Past entries:
–Iron Man
–The Incredible Hulk
–Iron Man 2
–Thor
–Captain America: The First Avenger
–The Avengers
–Iron Man 3
–Thor: The Dark World
–Captain America: The Winter Soldier
–Guardians of the Galaxy
–Avengers: Age of Ultron

Ever since before the start of the MCU, there was talk of a possible Ant-Man film. The character is actually a major figure in the comics, but between the name and the shrinking-powers, the idea seemed to ridiculous to be accepted in a live-action film. Nevertheless, the idea bandied about for years and years until finally, amid the success of the MCU, it became a reality.

We open in 1989, with the Triskelion building (SHIELD headquarters from The Winter Soldier) still under construction. The brilliant, but prickly Dr. Hank Pym storms into a meeting room with Peggy Carter, Howard Stark, and new character named Mitchell Carson to express his unmitigated fury that Stark dared try to copy his work; the mysterious ‘Pym Particle.’ Disgusted, he declares that he is done with SHIELD, and though Carson (smarting from a broken nose received for making a crack about Pym’s late wife) wants to stop him, Stark and Peggy wisely suggest that Pym is both trustworthy and far too dangerous an adversary to tackle unless they have to.

In present day San Francisco, a high-tech burglar named Scott Lang finishes his term in jail and sets out trying to rebuild his life and particularly to do right by his adoring five-year-old daughter, Cassie. However, with his criminal record he finds jobs hard to come by, so in desperation he decides to take one more burglary job with his former cellmate Luis. Meanwhile, Dr. Pym has discovered that his former protégé, Darren Cross (who now runs Pym’s company) is close to replicating his shrinking technology and means to sell it as a weapon. As it turns out, the heist was secretly set up by Pym to recruit Scott into helping Pym and his estranged daughter Hope into taking Cross down…assuming Scott can become the new Ant-Man in time.

Let’s get this out of the way right from the start: I love Ant-Man. It’s a much smaller, more contained story than most of its predecessors, and if the world is at stake, it’s only because of the particular choices being made by these particular people, not because of cataclysmic events or world-shaking conspiracies.

A major part of why it works is that the hero, Scott Lang, is just so darn likable. He’s neither a reformed bad-boy (despite being an ex-con) like Tony Stark, Thor, or Peter Quill, nor an iconic hero like Cap, but just an ordinary man trying to be a good father. Having lost five years in prison, he wants to turn his life around and be there for his daughter (“Be the person she already thinks [he is],” as his ex-wife says). Throughout the film, she’s his top priority, and even when he’s making mistakes, such as turning back to crime, it’s in the hopes of being able to be with her, or at the very least leaving something behind for her. As Hank tells him, one father to another, “It’s not about saving our world. It’s about saving theirs.”

Meanwhile, he’s just an all-around nice guy: friendly, humble, and trying to be responsible. For instance, there’s a good scene where Hope has just had a blow-up at her father (subconsciously expressing her frustrations by swarming the room with ants), and, though she’s been nothing but antagonistic and dismissive of him, Scott goes out to the car to talk to her, drawing on his own knowledge as a father to assure her that his presence proves how much Hank cares about her. His good-nature, and that of his fellow crooks, is established right away when what seems to be a prison beat-down turns out to be a good-bye ritual, whereupon he’s met by his hilariously loquacious ex-cellmate Luis, whom he assures that he intends to go straight. Later, when he first starts using the Ant-Man suit, his compassion relative to Hank is established when he asks why the flying ant he’s riding on doesn’t have a name (he later christens it ‘Ant-ony’).

The film does establish, however, that he is a very competent and clever man as well. We’re told from the start he has a maters in electrical engineering, and when he burgles the Pym house he quickly improvises several very clever solutions to unexpected obstacles on the fly. In fact, right when we first meet him in the prison ‘brawl’ we see him using his cunning to get a blow in on a larger opponent. This improvisational quality fits perfectly with the Ant-Man powers and is continually giving him the edge over the course of the film.

