Big shoes to fill...

Rating: 8/10 (22 April 2015)

Overall, AoU was a good film... but given the last 2 Marvel movies that were released, the problem is that the expectations have grown tremendously. I thought CA:TWS and GOTG were absolutely incredible, and so, came into the cinema with possibly slightly inflated expectations. AoU delivered on most of those expectations... Here's 2 things that I thought let it down:
1) New characters - Not enough in terms of character development. There were far too many existing characters/new ones/returning ones bouncing around and time limitations (and this isn't a short movie either) basically meant that none of the new characters got developed enough... not even Ultron (IMO). It almost felt like they decided to throw in a paragraph for each new character and call it a day.
2) End Battle - Without giving away anything, I thought the final battle didn't feel like one. Something seemed lacking in terms of build up and peak... and as such it ended up feeling more like a large speed bump rather than a roller coaster.
Don't get me wrong though, as I mentioned earlier, everything else I expected out of an Avengers movie had its box ticked... I still enjoyed the movie. Just not as much as I would have if the 2 issues above were ironed out... It almost felt like Joss tried to do accomplish too much with this single movie; create Avengers movie, add new villain, add new characters (a bunch), add tie-ins, add forward links to next movies, etc. That said, I'm still excited to see what's next for Marvel.