I really, really liked this. At some level, this is a more intellectual like than a visceral one — like, on a visceral level, I think Guardians and Cap 2 were more enjoyable, but those movies were free to just be those movies, whereas this had to serve a dozen masters.

It had to tell the story of literally like eight protagonists and a dozen supporting characters, giving each of them a defined personal journey and a few moments of awesomeness; it had to advance the big over-arching plot of the Marvel Universe; it had to deal with the fallout of Cap 2; it had to advance the big over-arching story of the Avengers as a team; and oh yeah, it had to tell a story about this killer robot and make it into something more than just a series of meaningless battles.

And it did all that, and pulled it off really well. The characters were who they should be, they each had their story, the Avengers as a team has a story, the Marvel Universe’s ongoing storyline is advanced, and the Ultron storyline was meaningful on deep levels.

So, yeah, it was maybe missing a little bit of the easy looseness of Cap 2 and Guardians — you could feel the sweat here a little bit — but when you factor in degree of difficulty, this is some serious gold medal shit.

ALSO, I didn’t totally hate James Spader, which is shocking, because he’s so hate-able.

AND NOW SPOILERS, LIKE SERIOUS GIVE IT ALL AWAY THINGS

  1. So yeah, wow, that’s a LOT of characters to tell the stories of, and that leads to one of the missteps in the movie, I think — because there wasn’t really enough time for each character to have their own fully independent storyline/journey, right, and so a lot of that happens between characters. Thor gets his own storyline, but only because it was tied into advancing Thanos in a way that the movie otherwise really couldn’t; the Maximoffs arc with each other; Steve and Tony arc with each other; and “Nat” (I can’t get past them not calling her “Tasha”) and Bruce arc with each other.

    And so given that, I see why they went with a Widow/Hulk romance. The movie otherwise wouldn’t have any romance element at all, it gave them both a storyline that drove their motivations for the movie, and it really did come very close to working.

    But… I don’t think it did work in the end. I could buy Bruce in that relationship, but I didn’t quite believe Tasha. Part of this is because they had to develop the relationship so fast, but part of it is because the movie had to show her with the Hulk so often, and that relationship — the vulnerable hero with the invulnerable strong-man — doesn’t work at all. And you can tell that they were trying to establish it as Tasha/Bruce instead of Widow/Hulk, because that’s a zillion times more plausible — that the stone-cold assassin has a soft spot for this gentle peaceful guy (this was basically stated outright in dialogue at one point) — but the demands of showing the Hulk so often made that not super-work.

    Plus, there’s kind of the “do you really need to do a romance just because you’ve got a female character?” aspect to it, so yeah.

  2. I didn’t mention Hawkeye above, because he’s the really weird one — in so many ways, he was the only character who really got a long personal story that was just about him (you could make an argument that he was arcing with Fury, but he really wasn’t). And so obviously that was because Joss was setting up the “I’m going to kill this guy” expectation, which I was really really hoping he wasn’t going to do, which then led to me being kind of oddly relieved when Pietro died instead.

  3. I’m super-impressed with what they’re doing to set up Civil War. Because the whole plot of this ties into the themes that they’ll almost certainly be getting at there, with Steve’s vision conflicting with Tony’s. And the movie does a great job making both of them be “right”: Steve was right about not creating Ultron, and Tony was right about creating the Vision.

    In the comics, it’s played totally as “authoritarian dick Iron Man vs. good guy boy scout Captain America,” but the lines are a lot more ambiguous here, and Stark is less clearly in the wrong, esp. given what we know is coming.

  4. I’m also impressed with what they’re doing to set up Thanos. Having the Vision’s forehead gem (and the Witch’s powers! and Ultron, really!) tie into the Thanos thing is totally economical storytelling, so obvious a way to do it that I actually had to look to make sure it wasn’t that way in the comics, as it obvs should have been. But yeah, no, it wasn’t.

    Also, huh, now that I say that, the Vision and Witch are kinda tied together with a bond from that gem already. Interesting!

  5. I thought they did a really good job of not randomly having civilians dying like candy, too. Like, there were defs some scenes where it was kind of like “really? NOBODY died there?” and I think you have to believe that some standers-by did. But, y’know, that’s fine; big awful battles are going to kill a few people. The point isn’t that nobody should die, it’s that the heroes should care, and they very much did.

  6. Oh, I like the new team! Although having Tony “retire” so abruptly is kinda weird, because won’t he be in the Civil War thing? But anyway, yeah, that’s a solid team that’s going to feel different while still being Avengery, and it’s a team with a history of changing rosters, so yeah, that’s sweet. (And also, Thor is going off to Guardians 2, right? That certainly seemed like it was where they were going with that.)