Avengers Age of Ultron - Review [Spoilers]

The Good 

Overall I liked the movie and found it entertaining and fun enough to recommend it, as long as you've seen the other movies including Guardians of the Galaxy if you want it to make the most sense.  I've seen them all expect Thor: The Dark world oops my bad.

My favorite thing about Avengers Age of Ultron was how well they portrayed a traditional family. Hawk Eye's wife and kids were amazing and he was clearly a good father despite having to be away from home due to... saving the world and all that... for a living.  So many movies today feature broken families or worse promote homosexual families, I thought it was very refreshing to see a traditional loving family taking a central role in the film.  It was also very nice to see that none of the family members were used by Ultron to gain the upper hand like so many other Super Hero movies do.  (Louis Lane, Mary Jane/Gwen Stacy, Rachel Dawes etc)

I also liked Black Widow showing her true colors of caring for a good man (with a large green disability LOL) rather than attempting to flaunt herself toward men in order to control them as she has done in the previous Avengers/Captain America movies. It seemed she really respected Bruce rather than attempting to use or deceive him like she normally tends to do. Aside from forcing him to transform into the Hulk when in a life threatening situation which is understandable.

Of course this movie also had some great action scenes. I thought the Hulk vs. Hulkbuster rampage was the best action scene in the movie.  That fight was amazingly well done because it was funny and suspenseful at the same time. 

The Bad

There were quite a few religious references in the movie, particularly Catholic references and I was very unclear what kind of statement they were trying to make, if they were trying to make any kind of statement at all.  

First of all there was a joke about Catholic rabbits, I thought the joke was hilarious, but at least one of my Catholic friends found it offensive so it probably offended others as well.  

Next there was the fact that Ultron preferred to do his dirty work in a Church.  The denomination of the Church was not mentioned, however, Ultron quotes Jesus, (Matt 16:18) "....upon this rock I will build my Church..."  This is very significant verse particularly to the Catholic religion.  The reason for this quote escaped me. The only thing I could come up with is they may have been trying to imply that Ultron was and anti-Christ character.  However, that still seems very odd to me considering he came into being via a computer program so was really an AI program. 

Lastly when Vision comes into being they ask him who he is and he say "I am" which is the name God uses to describes himself to Moses (Exodus 3:14) The only knowledge I have about the Avengers story is from the movies, so maybe this is explained better in the comic books, but without knowledge of where the infinity stones came from, this seemed very odd to me because from my perspective Vision is an AI infused with an infinity stone.  So it seems odd that he may have a god complex considering artificial intelligence is an and even lower life form than human beings.  Humans are made in God's image, but AI are made in man's image, so they are two steps removed from God rather than one.  

The Meh

I thought the visions the Scarlet Witch gave the various characters were confusing and I did not understand how her power worked.  Did she direct what they saw?  Or was it based off of their emotions?  Or was she simply a telepath?  Iron Man's vision seemed to be his worst fear, but Ultron's seemed to be his desire.  Captain America's vision could have been his doubts or secret desires I wasn't sure what to make of that one, and I had no idea what was going on in Thor's vision, but I assume it's because I failed to watch Thor: The Dark World first.  Anyway the movie did not do a good job explaining how her powers work and I felt that she and Quicksilver should have had their own movie like most of the other characters did so we could understand them better.




Lastly I felt the end fight was too drawn out and was not as impressed by Iron Man's heroics because it felt like it was a copy cat of the first Avengers movie.  I would have preferred to see one of the other characters take the lead role.  Although Scarlet Witch's little break down was dang impressive it left me a little confused as to why she doubted herself earlier during the dialog between herself and Hawk Eye.