Not A Home Run

Rating: 8/10 (31 May 2015)

I liked Age of Ultron overall after I thought about it for a while. Coming out of the theater, it felt like a disappointment, and I think that's because people hoped it would be better than the first. It's not, but it has some great sequences. I liked the new characters a lot. I'm very interested in what Scarlet Witch and The Vision can do in the next movie. I liked the character they created for Ultron, but he never really did anything interesting or memorable. Some aspects of the movie that should have been more clear were things that you had to put together for yourself, which shouldn't be a bad thing, but in this kind of movie, it is. Ultron's motivation, for example, is the main aspect driving the plot, and you really have to work it out of the subtext. For a superhero movie aimed at a wide audience, I don't think that was effective. Loki's true purpose only gets a passing mention in the first Avengers, but it was also backed up by the first Thor movie. Everything in that movie seemed to work; Ultron had me thinking, "Well, I guess I can see that, if you look at it that way..." So while it was miles above the average action adventure film, high expectations clouded my judgment.