Scott makes for a good contrast with the villain, Darren Cross AKA Yellowjacket. Cross is a former protégé of Hank’s, except that he resented Hank for not sharing the secret of the Pym Particle with him, and is shown to be bursting with a sense of inferiority and frustrated ego, to the point where it seems his desire to sell his work to Hydra is less a matter of getting rich and powerful than it is a chance to rub Hank’s face in it. I’m actually quite impressed with the writing and acting on Cross: he’s a consistent and quite frightening character, in that he’s the kind of guy who takes even the slightest insult or check to his ego as a declaration of war, but who can maintain a calm and friendly façade up until the moment he horribly murders someone, so that once you cross him in any way, you’re basically marked…rather like a hornet, come to think of it (which makes his climactic attack on Cassie, when he could easily have made a break for it, entirely in character: he needs to punish Scott for the ‘insult’ done to him). Yet he’s not completely inhuman either, as he seems to have some genuine feelings for Hope, at least to a degree, as he admits at one point that he held off killing Hank while she was in the house because, “I wasn’t ready to kill you yet.” It’s a warped connection, but a connection nonetheless. I also like his contained emotion when he asks Hank why he shut him out, followed by him calling Hope to vent about it like a frustrated teenager (which also serves to alert her and us that he’s beefing up security: character development and moves the plot along).

Of course, the parallels and contrast between him and Scott are great; both protégés of Hank’s, only one is proud, the other humble. And, naturally, the humility of the one enrages the pride of the other. “Your very existence insults me!” Cross rants at Scott during their final battle. Earlier he brought up Scott’s file commenting “and who did Hank Pym trust more than me?” He’s infuriated at the idea that this miserable little nobody ex-con rates higher in his mentor’s esteem than he does. This also, by the way, fits their respective animal motifs: Cross the proud, easily enraged hornet, Scott the humble, hard-working ant.

This also, by the way, means that Cross actually figured out (almost) Pym’s whole plan, including the identity of the new Ant-Man, purely from clues and intelligent suppositions. The parts that ultimately undermine his trap are things that he naturally wouldn’t have anticipated, such as Scott’s new shrinking-growing discs.

Upon reflection, I think I would rate Yellowjacket as one of the better MCU villains thus far. He’s a common type – the evil businessman and resentful protégé – but they invest him with enough nuance and attention to make him surprisingly interesting.

Hank himself is a cool character as well, in that he’s quite frankly a bit of a jerk. He has no trouble belittling Scott, or laying down the law, he’s controlling, stern, and arrogant. Rather like a more mature and emotionally stable Tony Stark (whom we learn he thoroughly dislikes). But underneath he is a genuinely good man, and his prickliness is largely in defense of the things he cares about – his work and his family. There’s a smooth introduction to how respected he is when he shows up at his own company HQ after a long absence, is asked for his ID, and points to his portrait on the wall.

As for the love-interest, Hope gets a fine story arc of her own in reconnecting with her father, whom she resents for seemingly shutting her out after her mother died, when she needed him the most (it should be said this is a much better reason for estrangement than we usually get in these kinds of stories, and I like the touch that Hope comments at one point that she was sincerely hoping the crisis would bring them back together). This parallels her relationship with Scott, whom she barely tolerates at first until he wins her over with his kindness and simple courage. Their relationship is understated (it might have benefited from one or two more scenes), but it works. They each bring something the other needs: he shows her sympathy and levity, while she teaches him focus and drive. It’s a good balance and the two of them work well together.

I started off talking about the characters, because that’s something this film does so well; it’s basically just a nice, human story of two fathers who want to do right by their daughters and an aged genius with two possible heirs, only leavened by two basic, but very cool sci-fi conceits: changing size and controlling ants.

