After a successful raid on a HYDRA base, Tony Stark and Bruce Banner create an Artificial Intelligence called Ultron, a peacekeeping protocol designed to help the Avengers protect the world from their enemies. But things go wrong when Ultron sees the human race as a threat and sets out to destroy it along with the Avengers. Now the Avengers, Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, the Hulk, Black Widow and Hawkeye, must reassemble to stop Ultron from causing mass destruction. Aside from this, the Avengers also must take on the powerful twins Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch as well as the new entity called Vision. Also, the Avengers find that things may never be the same again after discovering a power beyond their comprehension.1
Avengers: Age of Ultron is the second Avengers movie, and it might be one of my favorites. It shows the Avengers as established heroes and does a great job developing the characters Ultron and Vision, as well as their adaptation of the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver. We also see a lot more of the Avengers as people and how they get along with each other.
I really like how Avengers: Age of Ultron does a really good job establishing the Avengers as a team that actually gets along. That might seem like a given, but it’s hard to come by in newer movies, and it gives the film a more positive energy despite its disturbing villain. This is the one movie where we really get to see them interact on a common level, which kind of makes me sad when I think about how much potential was wasted by not having these characters interact more.
The most conflict we really get to see between members of the Avengers in this movie is the tension between Steve and Tony. There isn’t a whole lot of infighting between them in this movie, but we do get to see where they begin to disagree when Tony talks about his “suit of armor all over the world,” or his talks of creating machines to “protect” the Earth, and Steve heavily disagrees with anything that is controlling. Their ideas of freedom differ greatly in this film, which ties directly to the main conflict in Captain America: Civil War.
They also introduced the characters of the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver from the comics, or Wanda and Pietro Maximoff. I really like how they introduced these characters, although I am bummed they weren’t able to refer to them as mutants or use any other mutants in their movies until now. They did do a really good job building these characters up without being able to use much of their comic origin, and I never even realized Pietro Maximoff and Peter Maximoff from the X-Men movies were supposed to be the same person until I watched WandaVision. Wanda, especially, is a really well-written character in this movie and the ones after, in my opinion, and Elizabeth Olsen does an amazing job portraying her.
Although they don’t have her classic mutant origins like in the comics, I do really like how they highlighted Wanda and Pietro’s non-white features, making them Sokovian natives and children who were affected by terrorism and Stark Interprises. I feel like this was a good way to build their characters without being able to refer to them as mutants or say that they were born with their powers, and them working for HYDRA is a good replacement for them working with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.
The lack of mutants in the MCU wasn’t a choice that they made; there were conflicting licensing rights with Fox, and I’m not that informed on the topic, but all that I do know is that Marvel could use Wanda and Pietro as Avengers, but could not mention that they were mutants or anything about mutants, and Fox could also use Wanda and Pietro as mutants, but not mention anything about them becoming Avengers. In 2019, however, Disney bought Fox and acquired all of the X-Men movie rights.
One aspect I really liked about this movie is the irony behind Ultron’s creation. Tony wants to protect the world from threats, so he decides to build a super-AI with access to all the knowledge on the web and unlimited “protection” capabilities, and neither Tony nor Bruce believes anything could go wrong. They created Ultron to protect the world, but Ultron accessed all digital records and concluded that humanity is Earth’s greatest threat, so it decided to trigger a global extinction-level event.
Something that I feel like is really important about the characterization of Ultron and his goal to wipe out humanity is the fact that he is so similar to Tony Stark. His mannerisms directly mirror Stark, his ego is very similar, and he is literally the “son” of Stark (and Banner, if you think about it). Ultron’s view of saving humanity also mirrors Stark, given his past in weapons development and his use of threats of annihilation to keep peace. Wanda directly reflects this sentiment to Steve Rogers when she says, “Ultron can’t see the difference between saving the world and destroying it. Where do you think he gets that?”
What’s even more ironic is how repulsed Ultron is by the idea that he is similar to Stark in any way. He gets violent and angry when someone suggests he is similar to Stark in any way, expressing how he cannot stand his ego and hypocrisy in his vision of peace.
This movie has also aged much better than the creators probably thought. It was released in 2015, 7 years before generative AI broke through and became mainstream. Many people were probably lost on the movie’s larger themes when it was released, thinking of it as just another movie about an evil robot, but seeing the ramifications of AI so clearly today, Avengers: Age of Ultron feels like a much more important film than it did in 2015.
The introduction of Vision is also surprisingly well-done in my opinion. It’s really hard to introduce a character this late in the film, especially one this important to the main story and themes, but I think they did it very well. None of the Avengers knew what his intentions were, but his genuine confusion with the world around him looked very genuine and Paul Bettany did a great job portraying that.
Something that hit me harder than I thought it would is the supposed “death” of JARVIS. His code and voice actor carried over to Vision, but we never really got JARVIS’s character back after Ultron scrambled him. JARVIS is supposed to be an AI computer, and I’m not the most fond of AIs in general, but I feel like older versions of AI in media were a lot more human-feeling than the real bots we have today.
One thing that I wasn’t too crazy about in this movie is the romance between Natasha and Bruce that they tried to build up. The idea of their romance was very sudden, only appearing in this movie and breifly referenced in ones after, and it never had the chance to develop. The concept of a relationship blooming between these two characters is not a bad idea in my opinoin, and I would have loved to have seen it if it wasn’t so shallow feeling and had some sort of payoff.
Overall, Avengers: Age of Ultron is a really good Avengers movie and a great addition to the MCU. I love how the Avengers really felt like a team in this movie, and seeing them work together as an established force was really rewarding as a viewer. It’s a really good movie to go before Captain America: Civil War, serving as both a contrast to the next movie and prelude to it, hinting at things that will result in larger conflicts later on.
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