Avengers: Age of Ultron (spoilers)

[tomBitonti]

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The whole "Age of" Ultron seemed overblown. Ultron didn't seem to have the global impact as predicted in the Agents of Shield. Other than the one city in South Africa, and the other at the end of the movie, Utron seemed to have a pretty small impact.

I was a little annoyed that they played the Stark card again. The movie seem almost to be Iron Man IV.

And I was sorry to see QuickSilver die. He and the Scarlet Witch were refreshing additions.
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Thx!

TomB

 

[Jhaelen]

Personally, I'd like to see a villain who can last through 2 or 3 films before they are finally able to deal with him.

Imho, that would work better for a serial TV show.
E.g. while I thought the movie was pretty good, all things considered, I'd have vastly preferred if 'Watchmen' had been adapted as a tv show with a number of episodes matching the original comic.

Similarly, 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' would probably make an awesome TV show, but the movie adaptation was rather meh...

 

[Kramodlog]

Soulless. Like painting by numbers or crossing items off a list.

Lots of stuff ended on the cutting room floor. Thanos was supposed to talk to Ultron. Curious to see the deleted scene on the blue-ray.

Ant-Man doesn't look great, so I guess Civil War could make the MCU franchise interesting again. Maybe not.

 

[Umbran]

We? You're the one trying to somehow define my movie tastes!

I'm not trying to define your tastes. I'm trying to glean information, in part to discuss how we critique and form opinons.

I'm perfectly happy just saying whether or not I like a thing.

On the flip side... it is a discussion board, isn't it? When you post an opinion, it is kind of inviting discussion, right?

 

[Umbran]

I think this is the crux of the "why is the ending always a big aerial battle"

But, it isn't always. As noted upthread - about half the movies have a big aerial battle. The other half don't.

It's a GMing problem for a high level party with flying and stuff.

And if they had all the fights on the ground instead, would we think of it as a problem?

Or, is this like the "problem" of characters with Divination magics? Yes, once the characters get certain abilities, they will no longer be constrained. As a GM, your only real choice is to accept that the characters will use their powers to the best advantage they can find. Trying too hard to stop them starts cheesing off the players.

Now what they haven't had was ensemble heroes vs. ensemble villains. It's always been Heroes vs. leader and his minions or the Batman/spiderman model of Hero vs. pair of villains.

I think there's a time constraint issue here, a limitation of the movie genre. With only two hours or so of movie, you don't have a whole lot of time to develop villains - even so far as to show individual powers and how they work, much less personalities such that we care about the fight. The time investment must pay off - in Avengers 2, they do develop more villains, and to make it pay off, they turn them into heroes that join the Avengers.

 

[Bagpuss]

While I enjoyed the film, I think I would have liked to see it as two films, there was clearly enough story there, I've heard the first cut was over 3 hours. I think that would have made it feel more like and "Age of". While the "found footage" thing has been done to death in the last few years I would have liked to see a global impact of Ultron, through some news reports and the like, as it was he seemed very localised.

If he could escape via the internet, why didn't he have a backup copies of himself in automotive plants throughout the world that could retask robots to make primitive copies of himself? That way the solution would have had to have been something smarter than a fist fight in a floating city. Maybe see the full extent of Scarlet Witches reality bending powers, rather than have her just be a Jean Grey with a red paint job, it would also have been something to refer back to when they introduce registration in Civil War.

Morrus is right it is getting very formulaic, but then it is one that works, so it is to be expected. Still it better if they could add a twist to it, like the bait and switch with Hawkeye being set up to die with all the back story and stuff. Vision killing the last Ultron at the end was a disappointment, I would have preferred a horror movie type ending where they imply he could come back.

 

[Crothian]

While I enjoyed the film, I think I would have liked to see it as two films, there was clearly enough story there, I've heard the first cut was over 3 hours. I think that would have made it feel more like and "Age of". While the "found footage" thing has been done to death in the last few years I would have liked to see a global impact of Ultron, through some news reports and the like, as it was he seemed very localised.

A number of people say that but the movie clearly established the Ultron was breaking into places all of the world and we had action on four different continents.

 

[Bagpuss]

A number of people say that but the movie clearly established the Ultron was breaking into places all of the world and we had action on four different continents.

Right, Ultron, just him and some servant robots, the thing was an AI, why couldn't he be in more than one place at a time? It's hardly an "Age of Ultron", if only four locations in the world he actually visits and interacts with about 20 people in total. "Age" implies some sort of significant event across the global. Iron Age, Age of Steam, etc.

 

[Morrus]

A number of people say that but the movie clearly established the Ultron was breaking into places all of the world and we had action on four different continents.

For certain values of "clearly" that said number of people clearly don't agree with. I didn't get that impression from the movie, either.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

I saw it last night and quite liked it. There were a couple of believability problems. Even accepting super-powers I know very well that their end-of-the-worlds threat wouldn't work, and that that evacuation wasn't possible in the time allowed. Oh well. What I thought they did very well was put in reasonable ways for unpowered characters like Hawkeye and Black Widow to contribute equally. In general I dislike disparate teams like Avengers or Justice League, even in comics, but the movie made it plausible.