I pretty much only watch Marvel movies when I am looking for something I don’t have to think about. Civil War was just added so I figured I’d watch that, distract myself from my surgery tomorrow. But then I remembered I hadn’t seen this one, so I figured I’d watch it first.

SPOILERS I guess

There are just so many Marvel movies these days, and they all basically follow the same pattern. But the Avengers movies are the most bloated of all of them: they are ridiculously long, full of stuff that could have been cut and, perhaps, worst of all, they do this annoying thing where they up the stakes as high as they possibly can – to world-destroying proportions, every movie, though the Thor films do this too – without really endangering – or killing! – any one of the major characters. (And the characters multiply film after film. Look up a Comic Con cast photo one day and see how many fucking people are starring in these movies lately. It’s ridiculous.)

The latter point is utterly maddening: the stakes are HUGE but they actually aren’t, because we know that the main group isn’t in danger. Quicksilver dies but so what? We just met him. The main cast are too important to the franchise (and perhaps contractually obligated to be in future films) to ever die. So we get the same shit every time: world-threatening stuff but our heroes will prevail with their quick wits and quicker brains and reflexes and, though thousands of extras die in each film, everything is fine in the end, it was all just another day at the office.

I actually enjoyed the bad guy this time around, when Spader was allowed to be particularly insane. It makes sense that an AI would want to kill the Avengers and Ultron was almost appealing enough to root for. But he wasn’t – I wonder how much of Spader doing his thing was left out of the film, so as to make Ultron less appealing – and, in the end, the whole thing is just too long and too boring.

We’ve seen this movie many times before. And, because I am looking for stupid things to watch on occasion, I will likely see it again many more times. The only thing that lets me live with myself is that I don’t pay for these films. I just watch them on Netflix.

5/10