Failed attempt at character development

Rating: 5/10 (13 June 2015)

Age of Ultron is an odd mix of action episodes interspersed by attempts to take cardboard characters and give them a human element. The latter fails pretty miserably. The characters just get slightly more boring with each installment, and their love interests and background stories are insipid. This all works much better in the graphic novels than with live action.
The physics is bad, as always in these films. Here the problem is energy conservation. Cracking an asteroid-size chunk into smaller pieces to avoid disaster won't work too well: A single smaller impactor is less powerful because it is smaller, but if I cut a larger impactor into several smaller pieces a few 100 meters before impact and let all the pieces still hit simultaneously next to one another, the kinetic energy turned into heat remains the same. Woe to the Earth. Fortunately, it looked like the vibranium engines had not accelerated the impactor to the several km/s speed necessary for a disastrous impact anyway. The chunk had barely flown up a few km (humans were still breathing) and took way more than 1 second to fly back down. Soft landing. Stupid Ultron. Luck to the Earth, even without Avengers intervention.
Ultron was about the only interesting character in this movie, and not developed enough. He put a sarcastic face on the old Terminator "Rise of the Machines" idea that an AI will conclude that humans are superfluous. However, Ultron seemed to have nothing against plants and animals, hence his destructive plan seems a bit over the top. Surely an AI so smart could have figured out some bacteriological warfare method to get rid just of the humans.
Basically, the film shuffles along OK from one action set piece to another, providing somewhat mediocre summer fare entertainment. I think this series has lost its touch. Sad because I really enjoyed the first "Ironman," when Downey, Jr. had to put together a suit from scrap metal. Fewer resources, better result. This seems to be the problem with many action movies these days.