On that subject, the film goes whole-hog on these two main ideas. There is so much creativity at work here, from the simple idea of riding around on a record player to jumping through keyholes to infiltrating a building through the water main. Ant-Man shrinks and grows and shrinks again in rapid succession to dodge bullets and fists, gain extra momentum for flips, and disappear from view to strike from an unexpected direction. During the climax, we have a zero-G fight inside a falling briefcase, then a train-top battle…on a ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ set (culminating in a hilarious anti-climax where Thomas tries to run over Yellowjacket).

The film amply demonstrates that, though the shrinking idea may sound ridiculous, it makes the user incredibly dangerous. Who could shoot an insect out of the air, or stand up to a punch with the entire weight of a full-grown man packed into a half-inch space? How could you stop someone like that going wherever he wanted, or, since he can also shrink other objects, taking whatever he likes wherever he likes (e.g. a set of plastic explosives into a computer server)? As noted, the prologue establishes that even SHIELD was leery of tackling Ant-Man, while in a hilarious and very cool scene the film pits Scott in battle against Falcon to show that, even in the hands of a rookie, Ant-Man is an Avenger-level combatant (not only that, but the film then establishes that Cross was able to double his price after Hydra learned of the incident, thereby both tying the different threads together and letting us know that the Avengers themselves are on the line here).

It does something similar with the ants. Controlling ants might not sound like much, but again they can go anywhere, hide anywhere, and are incredibly versatile. At one point Scott rides a raft of fire ants down a storm drain. When Pym needs to disable a security camera, he simply has a bunch of ants swarm over it. The two abilities combined mean that the heroes can basically go anywhere with their own personal miniature army.

(On the subject of ants, one minor bit where the film falls short is in the ridiculously under-blown reactions some of the characters have to being stung by bullet ants. They let us know that they have one of the most painful stings in the world, but the people being stung react as though they were little more than wasp stings. If you want to know what it really looks like, here’s a video showing it (warning: very intense!). For those who don’t want to watch it, let’s just say that if Cross were actually stung by one of these things, there wouldn’t be a climactic battle because he’d be paralyzed with pain and nerve spasms for the next hour or so).

Basically, it feels like the writers really loved their own premise and were legitimately excited to come up with all kinds of crazy and creative things to do with the idea of shrinking and growing things and controlling ants.

Besides all that, it’s just a really, really funny film; up there with Guardians of the Galaxy, but in a gentler, more family-friendly style. We have Scott’s awkwardly endearing charm contrasted with Hank and Hope’s more serious manner, his three quirky thieving buddies (including Luis, who is hands-down one of the best narrators in film history), the many, many mishaps and absurdities inherent in being tiny (e.g. at one point Scott hits Yellowjacket with a ping pong paddle, or Scott running across a scale model as its torn apart by bullets in a parody of the standard bombastic scenes of super-powered destruction), Scott greeting Falcon with a cheerful, “Hi, I’m Scott!” (“Did he just say ‘hi, I’m Scott’?”), and so on. There are a lot of very simple, not even jokes, just funny moments, like when five-year-old Cassie asks her detective step-father if he’s trying to find her daddy, then says, “I hope you don’t catch him,” with the sternest look she can manage. Or moments funny for their sheer logic, as when Scott, upon learning of the situation with Cross, suggests, “I think our first move should be calling the Avengers” (thus the film astutely avoids the problem that plagued Iron Man 3 by tackling the issue head-on: Hank won’t call the Avengers because he doesn’t trust Stark and means to keep his tech out of his hand: something entirely logical and in-character).

As indicated, also like Guardians, everyone here has a lot of personality; Luis is a small-time crook, but he apparently also frequents wine-tastings and art galleries (“you know me, I’m more a neo-cubist kinda guy…”). Cross casually mentions “my morning meditation” at one point, while Hank periodically adopts a hilariously long-suffering expression when he has to deal with the antics of Scott and his compatriots. Even minor characters like Scott’s ex-wife’s boyfriend, or his manager during his brief stint at Baskin-Robbins feel like real people with their own distinct personalities.

