It's Not the Comics, And That's O.K.
It is not without a little trepidation that I finally sat down to watch this film. I knew going in that there were some big departures from the comics this time out. To their credit, the gatekeepers of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have managed to hew close to the source material for ten films, but this time out I had heard things like Ultron was not created by Hank Pym, and that Pym (the man behind a lot of the internal conflicts within the Avengers in the comics) was not to be present at all.
Combine that with firstly, the fact that the film features over a dozen(!) major characters, and several minor ones, and recent superhero team films (the last few installments of the X-Men and Fantastic Four for example) already suffered from overcrowding and not enough screen time for individual characters to really shine, and secondly that just days earlier I'd watched the lackluster Iron Man 3, and thirdly that critics were giving A: AofU mixed reviews - and you can see why I approached the film so warily.
And to be totally honest, seeing the Avengers assemble again isn't as fun as the first time around (never is there an exchange as great as the one between Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark and Tom Hiddleston's Loki over drinks in Stark tower). But it's still amazingly well focused given the large ensemble cast, and nearly every character seems to have a story arc here, every character has a role to play, no matter how small.
And the departures from the comics doesn't seem to detract from A: AofU. Quite the contrary, they really seem to enhance the film. Once you've seen it, it totally makes sense that Tony Stark would be, and probably always should've been the one to create Ultron - it matches not only his skill set better than Pym (who was always more into making organic things big or small than creating robots), and it also matches his hubris. Other changes from the comics were also a pleasant surprise like the budding beauty-and-the-beast relationship between Natasha Romanova and Bruce Banner.
Special attention should be given to James Spader's remarkable performance as the voice actor behind Ultron. The evil killer robot trope has been done to death on the big screen, and it would have been easy for this movie to sink down to mediocrity by having a clichéd monotone mechanical vocal delivery. Instead we get vocals that while definitely processed to sound inhuman, also crackle with malevolence, and an evil Stark-like personality.
Ultimately, A: AofU is an entertaining film that manages to juggle more characters than it should, while balancing heavy action with lighter moments (a drunken contest to lift Mjolnir is a memorable highlight), while simultaneously accomplishing its secondary goal of setting up the third wave of Marvel films still to come. The movie opens a lot of new doors (no spoilers, but Hawkeye reveals a huge secret about his private life in this one) for future films to explore - though some of them are going to be tall orders (such as reconciling this broody, heavily-accented adult version of Quicksilver with his more happy-go-lucky teen counterpart in the X-Men films).
While it's not as good as the first Avengers film, it's better than most of the Marvel films to date, which makes it fun to watch, and bodes well for the future.
