should I watch Age of Ultron?

[lotesse]

peeps who've seen the movie, i would like your advice. I'm primarily invested in Tony, did not like the arc reactor elimination/mass suit destroy at the end of IM3 and so have not rewatched it at all, have not seen CATWS, dislike many current MCU Steve tropes, and also i will be upset about [things] happening to jarvis. i've spoiled myself pretty rigorously, but most of the reviews i've seen are either coming from Steve/Bucky fans upset about continuity or people who aren't in to Tony Stark's Endless Woobie Melodrama (secret: i tttly am tho). is there anything worth my going in for?

Comments

[minim_calibre]

It's very much a movie about Tony Stark. So you'd probably enjoy it. I'm not kidding at all when I call it Iron Man 4.

[coffeeandink]

{here from network} I am ttly into Tony Stark's Endless Woobie Melodrama and I felt like it was really short-changed. It just generally isn't emotionally satisfying.

[lotesse]

that's the sense i'd been getting from reading around - that Tony's technically prominent but not in a satisfying way. can you say more about what wasn't working? spoilers welcome.

[staranise]

It's super muddled just what the hell he's doing. Like, I literally could not tell what was or wasn't a telepath who hates him planting deliberately bad ideas in his head. He makes Ultron and that was a bad idea, but then he gets a chance to destroy Ultron's superweapon and instead decides... to do the EXACT SAME THING ALL OVER AGAIN?? And then it works? So like what did we learn here, what is the conclusion of Tony's character arc? It feels like instead of actually facing his moral culpability he's just like "well it didn't destroy the earth like it could have so eh whatever" except then he thinks about moving Pepper to a farm in the middle of nowhere?

It's just so absolutely muddled and weird.

[princessofgeeks]

Yes, this.

[coffeeandink]

Almost all the character work seems so perfunctory and half-assed. So Tony has a vision of the world being destroyed (with Steve, notably, being the voice of conscience who blames him and tells him he didn't try hard enough), and then ... montage of creating Ultron! And then he fixes Ultron by creating another AI. JARVIS dies and he's sad for a minute, and that's it. And Ultron kills hundreds and there's a half-hearted argument with Steve and then Fury tells him to suit up, and that's *that*.

It's not just that the movie doesn't take into account the character work done for Tony in IM3 (and Steve and Natasha in CAWS, and Thor in The Dark World), it's that it can't really be bothered to do character work for him here.

The more I think about this movie, the more I dislike it.

[princessofgeeks]

It's a muddle, but it's a Tony-centric muddle. It doesn't have the things you didn't like about Iron Man 3 -- very little to connect it with that, actually, and Steve was very much Movie Steve. (I rarely seek out Steve-centric fanfic, so I am ignorant about the tropes there.)

My vote would be, go see it. It's weird, but it might leave room for all your preferred interpretations?

Do you ship Tony with anybody, by the way? Because it's wide open in this movie, pretty much. He mentions Pepper fondly, which to me is a good thing?

But the other commenters are right that in some ways it feels oddly cut off from the other movies, except for the presence of Rhodey and Sam, and the continuation of the Steve and Natasha friendship.