Yet again like Guardians, there are real heroics and genuine human decency on display, even from the criminals. Near the end, while racing to escape a building set to blow, Luis suddenly remembers a security guard he’d punched out and hurries to get him out. Earlier, when it looks like their heist has been a bust, Luis’s first comment is condole with Scott, since he really needed the score. We see flashbacks to Hope’s mother sacrificing herself to save the innocent, which she only had to do because Hank wasn’t able to do it himself. Even Paxton tries to stand up to Yellowjacket to protect Cassie during the climax. And during the climactic heist, just about everyone goes to bat and risks everything for everyone else at some point.

And in the midst of all this craziness and humor, there are some lovely, emotional little scenes, like how, the night before the big heist, Scott takes the suit so he can go see his daughter for possibly the last time: just to see her. Or we have Hank and Hope finally reconciling, and the aforementioned scene where Hope and Scott begin to connect.

The visuals likewise are fantastic. We have, of course, the perspective of being tiny in the midst of ordinary things like keys, bathtubs, grass, and so on, which are all very interesting to look at, but we also get things like the hive-like dome where the Yellowjacket suit is stored, and, most excitingly, a journey into the realm of the subatomic, getting smaller and smaller, passing beyond anything even remotely recognizable into a surreal void. Again, there is so much creativity and enthusiasm evident in this film.

In a word, Ant-Man is really, really good. It’s easily one of my favorites of the series. There are obviously some flaws; the way the suit is said to work doesn’t fit with the idea that they can potentially go sub-atomic and shrink forever into nothing (since, if they reduce the space between molecules, you obviously can’t go smaller than those molecules). If I’m not mistaken, the character of Carson doesn’t get any kind of pay-off; he just kind of disappears in the middle of the climax (I suspect a deleted scene is involved). And, as noted, the relationship between Scott and Hope could have stood one or two more scenes to more fully develop it.

There are objectively better films in the MCU than Ant-Man, but for simple, largely-self contained entertainment, featuring a good story, great characters, hilarious comedy, and a lot of crazy creative action, you really can’t do much better.

Past entries:
–Iron Man
–The Incredible Hulk
–Iron Man 2
–Thor
–Captain America: The First Avenger
–The Avengers
–Iron Man 3
–Thor: The Dark World
–Captain America: The Winter Soldier
–Guardians of the Galaxy

Following on three more solo films and an almost unrelated side story, the Avengers return in Age of Ultron.

The film wastes no time in its opening sequence, with the Avengers already assembled and assaulting a Hydra fortress in the Eastern European nation of Sokovia, seeking to recover Loki’s staff from Baron Strucker, a high-ranking Hydra agent who has been using it to experiment with human enhancements. His only two successes are the Maximoff twins, Pietro and Wanda, who are, respectively, super-fast and possessed of powerful psychic abilities almost amounting to witchcraft. The assault is, unsurprisingly, a success, though not before Wanda is able to give him a vision of the Avengers being defeated by Thanos’s forces because of his own failures. This prompts him to use the staff to jumpstart his ‘Ultron’ project: a super-sophisticated AI program that can automate his suits and thus keep the planet permanently protected without the need for the Avengers.

Unfortunately, something goes wrong and Ultron emerges as an unstable, murderous lunatic who immediately sets out to destroy the Avengers and take over / destroy the world (enlisting the help of the twins) while the team tries to find a way to bring him down.

So, Age of Ultron is kind of a difficult film to discuss, since there is so much going on in it. The original Avengers was a very straightforward film: Loki wants to conquer the world, Avengers assemble to stop him. Age of Ultron leaps all over the place, quite literally; from Sokovia to New York to Africa to Korea to Oslo to the Midwest and back, all the while introducing and dropping character after character, moving from crisis to subplot to crisis. It’s all (or most of it) strung together by the Avengers trying to stop Ultron, though Ultron’s plan seems to change every other scene as well. Does he want to control mankind for its own good, like the robots at the end of Asimov’s I, Robot? Or does he just want to wipe out and replace mankind?

