Isn't it why we fight? So we can end the fight and go home?

This is my review of Avengers – Age of Ultron

There will be #spoilers you have been warned!

I was lucky enough that the VUE cinemas were offering pre-order tickets for Avengers – Age of Ultron over 3 weeks before the opening, which meant I was able to get us some decent seats.

I'll start with the obvious: the movie was awesome and if not for the fact that movie tickets cost an absolute fortune these days I'd go see it again. What I'll do is do a quick summary of the events of the film and then go over characters individually, so this might get quite long.

The movie – by sequences
The movie opens with the scenes you see in the trailers where they are in the the forest and snowy areas. The Avengers have tracked down Baron Von Strucker to the fortress in Sokovia and have launched the assault to retrieve Loki's staff so it can be returned to Asgard. Why it wasn't returned in the first movie I'm not sure but nevermind.

There is a lot of witty scenes in there, most prominent is Cap making a remark about someone using bad language and everyone after that giving him a hard time for it. It has a very "family" element to it, like siblings squabbling, I liked that.

Stark is trying to penetrate shields covering the fortress while the others are turning Hydra agents into pulp, makes you wonder who'll be left to be the main antagonist in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. after all that. Stark eventually gets in, Strucker surrenders but the Twins who were under his command decide to take on the Avengers, before deciding they're too much to handle but not before Wanda puts a hex in Tony's mind that makes him see what he thinks is the future where he's responsible for the death of every Avenger (that's the scene with the broken Cap shield). This triggers something within him which will ultimately lead to the birth of Ultron. Eventually he retrieves the staff in a room full of paraphernalia collected by Hydra, most of which related to the battle of NY, including a Leviathan. How they brought that all the way to Eastern Europe is again a bit of a mystery.

The scene Natasha "tames" the Hulk back into banner is what they refer to as "a lullaby".

Moving on the Avengers tower, Tony tells Bruce he wants to use the staff to create his Ultron program as the ultimate peace keeping force, having discovered within the jem of the staff a complex AI system that is far superior to the neural patterns of J.A.R.V.I.S. After multiple failures, they run one last test and head off to a party upstairs with lots of guests like Rhodey, Sam Wilson or Stan Lee (as himself, he's taken out of the party drunkenly exclaiming "excelsior!"). We also meet Dr Cho and are told Jane and Pepper couldn't be here because they're too busy or something.

Then as the party draws to a close Ultron emerges like a baby barely able to walk but intelligent enough to have uploaded himself to the internet (I suspect he became mad after absorbing the whole of BuzzFeed) and taking over the 6 Iron Legions. Battle ensues and they lose the staff … again.

They then discover Strucker has been murdered but although all files have been erased from the system (including J.A.R.V.I.S.) they had recovered some hard copies of documents that will lead them to South Africa and Ulysses Claw with a marvellous performance from Andy Serkis if I may add. Ultron meanwhile had returned to Sokovia and gained the trust of the twins in a guise that was a nice call back to one of the first appearances of Ultron in the comics as The Crimson Cowl. He is now fully formed and is in the process of building an army of drones he can take control of at any time.

Back in South Africa, the Avengers intervene as Ultron is in the process of making a deal with Claw to obtain vibranium, cutting his arm in the process (here's the Star Wars reference) and another battle ensues where this time. As a side note, it is frustrating that the MCU isn't allowed to use adamantium, calling vibranium "the strongest metal on earth" is just wrong, its properties are quite different to adamantium which is the stong metal. Back to the battle Wanda manages to get into the heads of the Avengers except Clint since being brainwashed once was enough for him. Cap goes back to the 40's where he gets the dance with Peggy, Thor gets a warning from Heimdall (and no, Loki wasn't in the movie) and Natasha returns to her days training as an assassin. After Clint dodges Wanda and neutralises her, she and Pietro make a run for it but Wanda had one last hex for Bruce as he's coming out of the quinjet thinking someone called a "code green". Thus follows the Hulk rampage of Johannesburg and the battle with the HulkBuster.

Eventually the Hulk gets tamed as the hex wears off and they all huddle back into the quinjet led by Clint to a "safehouse" which turns out to be where his wife and kids live. It's there that Natasha and Bruce almost hook up, where you see the first seeds of Civil War and where Fury makes his re-appearance.

I can't quite remember why Fury's reapperance is significant but they all then realise they haven't heard from Dr Cho for a while and head to Seoul to investigate. Here we see that Ultron has taken over Cho's lab (and mind) and is forcing her to create the perfect body for him. At this point Wanda has a vision of Armageddon and realises Ultron means the end of the whole human race, not just the Avengers. She releases Cho from the mind control and a highway chase then takes place where the Avengers attempt to retrieve the synthetic body Ultron is trying to upload himself to. After much fighting including from the twins, now on the side of the Avengers, Stark retrieves the body and takes it back to Avengers tower, while Natasha is captured by Ultron.

This is when the Vision is born and also when we find out that the jem in Loki's sceptre is the mind jem, one of the 6 infinity stones.

