Avengers: Age of Ultron

The team's second film. A sceptre is recovered. Tony Stark examines it, finds an intelligence inside, and tries to attach it to a defence system without telling the others. Ultron wakes up and makes his first decision immediately: for peace, humanity has to go. From there the film travels through several countries. A fortress, a shipbreaking yard, an African port, Seoul and a city in Eastern Europe. There are two siblings on the other side. One is fast, the other gets inside minds and shows each member of the team their own fear. What the narrative is interested in is not an enemy but responsibility: Ultron does not come from outside, he is the team's own product, and the film never lets that be forgotten. The Vision line is the best idea in the narrative and that character's birth sits in the middle of the film. The ending takes place with a city lifted into the air, and the evacuation scenes take as much room as the fighting; this is an answer to the criticism of destruction in the earlier films. The balance of the film is poor. The narrative has to tell its own story and prepare later films at the same time, and the two squeeze each other. The director could not agree with the studio about the cut and some of what was shot did not appear in the released version; he later said so openly. Ultron was produced entirely from an actor's face and movement capture. It was shot in Britain, Italy, South Africa and South Korea. Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, James Spader, Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany are in the cast. Joss Whedon wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone following the series. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the balance of the first film; the narrative is crowded and tired.