This is partly explained by the fact that Ultron is clearly insane, which is itself an interesting touch as far as it goes; unlike the standard emotionless, ultra-logical killer robot, Ultron is instead an erratic, highly emotional being, more like an arrogant teenager than a super-genius, and clearly taking a lot from his ‘father’ Tony Stark. This leads to some very amusing moments with him, as when he cuts off Klaue’s arm in a fit of rage, only to try to walk it back with an uncertain “I’m sure that’s gonna be okay,” as well as some rather striking emotional bits, as when he almost shyly tells a captive Black Widow that, “I don’t have anyone else [to talk to].” It also leads to him ranting about God and quoting the Bible at some points, which seems standard for a lot of bad guys these days, but in Ultron’s case seems to hint at a blasphemous belief that he can take the place of God (certainly at times he seems to be using ‘God’ to refer to himself). He even sets up his headquarters in an abandoned medieval church.

There is a lot that could be made of this: Ultron as a devil figure, rebelling against his creator and trying to set himself up as a deity; Ultron as the image of what attempts to perfect or systematize the world always lead to; Ultron as unfettered fear of mortality; Ultron as the embodiment of pacifism’s tendency to backfire horribly. You can get any of those out of the film, but I’m not sure any of them are really carried through into a coherent whole. It feels rather as though the writers had all of these ideas and ran with them without stopping to focus on any of them.

And a lot of the film is like that; too many underdeveloped ideas thrown together to end up with a satisfactory payoff for most of them. The Maximoff twins’ hatred of Stark is never given a satisfactory payoff, for instance; they never come to grips with the fact that they were blaming the wrong person for their pain (Tony didn’t fire the shell into their building, he only made it), or recognize that Stark is a better person now. Strucker’s experiments in enhancing humans only serve to give us the twins and are dropped once he’s out of the picture. The threat of Ultron taking over nuclear weapons and the existence of the ‘internet nexus’ in Oslo are only briefly touched on, as is the possibility of Banner being arrested for the Hulk’s Scarlet Witch-induced rampage in an African city.

The biggest out-of-nowhere bit, however, is the sudden onset romance between Banner and Natasha. There was nothing at all to hint at this in either the first Avengers or Winter Soldier (both those films, if anything, seemed to hint at the possibility of something between her and Cap), and here we open with them strongly in love and wrestling with it, to the point where Barton’s wife can tell what’s going on in five minutes. It isn’t that the romance doesn’t make sense (as the film points out, they’re both broken, hurt people who spend a lot of time hiding their true emotions, and Natasha is understandably drawn to Banner’s integrity and reluctance to fight “because he knows he’ll win”), it’s that they don’t have time to give it any real set up, so that we’re left more being told that they’re in love than actually seeing it happen. Though, on the other hand, it does build on the ‘beauty and the beast’ motif of the Hulk, which is further reinforced by having Natasha being the one who calms the Hulk down at the end of each mission (that they would develop a reliable means of shutting the Hulk down is a very smart touch).

So, the film is kind of all over the map and frankly tries to do way too much for its own good. A more streamlined story, one that gave Ultron a more clearly defined goal with fewer details and twists, would have benefited it immensely.

But most importantly, there needed to be a better origin for Vision. What they might have done was to have Vision be created as a weapon against the Avengers, and then develop a conscience and rebel against Ultron. It might have been tricky to fit into a single film, but it would have certainly been better than having Tony solve the problem he inadvertently created by, essentially, doing the exact same thing and getting a different result.

In summary, plot wise the film is kind of a mess. It jumps all over the place, throws out too many threads to wrap up, and fumbles some of the ones it tries.

