For me, it was unsuccessful for several reasons, but the main five to me are as follows...
1. The edit. The edit was one of the worst I've ever seen from a major motion picture. There are scenes that seem to be cut off in mid-sentence of someone speaking, or right in the middle of a character doing something, and Whedon flashes over to a new scene and then inexplicably goes back to the other scene and the characters are in completely different positions doing something else entirely or are in a completely different location from where they were from the last moment we saw them. Had Whedon cut out Hawkeye's false death flag scenes at the farmhouse and cut out Banner's and Romanoff's unconvincing romance he would've had more running time to be able to explore the characters more as well as their motivations. As a result of a poor edit, the film thus suffers from multiple continuity errors.
2. The writing. The screenplay felt like a thousand people had contributed one sentence each, the writing felt juvenile and sometimes sexist(which is mind-boggling given that Whedon criticized Jurassic World for the exact same thing on twitter), and the dialogue was delivered by the cast in a very ham-fisted sortof way.
3. The villain never felt menacing.
4. The action set-pieces relied far too much on cgi, and much of the action on-screen felt completely incoherent. The basic look of the fight scenes and action scenes looked like the basic equivalent of some newbie hiker standing in the middle of a swamp swatting mosquitos.
5. The film itself could not stand on it's own, like for instance the original The Avengers or Captain America: The Winter Soldier could. A person could walk right into the theater and be entertained and know what's going on if they had not seen even a single other Marvel Studios film while watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier or the original The Avengers. If non-comicbook reading movie-goers and/or ticket-buyers who may not have seen all of the rest of Marvel Studio's cinema and television productions, then those people would be moderately lost while viewing Avengers: Age of Ultron in my opinion.
At any rate, these are my main reasons for personally believing this film to be a far, far inferior movie to the original Marvel's The Avengers.
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writing_in_red
9 years ago
I accept that everything you've listed is your opinion, but I'd just like to address your points with my own if I may;
1. I'm honestly not sure what you mean here. The edit felt just like every other Marvel movie. Like I said above, I was not lost at any point and I didn't notice anything you seem to have.
2. I absolutely disagree. The one-liners, the motivations, the character interaction all felt very well done.
3. I don't think the villain was meant to be the focus. What he was trying to do and how this reflected on the Avengers was the focus. I agree that Ultron could have done more "evil" things - like Loki did with that eye gouger thing in the first one - but I enjoyed Ultron and felt he more than served his purpose.
4. It's going to be CGI heavy. It's got to be. End of. I was very impressed and enjoyed the spectacle.
5. This is where you are undoubtedly wrong, I am afraid. I went to see it with a few mates, some of which hadn't watched the solo movies and had only seen the first one when it came out in cinema, and they enjoyed it as much as I did.
The Nth Doctor Adventures - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9OBLh4UAdzRgWWkSCD4h7w/feature
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cadenbt
9 years ago
1. The edit. The edit was one of the worst I've ever seen from a major motion picture. There are scenes that seem to be cut off in mid-sentence of someone speaking, or right in the middle of a character doing something, and Whedon flashes over to a new scene and then inexplicably goes back to the other scene and the characters are in completely different positions doing something else entirely or are in a completely different location from where they were from the last moment we saw them. Had Whedon cut out Hawkeye's false death flag scenes at the farmhouse and cut out Banner's and Romanoff's unconvincing romance he would've had more running time to be able to explore the characters more as well as their motivations. As a result of a poor edit, the film thus suffers from multiple continuity errors.
That's not called
continuity errors, it's called a
montage. For christs sake, look up what both of those things are.
If you thought the writing was sexist, then you weren't paying attention either.
No one was lost, except for you, guy.
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