06 Nov Marvel Avengers: Age of Ultron
Last weekend Tom and I finally watched Marvel Avengers: Age of Ultron. Yes, I know, we are really late… Originally we wanted to watch it at the cinema, but if you have a baby at home (we wouldn’t have left him alone at home of course) and with the current cinema ticket prices (and costs of additional things like sweet popcorn or nachos and soft drinks of course), you’ll think twice about going.
In fact, we haven’t been going to the cinema for almost two years now. The last time we went was for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Yes, it was already this long ago. I was in my third month of pregnancy, where it was still possible to sit down longer than one hour or so without having to go to the bathroom XD. So with all of that we decided to just save the cinema and rather buy the BDs (that the shortening for Blu-ray Discs in case you didn’t know) instead when it’s out.
Source: Marvel Entertainment
I didn’t have any real expectations for this. I really liked and enjoyed the first Avengers movie and also most of the individual Hero movies from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Most of them, except for Iron Man 2, of course. Now I’m waiting for Ant-Man to come out next month on BD and Jessica Jones on Netflix later this month ^.^!
Before I continue talking about the movie, let me just clarify one thing: I’m not so much into comics (yet), so I don’t know that much about all the backgrounds of all characters in all the different universes. I love the stories and the heroes (and villains as well), but somehow reading these as comics just doesn’t appeal to me as much as I enjoy watching these stories as a movie or as a TV series or as reading manga for that matter, but I’ll leave that topic for another time. However let me assure that I do some research about the backgrounds because I’m pretty interested in it.
Okay, so back to the movie (Attention, might contain spoilers!):
After watching Age of Ultron, I didn’t really know what to think about this movie. As for an action movie, it was pretty entertaining, but it somehow felt a little bit too ambitious to me: Two many different characters and stories squeezed in so little time. Yes, we complain if they drag the stories out too long to make more than one movie out of a story, but we also complain if some things come to short. Perfectly paced movies became really rare in the recent years. Or is it just me?
But let’s start with the beginning: You were just thrown into the story, so I didn’t really have any time to think about what has happened in all those other movies before (ah yes, S.H.I.E.L.D. and Nick Fury and Iron Man and Captain America, ah yes, right…). I wonder how people who have never watched another of the Marvel movies before must have been confused…
I liked how they showed some more background on Black Widow, which was pretty interesting. But then there was this thing, eh… these strange feelings between Natasha and Bruce Banner, which seemed to come out of nowhere. As for myself, I always thought there was something going on between Black Widow and Hawkeye, but it seems like he had other plans and started a family somewhere in nowhere. Not that I would blame him. As for the most time of the movie he seemed to be the only normal person and I liked how he played a big part in bringing the others back to reality.
Then there was Ultron as the villain of the story. Mehhhh…. I know that Ultron is super important in the comics, but in the movie he just didn’t feel that threatening. Lifting a city in the sky and let it drop back down on the earth might have really bad consequences, but I don’t know if that is actually what we want to see in a superhero action movie. Of course, the Avengers alone couldn’t finish him off without getting a “good” A.I. on their side. But not after Thor had to get some “visions” in an underground lake in a dark cave. I really don’t know about that scene. It still doesn’t make any sense to me, but maybe I just missed something. So Vision was born and saved the day, hurray!
And last but not least Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver were introduced. I always wondered what both of them had to do with the whole story, as I always thought of them more as X-Men. I also thought that it is a fact that Magneto is their father, but then I watched this video and now I’m just confused about cows. No, I actually read and watched more about them and Ultron and Vision and now everything makes at least a bit more sense to me (except for the Thor scene of course!). I think both of them were really cool portrayed and just knowing how strong Scarlet Witch will be in the future makes it really interesting. I’m looking forward to how they will continue her/their story.
So altogether Marvel Avengers: Age of Ultron wasn’t a bad movie, I just have the impression that most characters and the stories behind them missed out quite a bit, leaving everything just pretty superficial. But the movie plot itself was pretty interesting and you could really feel how they started to introduce the first signs leading to “The Civil War” in the next Captain America movie. But until then there’s a lot more to watch.
What do you think about Age of Ultron? Did it do justice to its predecessor or the comics?