Avengers: Age of Ultron

[SNT1]

^From sources and interviews he sounds pretty taxed by the whole ordeal, with the expectation of topping the Avengers. How do you even begin to top the first one?

*Well, for starters, don't have a record-obliterating boxing match on the same weekend (Mayweather-Pacquiao, and it was a borefest, and yes I am upset about it too); some are saying it's a big reason why AoU didn't beat Avengers' $207M opening weekend, even though it tracked higher in the Thurs-evening/Friday opening (it ends up doing $191M, good for #2 all time)

I guess we all agree that

Spoiler

Ultron underwhelmed a bit and Nat/banner, at least the serious parts in the 2nd act, was completely unnecessary (I chuckled at awkward Banner during the party scene; seemed like fun flirting at the time and I'd rather leave it at that

I just hope the Russos don't lose steam with the Marvel hype-train; by all accounts AoU is still a pretty damn awesome movie, and with their Civil War and then a couple of Infinity Wars I hope they're better equipped to handle what is likely to be an enormous superhero cast

[phillosmaster]

Yeah I remember reading that Whedon said something to the effect of it's harder than anything else he's ever done or something like that. I can only imagine the pressures put on him by the studios and fans. I wonder if they'll ever release a longer cut. I hear there was another half an hour of character work in the movie that they needed to cut down to make it a more theatre palatable 2.5 hour movie.

[Antares]

Forgive me graverobbing this thread, but I've been away for a long bit and decided to peep back in, and this was one of the few topics I felt I could contribute in.

The second Avengers movie was a lot of fun, but it was even more of a single-watch movie than the first one. Flashy lights, big booms, good action and timely jokes, yes, all very entertaining. Again, not a bad movie to be watched once. But the plot, I felt, left a lot to be desired, as did the set-up of the threat. I'll put the rest in spoiler-brackets just in case.

Spoiler

- Build-up to Ultron, like many said, never really drove his threat home. The twins contributed hugely to the Avengers not kicking his butt sooner, as did Hulk going berserk (again, the Scarlet Witch, not Ultron, did that).
- The beefing up of the good guys with the defection of the twins and the creation of Vision utterly undercut any remaining menace Ultron could've posed. While Ultron had his minions, they were dime-a-dozen stormtroopers, and the end felt like jocks of high school all getting together to beat up the nerd. Couldn't bring myself to root for the jocks. The Week of Ultron would've been a better subtitle.
- SNT1 mentioned the Eastern accents of the twins as a plus. I'm going to go on a limb here and demand that Hollywood starts bastardizing English accents into lumps that have no character, no authenticity, and always denote a villain or a person of incredible suffering, like they'd fallen off the beet-truck.
- The farm interlude was boring. This movie, like Pacific Rim, relied on eye/ear-candy and/or jokes. Don't let the pace slip into coma while dealing with Hawkeye's family.
- Whedon's random deathflags were hilarious; he set up so many characters to die but didn't kill them, that this game alone added to the entertainment value of the movie. That he ended up killing Quicksilver was, in retrospect, sensible, because he was ambiguous intellectual property.

Still, after AoU I still went to see Ant-Man, proving at least to my satisfaction that Marvel has gnarly mind-affecting powers which is basically uses to print money via the medium of putting people's butts in seats to watch their movies. The set up for Civil War, what I consider the better parts of the Marvel-universe, is sufficiently good.