Earth's Mightiest Heroes Struggle to Save This Script

Rating: 6/10 (6 May 2015)

Before I saw "The Avengers: Age of Ultron", I had read somewhere that Joss Whedon's first cut of the film was over three hours long, and that it had been pared down to the 2:21 release that is in theaters now. It shows.
This is a movie that sacrifices good story telling for action, and comes very close to being an epic fail for the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise. My main beef with the film is that the plot is poorly scripted. At its core, movie making is storytelling. A good story can be ruined if it isn't told properly, and that's what happened with "Age of Ultron". The plot of the movie is just fine--indeed, it's a creative way to introduce some new characters and lead up to the battle with Ultron, the film's main antagonist.
But the problem is that the entire first half of the film is severely underdeveloped in terms of how the plot is conveyed. The audience is made to leap right into the plot with very little in the way of development of new characters, or even of Ultron himself. Would this film have called for a full on "2001" HAL-esque treatment of the character so that his evil intent is only revealed halfway through the film? No. But in "Age of Ultron", we go from the character being conceived, to being brought online, to being the embodiment of evil all in a brief five minutes of the film. (Not to mention that the cinematography there conjured up images of the most egregious of terrible scenes from the LOTR/Hobbit movies).
Another beef I had with the film was the treatment of the Scarlet Witch, a.k.a. Wanda Maximoff. Wanda's telekinetic ability to produce delusions in her opponents plays a very large role in the early half of the film. Two things about that: my memory of Scarlet Witch from my time reading Avengers as a youth would suggest that this was never a prominent part of her arsenal of powers, so it was strange to see that ability given such a large amount of attention in the film. Second, the way that it was done was just odd in terms of cinematography. The warped delusions of human characters mixed with the oddball scene of Ultron coming online made the first half of the film very hard to watch for me.
That said, the movie did improve as the two-plus hours went along--which was a good thing. Some movies make you bite your nails because you're wondering what will happen next. This movie made me bite my nails because I was hoping it would get better and not be a complete and utter failure.
And it did. The second half of the film is notably better than the first, which would suggest that most of the editorial changes that Whedon made may have come from the first half of the movie. Some commentators are arguing that he was indeed forced to trim the large chunk of time out of the movie. If that's the case then it's a pity, as twenty more minutes of back story would have made this movie much more enjoyable, and forty minutes could have filled in the gaps enough that it would have been on par with the rest of the MCU films.
Whatever the case, the film finishes stronger than it begins. But it still suffers overall. To once again make the comparison to storytelling, a story that ends well and with great excitement but forgets to share much at all about its main characters on the front end will inevitably cause the audience not to be emotionally invested in the story overall.
Perhaps Marvel thought that with so many of its characters having already been introduced at this point that they could get a free pass on the background information on the front end of the film--and if that was the rationale, then they would be right on that point. Captain America, Thor, the Hulk, these characters didn't need any further explanation of who they are. But Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, Ultron, etc. did. And the plot at large did, as well, rather than just throwing the audience into a mess of a film that even Earth's Mightiest Heroes struggle to save.
Oh--and now that I think about it, the whole gist of the Vision's character was poorly communicated as well. Just bad storytelling all the way around on this one, even if the story itself was good.
A last note--I'm not someone to get upset over profanity, but Marvel has taken a strange approach as its film franchise has continued to grow. This film, like so many like it from the latter half of the MCU, tries to make itself both kid friendly and humorous, and yet also pepper in a dozen or so cuss words throughout the film. That just makes for a strange movie-going experience all the way around. I get that Marvel's main target audience is teens and adults, but they're also very clearly marketing their films to children. The language thing is a real issue now, for all the MCU films, and if I had young children I'm not sure I would feel at all good about letting them see them. And the fact that this issue is lampooned in "Age of Ultron" makes the problem all the more real.
All that said....this movie was better than "Iron Man 3". And better than DC's "Man of Steel". Probably not as good as "Green Lantern", though (a brilliant comic book movie that was largely rejected by the general population). I'm giving it 6/10 stars simply because the ending of the film caused it to not fall flat on its face, but this movie certainly represents a devolution for MCU properties--which is truly sad considering that this was Marvel's flagship franchise around which everything else is supposed to be built.