Rating
5/10
Synopsis

Tony Stark and Bruce Banner put their glorious brains together to resurrect an advanced piece of AI software called Ultron with the intention of it protecting the world, but it turns out to have the twisted, warped mind of James Spader and needs to be destroyed before it wipes out humanity – starting with a small, poor, eastern European country. Cue the Avengers to save the day

MPAA Rating

Rated PG13 because of flashy images and intense, CGI fight scenes and Scarlett Johansson in tight clothing

 

Plot
Someone's been at the pies

Assuming you’ve seen the other Avengers movie, the Iron Man trilogy, The Captain America movies, one of the Hulk disasters and both Thor movies you should be able to follow this plot – otherwise you might need to go do some homework first!  I gotta assume that you know who these guys are by now

So, Tony Stark has a half baked defence program he’s been working on but hasn’t been able to come up with a catchy name for it yet. After a raid on one of Hydra’s bases, the Avengers discover Loki’s sceptre with its sparkly gem at the top. They also run into two new genetically modified peeps – twins, Pietro (who got super speedy skillz) and Wanda (who got all mind fuck skillz). These twins are bad but you know that’s not gonna last long. Anyway, they bring the sceptre back to New York and despite having no knowledge of the technology used to power the thing, manages to figure out there is a computer AI thing inside, decides putting this into his software would be a good idea and BOOM! Ultron Baby!

Worlds shortest game of pat-a-cake
Should've programmed in a mute function!

But, instead of programming Ultron to save humanity, silly old Stark said save Earth and Ultron seems to be taking that literally – and everyone knows by now that the only way this planet is going to survive is if our grubby species is vaporized, liquidized or possibly atomized. Sticking himself in one of Starks Iron Legion robots he has a scrape with the Avengers before escaping with the sceptre, heading off to build himself an army of Robots and take out his anger on the fictional eastern European country of Sokovia.

It’s up to the Avengers to track him down and stop him and his army of flying robot mercenaries before he goes and wrecks all of our shit up. Will they get to him in time?  Will the CGI robots manage to beat the other CGI robots before the CGI robot destroys everything?? Eh… I hope so?

The Purple Nurple (I think that's his name anyway)
Pros
  • Plenty of in jokes for fans of the genre
  • Downey Jr still excels as Iron Man

 

Cons
  • Couldn’t stand up on it’s own if you gave it crutches and a dose of amphetamines
  • Way too much CGI
  • Ultra unrealistic at the best of times
  • All a bit meh really
Verdict

It would stand to reason that if you watched The Avengers (Avengers Assemble) then you could instantly watch The Age of Ultron and know what’s going on.  But no… just no.  That’s the problem I have with the “universe” that Marvel have created.  In order to watch this sequel(?) I have to watch Iron Man 3 (which was crap), Thor: The Dark World (which was crap) and Captain America: The Winter Soldier (which was…. not as crap as the other two) and it’s only getting worse.  What we end up with is more and more convoluted story lines, introducing new characters with every movie and continuity becoming a real problem – by keeping with every movie that has gone before in the universe, story lines suffer.  I know that a lot of fans of the comic books prefer it this way, but I don’t read comics because I’m an adult now and feel that these movies should be doing more to stand on their own, instead of basically becoming sequel after sequel with different titles.  Have some backbone and just call it “Avengers 6” or whatever – that’s what it feels like anyway.

The other main problem with this movie is the CGI – sure, it’s great what they can do with CGI these days but it’s still CGI!  It’s not real and we know it’s not real.  So why it’s used when it’s not necessary is beyond me.  It seems like if a character jumps in this movie they CGI’d it rather than just telling the actor to jump!  The last thing we need to see is a computer animated Thor spinning around the place like we’re not going to notice.

As much as it pains me, I can’t rate this too badly as it is what it is and it’s good at being that… I mean, its not bad… it’s just not good either!