'Avengers' Review: 5 Things 'Age Of Ultron' Gets Dead Wrong
'Avengers' Review: 5 Things 'Age Of Ultron' Gets Dead Wrong
  • Korea IT Times
  • 승인 2015.05.04 06:03
  • 댓글 0
이 기사를 공유합니다

Well, I’ve finally seen Avengers: Age of Ultron.

I shuffled out of the packed theater feeling…letdown.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy myself.

Aside from all the insane people who brought their very young, very noisy children to a movie wholly inappropriate for them, I had a pretty good time.

But I didn’t have the same sort of good time I had at the first Avengers. Compared to the last major Marvel movie I saw—Guardians of the Galaxy—Age of Ultron simply pales.

In fact, I’m enjoying the Netflix Original Marvel TV show, Daredevil, quite a lot more than anything I saw today, though Ultron is a lot funnier. The running “watch your language” joke is cute. I chuckled many times, though not enough times to justify the price of admission on comedy alone.

So where did Age of Ultron g0 wrong It’s filled with action, wise-cracks, and some great special effects, but something is still missing. It’s the perfect recipe on paper, but the final meal is…underwhelming.

Warning: There will be spoilers.

I’ve boiled it down to five major complaints that encompass all the little ways this Avengers film fell short. Let’s start with…

1. ‘Age of Ultron’ is too sappy for no reason, and without a payoff

The movie constantly tries to tug at your heart-strings (but there are no strings on me!) and almost always fails to land a real emotional punch.

Black Widow and Hulk have a nice moment as she calms the “big guy” down. But that transforms weirdly, quickly, into an oddly forward Natasha Romanoff hitting on a Bruce Banner almost as confused as me.

By the end of the film, Banner is gone and Natasha is all bummed out, and the audience is pretty much unmoved. It’s a weird little side plot that doesn’t add anything but confusion to the story.

Meanwhile, Hawk-Eye, now questioning his relevance to the team (much as audiences did back when the first Avengers came out) reveals his wife and family to his more super-heroic pals. This is an attempt to humanize him, one presumes, but it just feels…off.

What’s the point Why do we need to humanize Hawk-Eye Just give him more funny lines and let him shoot things with exploding arrows. All these little touchy-feely distractions are used to slow down what’s an otherwise action-packed adventure.

Which leads us to…

2. ’Age of Ultron’ has a serious pacing problem.

I’ve boiled it down to five major complaints that encompass all the little ways this Avengers film fell short. Let’s start with…

1. ‘Age of Ultron’ is too sappy for no reason, and without a payoff.

It’s pretty standard in action movies to sprinkle in slower moments, comic relief, and so forth in between the action to give everyone time to catch their breath.

This works okay in Age of Ultron, but for some reason a lot of the slower scenes—not all, but a lot—just don’t work at all, and serve only to muck up the film’s momentum.

The “lift Thor’s hammer” scene is a good example of how to do humor in an action movie (though mostly everyone had already seen it thanks to the over-marketing campaign moviegoers have been subjected to.)

But many other slow scenes felt bogged down, and there was rarely a sense that our heroes were really in enough trouble to need to catch their breath in the first place.

Hiding out at Hawk-Eye’s farm Yeah, these guys don’t even look beat up. Why not just turn around and beat up Ultron. He’s not at all scary (like he’s supposed to be.) More on that later.

The wood-chopping was funny—there are lots of funny bits scattered about the film—and the dream sequences were interesting, but most of the slower moments were just boring.

Not even Samuel L. Jackson could save the day.

3. Unfortunately, the action scenes don’t improve matters.

I could make a mini-list about everything wrong with the action scenes in this movie. Other than a couple gems, the action in Age of Ultron fell well short of its predecessor.

I rather enjoyed watching the Hulk duke it out with an over-sized Iron Man, especially with all the macho talk and testosterone-fueled posturing (turns out, size really does matter!)

The Hulk/Iron Man fight reminded me of the best fights of the last movie, which often included our super-heroes facing off against one another. And I think one reason I liked these fights so much, is because we didn’t know who would win or what the outcome would be.

But we pretty much do know the outcome of the fights in Age of Ultron. That robot army doesn’t stand a chance. There’s not even a moment in the entire film when it seems like they’re even all that hard-up.

The one possible threat that might put a dent in our Avengers’ plot to save the earth was the creation of an Infinity-stone powered version of Ultron. Instead, we got Vision—a Jarvis-bot reprogrammed with Tony Stark’s Jarvis AI (which is even more awesome than Ultron’s AI, I guess) and released by Thor’s Mighty Hammer.

I think Vision is a cool character, and I like how he’s portrayed here, but talk about a serious letdown from a plot perspective. They castrate the big bad’s plans well before the final showdown.

The final showdown, meanwhile, is wholly lackluster except for the death of newly-introduced Flash, er, Quicksilver, who has one of the coolest powers and looks pretty dead by the end (but who knows…)

The stakes are rarely, if ever, high in these action sequences, or in the entire film for that matter (we are all fairly sure that Ultron will fail and that none of our heroes will die, nothing horrible will happen, etc.)

Meanwhile, the most bombastic action sequences are simply too messy and chaotic. When you’re trying to watch six or seven different heroes at once fight off (rather lame) robot attackers, it can be a little hard to follow.

While there’s some terrific special effects at play, and some decent fight choreography, there just aren’t all that many “wow” moments, either, to make these fights feel distinct. Maybe that’s just because so much stuff is going on all the time.

