Movie: Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

All the spoilers all the time.  You have been warned!

Some Thoughts While Watching:

The first time I watched this movie was on a business trip to St Louis. I was able to see it in one of those “new” fancy theaters where you could drink booze and lounge in recliners.  I have been a fan of those ever since!

Opens in cheesy flight slo mo scene.

Slovakia!

The dream sequence brought on by the Scarlet Witch is a bitch! You could have saved up, why didn’t you do more?!

I love the whole Romanov/Hulk synergy: My friends are all fighters and here’s a guy who avoids the fight because he knows he’ll win.

AGAIN I feel like Tony Stark’s god complex is the root of all evil.  The whole upon this rock scenario!

God references: alpha/omega and creation/rage.

It is fascinating how Vision cannot tell the difference between saving the world and destroying it.  There is a TV show that flirts with that premise: The 100.  But honestly, where do you think he gets that?? His Master!!

Begin/End fight scene with another cheesy slo-mo.  Not my favorite parts actually.

His last words: For God’s Sake!

“A thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts.”  My favorite line from the movie.

No matter who wins or loses, trouble still comes round…

And my up-to-date MCU ranking:

• Guardians of the Galaxy
• Iron Man
• The Avengers
• Captain America: First Avenger
• Captain America: Winter Soldier
• Iron Man 3
• Avengers: Age of Ultron
• Thor: The Dark World
• Thor 1
• Iron Man 2
• Hulk

Some Interviews and Extra Video:

 

IMDB Synopsis: When Tony Stark and Bruce Banner try to jump-start a dormant peacekeeping program called Ultron, things go horribly wrong and it’s up to Earth’s mightiest heroes to stop the villainous Ultron from enacting his terrible plan.

Starring:

	Robert Downey Jr.	…	Tony Stark / Iron Man
	Chris Hemsworth	…	Thor
	Mark Ruffalo	…	Bruce Banner / Hulk
	Chris Evans	…	Steve Rogers / Captain America
	Scarlett Johansson	…	Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow
	Jeremy Renner	…	Clint Barton / Hawkeye
	James Spader	…	Ultron
	Samuel L. Jackson	…	Nick Fury
	Don Cheadle	…	James Rhodes / War Machine
	Aaron Taylor-Johnson	…	Pietro Maximoff / Quicksilver
	Elizabeth Olsen	…	Wanda Maximoff / Scarlet Witch
	Paul Bettany	…	Jarvis / Vision
	Cobie Smulders	…	Maria Hill
	Anthony Mackie	…	Sam Wilson / The Falcon
	Hayley Atwell	…	Peggy Carter
	Idris Elba	…	Heimdall
	Linda Cardellini	…	Laura Barton
	Stellan Skarsgård	…	Erik Selvig
	Claudia Kim	…	Dr. Helen Cho
	Thomas Kretschmann	…	Strucker
	Andy Serkis	…	Ulysses Klaue
	Julie Delpy	…	Madame B
	Stan Lee	…	Stan Lee

Director: Joss Whedon

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My ranking scores –

0-19 Levels of: Ugh

20-39 Levels of: Meh (aka I cannot reach the remote)

40-59 Levels of: I don’t hate it?

60-85 Levels of: That was solid.

86-100 Levels of: I Loved It!

I rank this movie a 67.8

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Trailer:

Additional Movie Info:

It received a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 75% Fresh.  It received a Rotten Tomato audience rating of 83% liking it.  Average Rating: 4.04/5 with a number of User Ratings: 287,701.

Movie Reviews:

• Roger Ebert
• NY Times

Specs:  Release date: 1 May 2015 (USA) / Runtime: 141 minutes / Budget: $250M

IMDB Trivia:

• Scarlett Johansson was pregnant during filming, so many of her scenes were scheduled early in filming before she began to show. To help hide her pregnancy later in filming, three stunt doubles were hired. This caused a lot of confusion amongst the other actors since, according to them, all of the stunt women looked very similar to Johansson. Chris Evans stated that it got to the point where he would say hello and start a conversation with one of them only to realize midway that the person he was talking to wasn’t Johansson. Ultimately, some scenes used CGI to hide Johansson’s belly.
• Because Ultron was eight to nine feet tall, the five-foot ten-inch James Spader had to wear an antenna-like contraption made out of a thick piece of wire, with two red balls attached to the top that went up his entire back and three feet above his head. This was done so that the cast members that shared scenes with him would have a reference point for where his eyes would be. The two red balls represented the placement of Ultron’s eyes. Elizabeth Olsen stated that this was actually distracting, because Spader would be giving an intense performance and out of instinct, she would look at him rather than the balls representing his eyes. Much to everyone’s amusement, whenever this happened, Aaron Taylor-Johnson would yell “Red balls! Look at his balls, Lizzie!” at her in order to get her to look in the right direction.
• In the comics, Ultron was created by Dr. Hank Pym (Ant-Man). In this film, Ultron is a dormant project developed by Tony Stark, while Pym gets his own separate story in Ant-Man (2015).
• The trailer was viewed thirty-four million times on YouTube in the first twenty-four hours after it was released. This broke the record that was previously held by Iron Man 3 (2013).
• Stan Lee’s cameo as a War Veteran, at the farewell party for Thor, is a sly inside joke, since Lee did actually join the Army, but never went into battle. Lee’s experience writing for Timely Comics (before it became Marvel) was put to use instead, for the Army’s medical division, thinking up slogans for posters about preventing the spread of venereal diseases that were drawn by Theodore Geisel a.k.a. Dr. Seuss.
• Lou Ferrigno contributed to the voice of The Incredible Hulk in this movie. He has played The Incredible Hulk in almost every live-action version since 1978. He played The Incredible Hulk in The Incredible Hulk (1978), and its subsequent three television movies, and he voiced The Incredible Hulk in The Incredible Hulk (2008), in which he also played a security guard. He also played a security guard in Hulk (2003). He has also voiced The Incredible Hulk in various animated productions.
• In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013) season two, episode nineteen, “The Dirty Half Dozen”, it is Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) who breaks into a H.Y.D.R.A. base and locates Loki’s (Tom Hiddleston’s) scepter. He then contacts Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders), so she can let The Avengers know to go to Sokovia and retrieve it, as they do in the beginning of this movie.
• Joss Whedon described this film as “Smaller. More personal. More painful. The next thing that should happen to these characters, and not just a rehash of what worked the first time. A theme that is completely fresh and organic to itself.”
• In the comics, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are born mutants. In this movie, they got their powers due to experimentation of H.Y.D.R.A. on them. This change has to do with the fact that Twentieth Century Fox holds the rights to the X-Men film franchise and the whole mutant concept. Therefore, this change was intended to disassociate the film from the X-Men film franchise to avoid legal issues.
• Despite Ultron and The Vision having two seemingly different personalities, they share the same origins. They both came from the Mind Stone. Ultron was born from a dormant intelligence within the Mind Stone, whereas The Vision was born from the remainder of the Stone’s contents. So in a way, they are the “good” and “bad” of the Mind Stone, which suggests that the other Infinity Stones may possess their own sorts of intelligence and personality.
• If Marvel Studios had the rights, this film would feature the three strongest fictional metals in the Marvel universe: vibranium (Cap’s shield), uru (Thor’s hammer), and adamantium (Ultron’s original body), but because Twentieth Century Fox owns the rights to everything related to the X-Men, admantium is never mentioned in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.