks to Wanda's mind games. After Tony suits up with the Hulkbuster and pacifies the emerald eradicator the team is devastated, not only is the world afraid of the Hulk after tearing through a populated city like a linebacker the team is still shaken up after having to see their deepest fears. So Clint flies the Quinjet to a safe house off of S.H.I.E.L.D's files, his house in the middle of nowhere with his wife and kids. But Thor still can't get his mind off of the visions he had during his nightmare. So he goes to Dr Selvig to find a pool that would let him see the visions again to get more answers behind what he saw.
Back at the farm tensions run high between Tony and Steve about Tony creating Ultron and Steve's disappointment with Tony going behind the teams back. While Tony is in the barn he's confronted by Fury who adds "created a homicidal A.I" to his ongoing list of "how many times Tony Stark has screwed up" and tells the team to get their shit together and what they're up against. They also theorize what Ultron is going to do, evolve the human form. Elsewhere Ultron takes over the labs of Avengers ally Dr Helen Cho (played by Claudia Kim) in Seoul and uses the scepter to take control of her and her staff. He needs her synthetic tissue technology to create his vision of the perfect humanoid form using the Vibranium as the base and the Mind Stone inside of the scepter to store all of his data.
But as he begins downloading into his new body Wanda is able to see inside of his mind and learns what Ultron's goal is, to cause an extinction level event and wipe out humanity. After this she frees Helen from the Mind Stone's control and sabotages the transfer while notifying the Avengers where they are and she and Pietro escape forcing Ultron to take his new body with him. Steve, Hawkeye and Natasha manage to steal the body from Ultron during the preceding chase. During his fight with Captain America Wanda and Pietro turn against Ultron since they realized that he's basically Robo-Satan. However he still manages to capture Natasha and get away leaving the stasis pod for his new body in the hands of the two that created him in the first place.
Back at Avengers tower Tony reveals that J.A.R.V.I.S is still functional and he decides to turn this would be Predacon into a Maximal by inserting J.A.R.V.I.S into the body. After Steve, Wanda and Pietro try to stop the upload Thor finishes the job, resulting in Vision; neither J.A.R.V.I.S nor Ultron, but his own being. After Thor explains about the Infinity Stones, Vision proving his trustworthiness by being able to lift Mjolnir, Tony uploading his new A.I. F.R.I.D.A.Y (played by Kerry Condon) to replace J.A.R.V.I.S and Clint receiving a destress call from Natasha the team heads over to Sokovia to stop Ultron once and for all. He's at the end of his rope and has used the remaining Vibranium to create massive engines to lift the capital city high enough into the stratosphere and send it crashing down destroying all of humanity as a makeshift meteor. Yet this still makes more sense for an extinction level event then the opening of Power Rangers Dino Charge.
So after Vision shuts Ultron's consciousness out of the net to just his own network and most of the civilians are evacuated the Avengers get to work destroying Ultron's army. The day is saved but not without casualties, such as Pietro who gave his life to save Clint and Vision destroying the last Ultron unit. As well as some of the civilians who couldn't make it out of the city before Ultron took it for a joyride. But who's going to be sore about that eh, I mean you know what they say about eggs and omelettes right? After the fight the Hulk takes the Quinjet into stealth mode and shuts down all coms so nobody can track him.
With all said and done the movie ends with the Avengers setting up a new base in Upper New York and Tony deciding to retire from being Iron Man (again). Thor then goes back to Asgard to do more research on the Infinity Stones, thanks to the visions he knows where the four from the previous movies are so now he's off to find the other two. As for Cap, he's home and has a new group of Avengers to work with, including Vision and Wanda. Though speaking of the Stones, our end credits scene has Thanos putting on the Infinity Gauntlet and decides that if you want something done right, do it yourself.
So that was Age of Ultron and after the breath of fresh air and energy that was Guardians of the Galaxy this was basically the first Avengers though without all the new wow factor the first one had going for it. I mean it was all still good as with most of this franchise but it just kind of felt like a rehash without really giving us something we haven't seen before. Now don't get me wrong there were some good things about this movie, its just that marathoning all of these movies back to back, and having to recap and break them down week after week is starting to get to me. But like I said there were parts that I really liked and others, while still good is just stuff that we've seen before.
Positives first I really liked the party scene before Ultron showed up. Just seeing these characters chilling out, having a good time, being pals it was just fun. I really liked the scene where everyone was trying to lift Mjolnir, not only was it just a fun sequence and great set up for Vision's trustworthiness later on (what we call Checkov's gun) but also showed that Steve actually got the hammer to budge just a little bit. I also really liked seeing the members' personal nightmares, Tony seeing his friends dead because he failed to do more, Steve seeing what he could have had and Natasha having her life stolen from her and raised into a killing machine. Also there was the after effects of those visions at Clints house, where Steve is finding it harder to trust Tony, Widow reliving her horrid past and Bruce completely losing control of the Hulk.
Though speaking of; that brings us to Thor's vision and his side quest to find the pool. Or as the Blockbuster Buster so eloquently called it, the Jacuzzi of exposition. This subplot was only there in the movie to set up Thor Ragnarok and give exposition on the Infinity Stones recovered so far. Apparently Joss Whedon was forced to include that subplot at the demands of Marvel, otherwise he would have had to have cut out Black Widow's nightmare scenes. Because of this Thor couldn't take part in the farm sequence which cost us some serious character development for him.
We once again see that Tony is once again the cause of all of this, not just by creating Ultron but his weapons nearly killing the twins set them off on their revenge quest on the man who indirectly killed their family. But does he own up to it? In later movies, yes but not before doubling down and creating Vision, sure it worked out in the end but he could have just as easily made another monster in that instance. So when we see him retiring at the end I figured it was for the best, but then Civil War happened and he's back out in the field though it looks like some of the lessons he's learned has finally started to stick.
As for the villains it honestly felt like the twins were just included into this movie as people for Ultron to ramble about his plans and motivations with. I mean they had a good reason why they wanted to destroy the Avengers it just felt excessive. Though I was honestly surprised that they were even in this movie in the first place regarding the situation with the X-Men movie rights at the time, though the changes Marvel made for the movie at least made it so they weren't out of place in regards to the MCU. But then again Mutants in the Marvel universe just don't make sense when you stop and think about it, I mean the Fantastic Four, Captain America and Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers) were mutated but you don't see the hate groups chasing them down do you? (At least not as far as I can tell.)
Ultron himself is the perfect idiot. An A.I who was alive for over a week and after surfing the web thinks that he can just wipe out humanity and do it better, his plan is not only insane but just plain stupid. He's a pretentious tin tyrant who thinks he knows best when really he only knows how to do two things, destroy and make snarky quips. But that honestly makes him fun to watch, he's an unrepentant psychopath who honestly thinks that he could do better then an entires species, he's all knowledge but no wisdom. And sometimes we just need someone like that get their shiny metal asses kicked.
Age of Ultron at the end of the day just felt like a retread of the first Avengers movie. While that's not a bad thing it just meant more of the same, and a little too safe for my tastes. It did its job of bringing the characters and audience up to speed with the Infinity stones and got the necessary set up for Phase 3 out of the way. But before we get to Phase 3 we still have one last movie to cover. As the next steps on the march to infinity may be tiny; they can still pack a very big punch.
Special thanks to my Patreon backer Jesse for his support.
Avengers Age of Ultron is owned by Marvel Studios, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures and is written by Joss Weadon. Based off the Characters created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
Rick and Morty is owned by Justin Rolland, Dan Harmon, Justin Roiland's Solo Vanity Card Productions, Harmonious Claptrap, Starburns Industries, and Williams Street
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