Avengers Age of Ultron Review

The movie that kicks off the summer of summer Blockbusters has got to be the best film that I’ve seen so far this year and I’ve seen a lot of films. Films that are from the 1960’s and onwards. Avengers Age of Ultron is so good. It’s only been out at the Cinemas since 25^th April (Including Premiere Screening) and I’ve already seen it twice.

The story

From the Start of the Movie it’s immediately into the action. A town that will play a bigger role later on in the film (Slovenia Town) the bad Men in this Town has got a Tesseract, The Item in which Loki had in the first film which is was able to control anybody. The Avengers have travelled to the town to get the item back, fighting waves and waves of enemies. Using the new Drone that Joss Whedon (The director) He was able to go above and beyond with his camera angles.

There’s one continuous shot in the first avengers film when the camera is going from avenger to avenger. Panning Tilting and churning in all kinds of directions then eventually the camera coming to create one of the best establishing shots of all time.  All shots from avenger to avenger were made of all different Composites all coming together. Whereas with the drone, The camera can go in and out of itself going from different camera angles just using one shot and adding in the special effects later of For example The hulk, Captain America with his Shield and then Thor using his mix of Strength and Lightning abilities that he can bring down a storm from the sky.

Just before claiming the tessaract. There’s twins within the town building, One boy and one girl. The boy is QuikSilver who has the ability to run at the speed of sound and he’s also able to slow time as well. The girl is Scarlett Witch, Which she has Telekinetic abilities, She’s also got the ability to induce fear and make them see theirs fears that they’ve got hidden within them. Just before Tony Stark grabs the tessaract, the girl induces tony with his fear that the earth will end in destruction and all of the avengers died. His nightmare is in some ways pretty straightforward: He sees all his teammates dying around him, and Captain America scolds him for not doing everything he could to stop this fate. Tony Stark Grabs the Tessaract using his Iron Man Fist and enrol the title screen with epic music.

Tony Stark has a dream of building a robot around the world protecting citizens from anything dangerous. With this dream, he can’t implement Jarvis to an army of robots that would be sustainable around the world so he’s had a vision of creating an operating system that can think for itself and do things for itself without user interaction. This is where the Tessaract comes in. Jarvis and Tony scan the tessaract and they see that it’s everything that they’ve been looking for. An operating system that can think for itself. They run some tests and configurations to implement the tessaract’s code within Jarvis’s mainframe but it then starts thinking for itself and taking over the entire Stark operation. The android named Ultron is planning taking over the world and creating the world in his vision which is causing a mass extinction for the human race so the only thing that is left are robots. This leads to the rest of the film.

Ultron’s Vision could only be successful if he obtained the strongest metal on earth which is the same material captain America’s shield is made off. Ultron Searches the internet’s database and he finds out that it’s been produced off an African coast. Ultron have gone to the coast to steal the Adamantium and the avengers shortly follow. Iron Man, captain America and thor are fighting again Ultron, a few of his minions, Quicksilver and Scarlett watch. Everything is going well for the avengers, they look like they were going to win the fight until Scarlett which induces the fear within captain America, thor and Black widow which switches back and forth from their fear induced dreams. Black widow’s dream is becoming an avenger and a stonecold killer in a very bright and secluded ballet room. Captain America’s dream is being brought back to the events of the second world war with a massive ballroom filled with people from his past and Thor’s Dream makes him go to a mythology place with all of his friends but they’re all dead and they blame Thor for their fate. The next shot is Bruce banner asking Tony ‘is it code green’ and over the muffled radio tony replies with ‘yes’ so Bruce opens the back of the stationary plane. It cuts to a shot of the twins with Scarlett witch saying ‘I want to go after the big guy’.

Iron Man vs The Hulk Fight

This is by far the best Marvel Battle that has ever been presented in the Marvel Universe. Bruce Banner actually reveals his true hulk. During this battle, you haven’t just got the Iron Man suit but you’ve also got Vanessa. A system that is previously discussed in the film where it’s only purpose is to diffuse the Hulk from his true self. The special effects of this scene alone are utterly amazing. Granted some of the shots when Iron man and the hulk are both in the sky with each other and scraping themselves against the building, the shots are quite fast and sometimes I didn’t know what was going on. This is obviously a testament to special effects nowadays, these special effects with a team of beyond 50 people are creating these and these people work on each shot for days on end yet there’s no exxageration for the special effects at all anymore. When Jaws came out, the shark was only spoke about and the last 30 minutes of the movie, you actually saw the shark and you actually saw it in action but this was due to the robot shark that steven speilberg and his team created. Steven speilberg wanted the shark to appear more often through the film but due to the cost of the shark and the technical difficulites they had. They had to limit their time.

One of the final battles, Vision goes from the thighs of the robots up to his head, using a striking and fast force and this is only slowed down by 70% and there’s a hell of a lot of stuff happening in the background as well, especially with the other avengers using their powers to fight against the army of robots (ultrons).

During the exact same scene, the camera is churning, tilting, shafting and the camera movements are so smooth, Most of it is CGI, mainly done in 3DS Max and Maya and after effects. All working together for the best viewing experience. And by far these few shots are the best special effects ever seen in a film and this is a true testament to special effects.

The Special Effects

3000 individual special effects shots have been used. Everything about special effects has just been getting better and better. Every detail is lit and executed very well with the environment. The best testament to special effects is the lighting on ultron, Ultron is a robot that’s made out of mainly Aluminum and steel and all intercut designs that in the perfect lighting, looks utterly stunning. There’s a scene at the beginning after the avengers have managed to knock everyone out, it’s time for the hulk to have his lullaby and the only person who can do this is Black widow, she uses her touch to turn him from the hulk to Bruce banner. As the Hulk is approaching black widow, you can see the dirt and sweat rolling off the hulk and where the sweat has been rolling and dripping, it’s lit from the rays of the diffused sun seeping through the clouds in Slovenian forest. Everything looked amazing.

On my second time watching the film, I picked up more effects than I did the first time around. There was one shot in particular that didn’t look natural at all. The camera was two feet from the ground, looking up at one of ultron’s minion robots with the cloudy sky behind him and the robot didn’t move naturally through the scene and Yes it’s a robot and how robots move doesn’t look natural anyway but I looked at this shot and it was poorly executed. It was like somebody created it in Premiere Pro which has basic special effects abilities rather than after effects where you can literally create anything that comes to your imagination.

Conclusion

If you’re interested in any films containing any of the marvel super heroes and just have a love for special effects or just love comic books in general. I strongly recommend watching this film. Preferably at the Cinemas or IMAX. If you’re too late and you’ve missed the Cinemas/IMAX viewing, get it on DVD and you’ll be watching it at least a few times.

The only one problem, I have is that it’s a self set-up movie plot and that if tony stark didn’t try and create Ultron from the AI then anything past the 30 minute mark wouldn’t have happened.

9/10