All that said, I still really like it. The story is all over the map, but what goes on in it is entertaining as heck, with great action sequences like the Avengers versus Hydra in the opening (which starts with a spectacular ‘oner’ showing all the individual Avengers doing their thing) or Iron Man versus an out-of-control Hulk using the ‘Hulkbuster’ armor (called ‘Veronica’) or Cap’s one-on-one running battle with Ultron, which he knows he can’t possibly win but he gives a heck of a fight anyway, all culminating in the Avenger’s all-out battle with Ultron and his drones in Sokovia while the whole city is levitated into the air to be used as a planet-killing meteor, which is just a gloriously comic-book-style conceit.

This final battle climaxes in a glorious scene where the Avengers all assemble to defend the ruined church against Ultron’s armies, creating a striking image of superheroes defending sacred ground and seeking to purge it of the evil corrupting it (I don’t think the symbolism quite goes far enough – since they’re ultimately trying to keep Ultron away from his own weapon rather than defending the church as such, but it’s certainly a possible interpretation and a glorious image nonetheless).

And, of course, it’s all featuring the same great characters we’ve been getting to know for over ten film now, and they’re just as entertaining and interesting as ever. One of the best scenes of the film has them just sitting around a room chatting, which turns into a party game where they each try to life Thor’s hammer (Steve is the only one who budges it. I really think he ought, by all rights, to be able to lift it, but as a friend pointed out, it’s possible he’s faking so as not to embarrass Thor). As I said before, they really could do a whole film of just the Avengers hanging out together and it would still be hugely enjoyable.

We also get some more character development, particularly for the ones who haven’t had their own film in between. Banner’s dislike of using the Hulk and his tragic inability to ever have a normal life are re-emphasized, as is his sense of being hunted. When, in the end, the Hulk makes a particular choice, we understand why he’s doing it and feel the tragic logic of it.

Likewise we get to learn some more of Black Widow’s backstory, including glimpses of her nightmarish training (which included ballet lessons along with cold-blooded executions, perfectly highlighting her distinctive blend of femininity and violence). We also learn that she, like the other members of the program, was sterilized upon ‘graduation,’ ensuring she could never have a family or anything in her life more important than her mission. In other words, it was her handlers’ attempt to surgically strip her of her capacity for love and nurturing. It’s a disturbing touch; cool as Black Widow is, we’re made to see that she has literally been made to sacrifice part of her humanity to become what she now is, and though she is now on the side of the angels and has recovered her power to trust and love others, she can never truly have a ‘normal’ life (significantly, she’s the only one on the team who doesn’t even try to lift the hammer: she already knows the answer). She even calls herself a “monster” at one point, emphasizing how acutely aware she is of what’s been taken from her.

Naturally, given the world we live in, this development caused controversy in certain regions by people who found the idea of a sterilized woman calling herself a ‘monster’ to be offensive. But of course, the sterilization as such isn’t so much the point; it’s the logic behind it. She didn’t lose her power to conceive through illness or accident, but deliberately in an effort to make her a more efficient killer and to ensure she would never put anyone or anything before her mission. It is that, the stripping of her power to love and care for other people, symbolically embodied in her sterilization, that makes her a ‘monster’ in her own eyes. It’s all the more tragic as we are able to see from her behavior in this and the other films that she actually has the warmth and love to make a very good mother, and that it’s implied in her flashbacks that she tried to deliberately fail to avoid the procedure, but she was too talented for her trainers to allow that.

This is a striking and haunting detail, showing us just what a tragedy Natasha’s life really is, along with Bruce’s, and continuing her trend of being one of the most flat-out interesting characters in the franchise.

