Avengers: Age of Ultron

2015 – USA

Director: Joss Whedon

Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, James Spader, Samuel L. Jackson, Don Cheadle, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany, Cobie Smulders, Anthony Mackie

Words: J. Harris

If you were to speak to some of the more die-hard Marvel fans they may try to explain how characters (Spiderman, the X-Men, etc) exist in a different ‘universe’ to one another, this is not the case with The Avengers.
The Avengers Age of Ultron is the second call to action of the Marvel superhero collective, when Tony Stark attempts to jumpstart a global peacekeeping program but creates a being which puts the world under threat.

If you’re new to the Marvel superhero franchise you may want to familiarise yourself with the first Avengers movie, as one of the great things about it was that it gave a crash course in each of the characters, and there are some references to their previous solo adventures here
– the cause of the worlds impending doom for instance stems from an object called the Tesseract captured in the first Avengers film, and the story here does pick up from where the first film left us.

However if you don’t feel like going on an 8 hour Marvel movie marathon through all the individual outings of each of the characters (though the first Thor film is particularly enjoyable), you can enjoy this blockbuster as a standalone feature without any effort.
We’re all familiar enough with characters such as The Hulk (man gets green and angry, green angry man smashes stuff), and unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 6 years Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man (who is at the centre of the story here) won’t be something new to you.

For those who are a little more Marvel movie familiar you might find some confusion/disappointment with the character Quicksilver who we saw in X-Men Days of Future Past (a standout character not featured enough in the mutant action), isn’t referred to here as a ‘mutant’ but an ‘enhanced’, has a completely different backstory and is played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson who coincidentally starred alongside the X-Men casting of Evan Peters in the film Kick-Ass.

The action sequences, spectacular special effects and performances by a Hollywood A-list cast make this an exciting ride with moments of seemingly unavoidable doom, conflict between the characters themselves with neat dashes of humour thrown in.

This is a movie which deserves an effort be made to watch on the biggest screen possible with with the volume turned all the way up – a good addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.