Avengers: Age of Ultron review

The Avengers: Age of Ultron may be the first of Marvel's "Cinematic Universe" to bend under future obligations.

Age of Ultron is nearly impossible not to appreciate in the moment. It's big, sprawling, excellently choreographed, human where it needs to be. It leverages its role as the 11th film in Marvel's host of interconnected stories confidently, the way that fastidious fans would want. It doesn't spend a lot of time re-familiarizing you with the characters that live and work here, instead getting right down to the story at hand.

Opening with the Avengers as they hunt for the last vestiges of Hydra in a post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier world, Age of Ultron immediately places thoughts of the future heavy on the mind of its leads. After a vision of a dark future where the Avengers just aren't enough to protect humanity, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) convinces Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) to help him build "a suit of armor" for the world. This armor is Ultron, an artificial intelligence network designed to guard the Earth where the Avengers might fail. Of course, things go wrong, and the team must work beyond their own internal conflicts and personal demons to save the world again.

His expected jokes and gags are well-represented in Age of Ultron from the first five minutes of the movie onward. Several got a chuckle out of me, but there were a few really leaden shots that were more distracting than anything, one of which particularly scraped at my affection for Tony — generally one of the more likable characters in the universe.

The film struggles to balance the characters people like right now with the places they're going, and the same could easily be said about the plot. Despite Age of Ultron's smart expediency with regards to its characterization and world-building, I was constantly struck by how overcomplicated everyone's actions were. There was always a second motivation where one made more than enough sense, where a character randomly had a thing they had to do in a location that didn't really fit with the rest of the narrative. It was only by viewing Age of Ultron in its greater place in Marvel's cinematic universe that these pieces sat more neatly together.

In this way, Age of Ultron is a functional engine to move a lot of pieces forward for already announced films like Captain America: Civil War and The Avengers: Infinity War, but they make Age of Ultron a worse stand-alone production. As the film contorts itself into more and more awkward positions to cement Concepts That Will Be Important Later, it occasionally feels like a parody of superhero story plotting. There are very few straight lines, and everything seems primed to tie into something else. It made me miss the comparative narrative simplicity of, say, Winter Soldier, not an overly simple movie itself.

Those criticisms keep Age of Ultron from eclipsing the best Marvel has had to offer, movies that balanced their need to serve their own, self-contained narratives while building on Marvel's universe. But as the Avengers jump and smash their way through spectacularly choreographed action scenes one after the next — deftly avoiding the muddled confusion of explosions and blurred bodies that define so many other summer action films — it's not hard to enjoy Age of Ultron anyway. It still has the strong background and foundation laid by its predecessors, the interconnected world Marvel has established. And as the story violently twists and turns, the characters Marvel has spent so much time building hold it all together.