Scarlet Fever

Rating: 7/10 (25 April 2019)

Continuing the "Endgame" prep with "Age Of Ultron" a film that, somehow in my head is a bit of a misfire. Happy to report that, though this is perhaps the weakest of the three "Avengers" films, "Ultron" is still a decent film and has a lot of great moments.
Haunted by the threats from other worlds that he's seen, Tony Stark wants to replace the Avengers with Ultron, an autonomous artificial intelligence that would protect the Earth. Finally locating Loki's missing spear, he utilises the properties of the Mindstone Infinity Gem to bring Ultron to life. Faulty and psychotic, Ultron decides that the best way to protect the earth would be to rid it of the primitives that inhabit it.
I find it really hard to believe that this was only four years ago! It seems like a lifetime. "Ultron" gets off to a shaky start, I felt. The battle to capture Von Strucker is a little bit too frantic to be enjoyable, and the CGI occasionally is a little shaky, however, the film really picks up from here and neither of those flaws could be levelled against the rest of the film. Expanding the cast and adding a number of characters who would feature in "Civil War" and "Infinity War" was done well. The plot points for the whole Infinity Saga is starting to come together too, with Thor learning about the Infinity Stones and realising that someone is behind their recent appearances, perhaps that impacts on this film a little - as Ultron doesn't necessarily feel like the same threat that Thanos is.
I can't decide how I feel about James Spader's Ultron. His naturalistic delivery is fun, and often funny, but I'm not sure how realistic it would be for an artificially intelligence to display these sort of mannerisms. Visually he's not quite as good as say Thanos in "Infinity War", there's a sheen to the CGI that's not quite dead-on, maybe the moving mouth was a mistake too.
The film does have perhaps the single most rewatchable single scene in all the MCU, the battle between Hulk and Ironman in his Hulkbuster outfit. There is lots of good stuff in the final battle scenes also. With hindsight, it's easy to say that it was time for Whedon to move on from the MCU and for the Markus/McFeely/Russos to take the saga forward, and with their writing and direction they have elevated it to another level. But "Age Of Ultron" is a really really good film, that would, in any other series, be a highlight. Here's though, it's just a solid addition.