I finally saw Avengers: Age of Ultron and while it’s very good it definitely wasn’t Marvel’s best film. I’d rank it 4th or 5th in my ranking of the Marvel movies,. It was still a damn good blockbuster and being in the top five Marvel movies makes it better than most movies. Here are my thoughts on the movie.

• I still get a giddy feeling seeing these characters from a comic book, who know one thought twenty years ago would ever get their own movies let alone a movie together, all in the same place in battle.
• I never noticed until this movie, but in the first movie Thor and Cap only had that one scene of fighting together. In this one, they’ve developed their team-up strategies with the hammer and shield to perfection.
• The accents of Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver were pretty awful. I get that they’re from a foreign country but they seem like such cliché Russian accents.
• Of the two, Quicksilver’s is definitely the worst.
• After infiltrating the Hydra base, the movie moves kind of slow. At least slow compared to quickness of the first movie which has its slow part in the very beginning when Loki takes Tesseract.
• I get that Thor is angry, but that scene where he grabs Tony by the throat seems kind of silly. It did make me laugh when he aggressively hand the tablet to Tony, still ticked off.
• Am I the only one who saw Mjolnir move a little when Cap. tried to pick it up?
• Until Tony pointed it out to Steve that Ultron was trying to divide them the whole making them fight amongst each other seemed like treading old ground from the first movie.
• Instead, they could have focused on how the fears Scarlet Witch makes them live divides them by making them focus on themselves individually rather than acting as a team. That way you can still divide them without repeating the same infighting from the first movie.
• Making J.A.R.V.I.S. become Vision was a great move in my opinion. Paul Bettany has the perfect voice, poise, and look for the android.
• In fact, I liked Vision so much that I wanted more of him in the movie. To me he stole every scene he was in and I would rather Ultron had knocked him away rather than out cold.
• With all the grandiose speeches, quotable lines, and the introduction of his wife and family I swore that Hawkeye was going to die in this movie.
• To my surprise it was Quicksilver, who I assumed would stick around considering he was just introduced in this movie.
• I guess it makes sense, the Fox movies get Quicksilver and the Marvel movies get Scarlet Witch though I think this Quicksilver looks more how I imagine he would in movies then the Days of Future Past one.
• I didn’t get it until later but was Cap’s vision by Scarlet Witch a fear of war ending, making his life have no purpose anymore?
• James Spader was brilliant as Ultron. In the comics he refers to Hank Pym, his creator, as his father so it was brilliant for the movie version to take on some of the same phrases and personality traits as his movie father, Tony Stark.
• Which explains in my mind why he makes certain  mistakes: his arrogance. If he was as cold and calculating as he think he is he would have used all that vibranium on his copies of himself.
• Looping back around to Stark’s history as a weapons manufacturer with the Maximoff twins  was a nice touch.
• Joss Whedon’s criticism of being forced to include the scene with Thor in the cave, getting visions of the Infinity Stones seems justified. It was kind of jarring, but I do think he blew it way out of proportion.
• All the jokes and quips on the movie were on point. If they bothered you I guarantee you’re going to miss them when you see the grim and gritty no joke movie that will be Batman v. Superman.
• Another silly moment with Thor: It may be just my opinion but having Thor underground during the battle at one point seem like a poor strategy.
• Seeing Thor, Vision, and Iron Man aim their lightning and beams at Ulton together was another one of those giddy moments to watch.
• What was the point of the Black Widow / Bruce Banner romance if they weren’t going to deliver? Was it supposed to feel tragic? After the death of Quicksilver it just rang false, nor did I really care. Of course Hulk is going to show up again in the next Avengers movie.
• The movie was a slow simmer, quite different from the first movie which had everything happen so quickly, but that doesn’t make it a bad movie.

In case you were curious here is how I rank the Marvel movies, not including Iron Man 3 which i still haven’t seen.

1. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
2. Guardians of the Galaxy
3. The Avengers
4. Captain America: The First Avenger
5. Avengers: Age of Ultron
6. Thor
7. Iron Man
8. Thor: The Dark World
9. The Incredible Hulk
10. Iron Man 2

After the two anti-climactic conclusions of Iron Man 1 & 2 I have yet to watch the third one. I’m guessing Ant-Man will probably fall right under Iron Man but that’s just my guess.