Maybe it’s because some of the “so much stuff” involved we’ve kind of seen before, in the last Avengers movie.

Think of the scene in the first Avengers when they’re trying to stop the SHIELD hellicarrier from crashing. Iron Man and Captain America and co. are all trying furiously to save the ship from crashing. It’s a great, tense scene. We move back and forth between this battle and other action, but it all flows together really well.

Fast-forward to Age of Ultron and Iron Man trying to get to “the core” of the big machine Ultron has built in a giant flying city and it not only doesn’t really make sense, it’s just hard to follow. The same dynamic is at play, making it less interesting, but it’s much, much messier.

4. We’re introduced to too many new (and old) characters, but not all the best characters.

There’s also the matter of an ever-growing cast of characters. That’s something of an inevitability when you’re making something like the Marvel Cinematic Universe (which, ya know, is making an Ant-Man movie of all things.)

But still, it means we have a lot of divvying up of screen-time and not a ton of focus. We have Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver (but not the X-Men version of Quicksilver!) as well as Don Cheadle’s War Machine, and Falcon (though black Avengers are still just getting cameos here and we’ll see if Scarlet Witch is anything other than a bit part in future films.)

Seriously, the X-Men look positively diverse compared to the Avengers. Regardless, we still have an overly-crowded cast, with Nick Fury and various SHIELD agents also making an appearance. Meanwhile some of our favorite characters—or at least, Loki—don’t appear at all.

Which leads us to the most important new character in the entire movie: Ultron himself.

5. Unfortunately, the villain is lame.

Ultron is the funniest evil robot I’ve seen in a movie in a long time, maybe ever. He’s a lot like his “maker” Tony Stark, but with a dark, demented side.

But he’s not as scary as the Winter Soldier, or as interesting or entertaining as duplicitous Loki, or as ominous as say, hyper-intelligent Ava from Ex Machina.

In fact, Ultron is a really terrible super-villain. He’s a “villain of the week” at best, and not even a very good one. He’s supposed to be this enormously powerful AI that can use the internet however he pleases, yet he barely does anything other than find ways to blow things up. That doesn’t sound like a hyper-intelligent and adaptable being, it sounds like a cartoon villain.

So instead of using his tech to shut down global banking systems, hack military servers, start a nuclear war*, or do really anything intelligent at all, Ultron builds a great big bomb that requires him to lift an entire city out of the ground in order to detonate.

*Note: I realize in the film Ultron was stymied in his attempts to gain access to nuclear codes. That does not mean a more clever villain couldn’t have used his technological capabilities to start a war. He didn’t bother to create any chaos, any distractions for the heroes outside of the twins. A better villain would have thrust the world into chaos prior to his big destroy the world segment. Ultron failed to do anything particularly interesting in this regard.

This entire bad guy was devised in order to pull off a special effects gimmick. That’s the extent of thought that went into Ultron. Never once (or at least not for more than a split second if we watched a preview) do we think Ultron will be good. We aren’t given any time for him and Stark to form a relationship that could later turn to hatred.

There is none of the passion that makes a Frankenstein’s Monster actually work as a dramatic element. Stark is no Frankenstein, and Ultron is no Monster. They barely have any interaction at all. There is never that process that allows us to accept Ultron first as Stark’s “child” and then as his antagonist. It feels so rushed, so pointless.

(Note: I’m definitely feeling a little extra biased here having just watched Ex Machina, but I think I would feel this way regardless. If you’re going to go for Frankenstein’s monster, go for broke.)

The villain poses very little threat, very rarely puts any of the heroes into any sort of bind (save once, with the help of Scarlet Witch) and fails to impress at every turn. And my god, the Pinocchio song that he sings in the previews, and again in the movie—let this go down as one of the greatest of MCU’s mistakes since Disney acquired the comic book company.

How disappointing.

All of these complaints aside, I still had fun at the Avengers sequel. Yes, there were some very irritating parents in the audience who brought kids far too young to a very long and violent movie, but aside from that I had fun. It was an entertaining sequel, but very much (one hopes) the middle-child of the Avengers films.

Let’s hope Infinity War and the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel fare better.

If I think of other things to add to this list, I’ll update the post.

Meanwhile, if you’ve seen the film and would like to chime in (with how astute and obviously correct I am, unless you truly must tell me what an idiot I am…) feel free to do so in the comments or on social media.

By Forbes Erik Kain


댓글삭제
삭제한 댓글은 다시 복구할 수 없습니다.
그래도 삭제하시겠습니까?
댓글 0
댓글쓰기
계정을 선택하시면 로그인·계정인증을 통해
댓글을 남기실 수 있습니다.

  • ABOUT
  • CONTACT US
  • SIGN UP MEMBERSHIP
  • RSS
  • 2-D 678, National Assembly-daero, 36-gil, Yeongdeungpo-gu, Seoul, Korea (Postal code: 07257)
  • URL: www.koreaittimes.com | Editorial Div: 82-2-578- 0434 / 82-10-2442-9446 | North America Dept: 070-7008-0005 | Email: info@koreaittimes.com
  • Publisher and Editor in Chief: Monica Younsoo Chung | Chief Editorial Writer: Hyoung Joong Kim | Editor: Yeon Jin Jung
  • Juvenile Protection Manager: Choul Woong Yeon
  • Masthead: Korea IT Times. Copyright(C) Korea IT Times, All rights reserved.
ND소프트