But this tragedy is balanced by the long-overdue development of Hawkeye, who, we discover, actually has a wife and two kids (with a third on the way), whom he keeps carefully off of everyone’s radar, but who give his life and mission a degree of purpose that the rest of the team generally lacks (while embodying what Tony wanted to be able to give them by creating Ultron). I absolutely love the scenes at chez Barton, whether it’s his wife’s awkwardly homely welcome (“I…know all your names”) or their warm spousal conversations where she expresses both her pride and her concern about his ‘Avenging.’ There’s a great detail where Hawkeye gets wounded in the opening battle, then has it patched by Dr. Cho’s new artificial skin technology, which she assures him “even your girlfriend won’t be able to tell the difference” (“I don’t have a girlfriend,” he answers, to which she comments “Well, I can’t fix that”). But when he talks about it to his wife, she tells him that she can indeed feel the difference.

This is a great bit not only because it demonstrates her love and concern for him, but also as a way of subtly showing the limits of technology; Dr. Cho’s process is technically perfect, but she can’t account for love. Rather like how Ultron himself can’t fully account for humanity (this would have been even more striking if the latter theme had been better followed through, but oh well).

They also poke fun at the popular idea of Hawkeye being comparatively useless. When he’s recovering from his wound, Natasha jokes, “pretending to need this guy really ties the team together.” Hawkeye himself later comments on how fighting an army of robots in a flying city with a bow and arrow makes no sense. But his wife points out that, with the rest of the team emotional powder kegs, they really do need the stable, responsible family man, the ordinary guy to keep them in check. Hawkeye also gets some awesome moments in his own right, such as being the only team member to avoid Wanda’s mind manipulation (commenting that he’s already done the mind-control thing). Generally speaking, he finally gets to have a substantial role, and it’s very cool to see.

Stark gets a bit more development as well, showcasing how terrified he is at the thought of the earth being destroyed and his friends dying because he didn’t do enough (“That’s my legacy” he laments at one point, following the character thread started way back in the first Iron Man). Which, of course, leads to his ill-judged attempt at a final solution for “peace in our time.” This makes perfect sense, given Tony’s character. He’s an engineer and inventor, and to his mind there must always be a final solution, a way to automate, to remove the possibility of human error. Except that, as with so many previous attempts at automating humanity, it simply doesn’t work that way.

Cap understands things better. “Every time someone tries to stop a war before it starts, people die,” he tells Stark. When he tries to talk Ultron down by saying “no one needs to break anything,” both Ultron and Tony come back with a variation on the “can’t make an omelet” line. In other words, Cap is of the view that it’s better to lose the right way than try to win at all costs, and that you can’t guarantee a good outcome, you can only try your best. Tony puts his faith in structure and systems, Cap on human virtue and trust.

These two perspectives, touched on in The Avengers and latent throughout the series, will continue to be with us and to inform the choices of our two protagonists all the way to the end.

Thor probably has the least to do of the returning Avengers, to the point where the film either disables him or sends him off on a side quest for a good part of the second act (which quest ultimately doesn’t amount to anything except inspiring him to go along with creating Vision, which wouldn’t have been necessary had that event been worked into the story better). The film also seems to forget that he’s more or less banished from Asgard and can’t just go back whenever he wants.

But then, it also pretty much just ignores the fact that Tony trashed all his suits and retired (not that the latter was really worth remembering, but it still feels jarring). It is as if the only film the writer thought worth keeping was Winter Soldier, as dealing with the fall-out of SHIELD’s collapse kickstarts this film’s plot (Falcon, unfortunately, only has a few short cameos, which is explained by him running down leads on the Winter Soldier, though I don’t see why he couldn’t have shown up with War Machine in the final battle). One touch I particularly liked was that the same brave technician who stood up to Rumlow in that film reappears working on the bridge of the Helicarrier. That’s the kind of thing that almost no one in the audience will really notice except for long time fans, but shows a great deal of commitment on the part of the filmmakers.

On the other hand, just where Fury had the Helicarrier stashed and how he’s able to get it out when he’s supposed to be ‘dead’ and SHIELD doesn’t exist anymore is never addressed, nor will it ever be in subsequent films. It’s implied he’s kept up a form of SHIELD in the background, but it’s never explained.

