Forget the election. The return of the Avengers is the most exciting thing happening this summer.
You absolutely need Marvel’s ridiculous and overwhelming vision in your life.
The team is back and now it’s a homicidal robot that’s threatening the world, not a homicidal brother.
This time it’s a triple threat. Ultron has Wanda and Pietro Maximoff at his side, Magneto’s twins… wait, scratch that, don’t even whisper mutant, they are ‘enhanced’.
Simply put, ‘he’s fast and she’s weird’.
In round two, the ‘time bomb’ play together slightly better – they have socials, they have in-jokes, they’re basically a frat group.
They’ve clearly spent a lot of time together since the end of Avengers Assemble, despite the last three movies suggesting they’ve been watching each other on the news.
A lot of the great fighting moments come from their teamwork, essentially acting as power-ups for one another, working in total harmony. Cap’s shield is the perfect nail to Thor’s hammer.
As always, Whedon’s dialogue sings. Just as key to the franchise as the blowout action scenes is the characters’ banter and repartee.
Spader as Ultron is the masterstroke everyone expected, his drawling bass is as sinister as it comes but his mannerisms, picked up from ‘Dad’ and the internet are all too human.
He is surprisingly comic too: he doesn’t know his own strength and he knows his way around an idiom or two.
His arch-nemesis, is the mysterious Vision whose addition to the film and the squad is very welcome, although the less said about his cape the better.
There’s a couple of fun and perhaps surprise cameos, if you haven’t quite had your ear to ground over the last year or so and there are two big shock moments that left the audience gasping.
Marvel have once again blown up the ball park, with their capacity to create an engaging, fun, and ridiculous world keeping them at the top of the action and superhero movie genre.
No doubt this one will break all the records again. But will it knock its predecessor off the number three spot of biggest grossing movies of all time? Could it even knock Titanic off the top?
With Whedon bowing out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe at least in a directoral capacity, it will be interesting to see how the Russo brothers take on The Infinity War, though they have already proved themselves with Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
Marvel will no doubt keep crafting hit after hit. Thor and Guardians of the Galaxy proved that they could take some of the most left-field characters and environments and still make a masterpiece even with fairly untested talent.
Fans will now go and repeatedly see Age of Ultron, basking in all its superlative glory, pushing up the numbers and assuring its success.
To give you some idea, there are 28 showings of Ultron at Manchester Odeon today alone.
Avengers: Age of Ultron is showing at cinemas across Manchester from today. Onwards to Ant-Man.
Image courtesy of Marvel Entertainment, via YouTube, with thanks
