To be fair, let's start by admitting that Avengers: Age of Ultron is not my kind of movie, and I went to it only because nothing else opened last Friday. And it was pretty much what I expected and almost exactly what a lot of people will want.
Other reviewers seem commonly to be complaining that it is overstuffed, with a dozen major superheroes and supervillains, as well as a bewilderment of plot. And the characters are pretty much what they've been established as in other movies, with a little complication in Mark Ruffalo's Hulk and his relationship with Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow. The most spectacular character is the head villain, voiced by James Spader, but he's one-dimensional. The plot involves his lust to destroy the Avengers because they stand in the way of his lust to destroy all the people in the world, and what he wants to do after that is unclear.
The real world we live in is shown only in process of destruction, except for a pretty unnecessary sequence on a farm that doesn't do much but give us a recess from heavily edited battles and brawls and reckless driving, and even an earthquake that doesn't seem to result from anything in either plot or theme.
Fortunately, special effects are as good as we have come to expect of major superproductions, and there is a lot of bang-boom action and a plenitude of sets that are too modern for me to identify with. I suspect that there is a lot whose point got past me, like a Hillary Clinton lookalike and what appear to be allusions to current social issues that don't seem to add much to the total sum.
Avengers: Age of Ultron will surely be more popular, but my kind of sci-fi is Ex Machina.