As for the new characters, Wanda and Pietro don’t get too much development: they have very good chemistry, and Wanda has a good moment where she breaks down in a panic during the final battle, realizing what her actions have brought (though Barton’s the one who shines here as the veteran soldier reassuring the young rookie, including giving her a way out if she wants it), but again they’re never quite allowed to come to terms with how misguided their actions were (in particular, Wanda never seriously shows regret or gets called to account for unleashing the Hulk on a city full of innocents). Pietro has a lot of fun as a cock-sure, immature speedster, while Wanda gets to be the more mature and level-headed one (even though, as he says, “I’m twelve minutes older than you!”). Their relationship with Ultron is kind of interesting, as he genuinely seems to care for them in his own way.

There’s also Vision, who benefits immensely from being partially constructed from Jarvis, a character we already know and like. His simple goodness and heroics are quite appealing, serving as the angelic counterpart to the diabolic Ultron, though he doesn’t get too much time to develop. His philosophical musings range from good (“A thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts”) to banal (“they think order and chaos are somehow opposites”), but I suppose we can’t expect too much better. He does at least get an iconic heroic moment where he rescues Wanda from the exploding city, Superman-style.

Meanwhile, we also get Andy Serkis in a scene-stealing cameo as Ulysses Klaue, the fearsome and eccentric African arms dealer, who is the one man who’s managed to steal Vibranium from Wakanda. He creates a strong first impression by putting the Maximoff twins in their place with sheer force of personality (“I’m afraid that I’m not that afraid”), then doing a deal with Ultron. We…will come back to him in a later entry.

The great snappy Avengers humor is back, for the most part, with things like the running “language!” gag (which also deftly re-establishes Tony and Steve’s characters), Tony’s disbelief at Barton’s family, Barton’s continual snark, Tony and Steve questioning the rules of Mjolnir (“if you put the hammer in an elevator..”), and Ultron’s…oddities (like when he reacts to the twins fleeing in horror from his scheme by shouting “Come on, guys!” like a petulant kid whose friends took a joke too seriously). On the other hand, the film sometimes sprinkles in humor at the wrong times, as when we get Ultron reacting to the Hulk with comical frustration right in the middle of mourning a character’s death. Doesn’t happen too often (not nearly as bad as Iron Man 3, for instance), but much more so than in the first film.

There’s also just a lot of really good lines: “How long before you trust me?” “It’s not you I don’t trust.” “I was asleep…or was I a dream?” “Make it right or the next missile I send you will come very much faster.” “Human life; not a growth market.” “I’m just an old man who cares very much about you.” “Keep your friends rich and your enemies rich and wait to see which is which,” and so on. We also get what is probably Stan Lee’s best cameo of the series to date, as an Omaha Beach veteran who dares to try Thor’s thousand-year-old Asgardian mead.

Most importantly, the unabashed heroism of the first film is still there in full force, from Cap mobilizing the twins into saving civilians from a runaway train to Tony taking such logical steps as temporarily immobilizing the Hulk while he gets his armor on and trying to fly him out of town, the film makes sure the Avengers are always trying to put the innocent first. At the end, when it looks like the only option is to blow up the flying city to save the world, Cap objects “I’m not leaving this rock as long as there’s a single civilian on it,” to which Black Widow answers, “I didn’t suggest we leave.” The waters are muddied a bit by the fact that, again, the situation is ultimately Tony’s fault, and to a lesser extent Bruce, Wanda, and Pietro’s, but even then the former two at least were trying to protect the world and prevent things like this from happening and spend the film trying to correct their mistake.

In summary, Age of Ultron is a big step down from its predecessor; it tries to tackle too much, fails to settle on what it wants to be about, and makes a number of key mistakes along the way. But that still leaves a lot of room for an extremely entertaining and thrilling superhero adventure full of iconic moments. The characters are still great, the dialogue and humor are mostly solid, and the action scenes are spectacular. It’s a potent blend of flaws and virtues that nevertheless ends up being well worth watching.