The Road to Civil War - Avengers: Age of Ultron

With Captain America: Civil War less than a week away (for the UK; two, if you’re Stateside), I’ve gone back to rewatch some of the MCU movies leading up to it. The most directly-related, I figure, are Captain America: The First Avenger, The Avengers (or Avengers Assemble), Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Avengers: Age of Ultron, so those are the ones I’m going to be looking at. It’s been a while since I’ve seen most of these, so it’s interesting to revisit them with a new perspective: both the passage of time, and the knowledge of just how successful Marvel’s grand cinematic experiment actually turned out to be.

I previously reviewed Age of Ultron for this blog, but it's interesting to go back to it - both with a little bit of hindsight, and the lead-up movies fresh in mind.

Ultimately, Age of Ultron is a movie that I feel a little bit conflicted about; a lot of the sequences are great, and the dialogue is solid, zingy Whedon, but some of the character beats still feel odd, even if nothing is outright wrong.

This is now the third time I've seen it, and having previously watched it with the commentary track on, I think I understand better what Age of Ultron is attempting - even if I'm not sure it succeeded on all counts.


A few of the things that bugged me before still irritate, to some extent; having a "Prime Ultron" still doesn't work for me, sucking as it does some of the threat out of the idea of an unstoppable, identical army of hive-minded robots by giving you a VIP target. The final battle with the Ultron army is overlong, and filled with too much downtime, which pulls a lot of energy out of it.

The Vision's powers are still weird, but even an extra line of dialogue or two ("He's got an infinity stone in his head; who knows what his powers might be?") would hand-wave away most of the concern, even if it left the question of why the Mind Stone gives him the ability to fly, phase through matter, and shoot lasers.

Or why he has a cape.

Capes are in this year, darling.

Having said that, there are other things that bug me less - for example, the Maximoff twins have a much better arc than I gave the movie credit for last time around, and their motivations do mostly make sense - though I still don't get why, exactly, Wanda so interested in making sure Stark gets Loki's sceptre.

Hawkeye's farmhouse isn't as long and dragging a sequence as I thought, either - maybe knowing it's coming helped, but it's broken up into a lot of smaller character beats, so it works okay. The Natasha/Banner romance is still a little bit weird, as we've never really seen them spend a lot of time together, but it basically works.

Thor totally gets the short end of the narrative stick, though.

It's fine, I'll just stand here and look pretty.

One thing that I did notice, as far as the success of the Grand MCU Experiment goes, is how unimportant some of the other movies seem, at least as far as we've gotten; Phase One is all setup for the Avengers, but a lot of the Phase Two movies seem... unnecessary. Going through The Avengers, Winter Soldier, and now Age of Ultron, I don't feel like I missed any required reading.

In particular, Tony Stark's Iron Man 3 arc seems to have been completely forgotten - the loss and recovery of his confidence, learning to live without his tech, blowing up his entire suit collection? Forget about it. Not only is he back in the armor, it's his intent to one build "around the world" that leads to the creation of Ultron.

All told, I think that Ultron is a flawed creation - a little too indulgent here and there, but it works, and it's a decent way to spend two and a half hours.

Next: Captain America; Civil War