Picoreview: Afternoon of Ultron: Doing these picoreviews has had me reading the original ones I did when some of these movies came out, and I was kinder to Age of Ultron when it came out than I was in memory and am on rewatching. I mean, I’ve seen it at least three times post-theatre, and it was apparently satisfying at the time, but ultimately remains a pretty bad movie, tbh. It has a number of good PARTS, which I think is what made me like it oriignally, but from more than a minute after that, well, it’s not great. If they’d cut the entire Hawkeye family & Bruce/Nat romance storylines, & dropped the PAINFULLY belabored monsters metaphor, it could have been good.
But I hate the title because it really is basically an afternoon of Ultron. The whole thing takes place in MAYBE as much as two weeks, but I think it’s probably under a week. It lacks the large-scale threat of the title, to me, and I find it very aggravating as a story because it’s such a disaster of Tony’s own making. I mean, yes, fully in character for him, but he’s five movies into his own storyline at this point and hasn’t learned a goddamn thing and I find it really frustrating. (For those of you who read Elfquest, I find Rayek EXACTLY THE SAME KIND of frustrating.)
However, it does give us the “Steve rips a log apart with his bare hands” moment, which is not only hot, it’s also got an INCREDIBLE reaction shot from Tony which I think plays up both the fact that when he’s not in costume, it’s really easy to forget that Steve is anything but an ordinary man, and that nobody is at all accustomed to seeing Steve allow himself to express frustration or anger about much of anything, particularly his situation, seventy years out of time. It’s actually a fantastic character moment.
And obviously it also gives us the hammer setup, which is a great moment. :) Honestly, there are a LOT of great moments, which are irrevocably bogged down by the parts that are bad.
Also, in retrospect it’s also really obvious that most of the point of this movie was setting up for Infinity War/Endgame, which is too bad. I do, however, still like the fact that when Wanda enters the field against Ultron, he just flippin’ bails. Do Not Mess With Wanda.