The last battle is back in Sokovia to rescue Natasha and have the final showdown with Ultron with some surreal moments that include a whole section of land lifted up from the ground carrying life annihilating weaponry (the scene reminded me of the episode of Earth Mightiest heroes where Graviton lifts up the entire island of Manhattan, the same episode where the Avengers first get together). The showdown is part battle – part rescue as the team attempts to evacuate the last of the civilians off the rising land mass into pods that Fury and Hill brought with the original Helicarrier (I was wondering where this was).

At one point nearing defeat, after having been blasted by the combined efforts of Iron Man, Thor and the Vision, Ultron takes over the quinjet and goes on shooting everything in sight as the last pod is about to undock. In the rescue to save a stranded child, Hawkeye is saved by Quicksilver who doesn't get quite so lucky, strangely enough.

In the end Vision blasts the last of the Ultron drones and (some time later) we're at a new Avengers facility (the tower is still standing though) in New York State, where apparently Iron Man and Thor leave the team, the latter being recalled to Asgard to get answers from the vision he had. The final scene is the line up of the new avengers: Captain America, Black Widow, Hawkeye, Vision, Scarlet Witch, War Machine and the Falcon (with awesome new wings).

The mid-credits scene was Thanos seizing the infinity gauntlet and there was no end-credits scene (the spider-man one that was leaked was probably fake, albeit quite well done)

Discussing individual characters

I'm not going to talk about everyone but there's one or two things I wanted to address

Bruce and Natasha
What I liked was the struggle that Bruce was showing, wanting to be able to commit to a relationship but facing a conflict with his alter ego who at the very end steals the quinjet and disappears. I wish they made the Hulk talk rather than just make him grunt but there's a definite battle for supremacy going on here.

As for the relationship well I wish the writers hadn't forgotten about Betty Ross. Natasha wanting to be in a relationship isn't surprising, she was with Hawkeye and then with Daredevil for a while in the comics, as well as a bunch of others. However something there didn't quite work for me.

Hawkeye
On the flip side, the idea that Clint Barton, the guy with a big mouth who can't seem to settle with a girl in the classic comics is now married with kids works really well. It grounds him somehow, despite being a super spy.

Vision
I liked how they combined the attempts from Ultron and from Stark to create an artificial life into a set of circumstances that created the vision, brought to life with Thor's lightning like a post-post modern prometheus. I also liked his look, though Paul Bettany's lip movements seemed odd for a synthezoid.

What I would have liked to see are is phasing powers. This wasn't shown at all how he can change his density to go through walls or be so heavy as being immovable. His grabbing Thor's hammer was a funny moment though, and I supposed kind of addressed that.

What I didn't like was that they put the soul gem in his forehead because that means if Thanos is to have all 6 gems when the Infinity War comes, the stone will have to be removed from him somehow, unless they replace it with something else at some point before hand.

Quicksilver
There's a running "you didn't see that coming" joke throughout the movie until that last moment when he ends up shot down because "he didn't see that coming". Joking aside, I found his death being pointless. In the first movie, Coulson dying had the effect of bringing the avengers together, this time it brings Wanda in a ranging frenzy but that's about it. Looking at his injuries, none seem to have hit major organs so he might still be alive. I would have loved to see him part of the Inhumans movie but I guess we'll see. So far, it seems, no one has stayed dead, except a few characters in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (for now), so he may yet return. Sadly as there was a confirmed death and pretty much everyone else was confirmed to return in Civil War (except Thor and Hulk, neither of which are easily killed) he was the obvious choice.

Nick Fury
I'm now confused as per what exactly is Nick Fury doing. That Hill was working for him all along despite joining Stark Industries at the end of Winter Soldier is hardly a surprise BUT Coulson is supposed to be the man in charge of S.H.I.E.L.D. now so what is going one with Fury suddenly appearing with the Helicarrier and a host of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents at his command? Where do these guys come from and how is all that linked to Coulson's S.H.I.E.L.D. and the "real S.H.I.E.L.D."? This smells of "Secret Warriors" actually but maybe we'll find out more about it in the show.

Ultron
When his consciousness first emerges he speaks like one who has been sleeping for many eons and doesn't know here he is. This suggest something much more ancient than a faulty algorithm which mixed with the misinterpretation of the desire from the creator to bring peace on earth.

Also keeping the main fight with him to Sokovia somehow diminishes the global impact he was supposed to have. In the first one the battle happens in New York City, in Thor the Dark World, it's in London, in Winter Soldier, it's in Washington but this time the big showdown is in Sokovia, which feels a little anti-climatic.

Finally, I appreciate the Pinocchio reference where he wants a body of his own, invincible and eternal but if he were smart he'd have made zillions of backups of himself across the world in case of hardware failure. I suppose this says that in the end Ultron's ego is what really defeated him, and yet I'm not sure the audience will see that.

to conclude
Again I loved the movie, I really did, but there were one or two things in there I would have liked to be done a bit differently.