Avengers 2- Movie Review

A marvel movie comes out and I don’t review it? Not likely. Especially the supersized sequel to the highest grossing superhero movie ever. I’d been waiting for this movie for over a year, ever since the official page on IMDB was created and the image of Ultron from the comics was used as a poster. So I positively had to watch the first morning show of the Saturday and I did. Even when the earthquake shook Kolkata at over 6 Richter and even when people were exiting the movie hall to save themselves, I and my friend just raised our 3D glasses for a second to look at them, whispered “Amateurs” and resumed watching the movie. I know it’s the dumbest thing to do during earthquake, but I didn’t feel anything shaking and didn’t know the severity of it until I went back to my apartment and saw the news. 

Getting back to the movie, it is everything that you expected from the trailers and even more. If you had a Loki wielding a magic sceptre in the first movie, here you have a huge metallic “A.I” wielding the magic sceptre. If you had an army of aliens in the first movie, here you have an army of robots. If you had six superheroes there, you have many more here. If you had two very good fight sequences there, you have four here. If you had a flying SHIELD control base there, here you have a whole darn flying… umm, watch the movie and you’ll know.

Marvel Studios learned from their past mistakes, and they’ve given equal importance to all members of the Avengers. In the previous movie Ironman stole all the limelight with his wits and ultimately by saving the city from the nuclear warhead (something he never stopped to boast about), and the Hulk by saving him. Hawkeye and Scarlet Johansson… Uh, I mean Black Widow… didn’t get much focus. Maybe I felt more so because they didn’t get their own movies to let us know about their past. This movie did very good job of showing their private, emotional and vulnerable selves, and that goes for the other characters too. It felt for the first time that these superheroes are humans after all... well, except Thor who’s practically a god, but gods also have their woes.

I liked the two new additions to the cast, a boy and a girl who are ‘twins’. The girl has magical abilities (Telekinesis and psyche manipulation) and the boy can run really really fast. Fans of X-men would know that the boy is actually ‘Quicksilver’ and the girl is ‘Scarlet Witch’, and are in fact children of Magneto. This fact was not revealed in the movie because the film right to X-men franchise is currently with 20^th Century Fox Studios, and Avengers was made by Marvel Studios. This is also the reason why Spiderman is not in the Avengers, although he is one of the coolest members in comics but sadly owned by Sony. This issue is so ridiculous that they call the twins ‘Enhanced’ in Avengers 2, which is just a nice way of saying ‘Mutants’. One thing that’s weird about the cast for the twins, although they look awesome together, is that they played as husband and wife in Godzilla last year. It was weird information for me because in one of the comic book arcs that I read, the twins were actually engaged in a... umm… romantic relationship. I hope that was a coincidence and wasn’t a reference to the Lannisters.

Ultron is of course the pivotal character in the story. He may seem like the usual Artificial Intelligence gone rogue, but he’s not.  He has a nice dark humour, much like the A.I system ‘Glados’ from the Portal games. He has feelings, evident from the way he speaks to the ‘Twins’ and feels the existential crisis. He gets angry when provoked, gets upset when told that he cannot reproduce, and even knows better than to engage the Hulk. James Spader has given a chilling voice to Ultron. It gave me shivers when the self-convinced Ultron mutters- “They’ll understand. When they see it they’ll understand. I just need some… time.”

What’s scary about Ultron is that he can very well be real in the near future. With the advances in the computer technology you can never know when the computers will ‘evolve’ to an extent as to surpass capabilities of the human brain. Currently they don’t, because human brain is the most complex processing unit known to man and its workings are still very much in the darkness. We can build CPUs that can process at lightning speed, but without proper directions, proper instructions, the CPU would not know what to do with all that power. But the brain is after all just a bunch of neurons firing signals at each other, and a computer is just a bunch of logic gates firing electric signals at each other. Once we understand the brain, it will not be impossible to decode it and make a computer that mimics it. It will just take two such average computers, coupled with each other, to outdo the highest IQ ever recorded. Now imagine several such computers connected via network. Now just for the sake of thought exercise imagine that such a super intelligent computer decides that the humans are a threat to each other and the entire life on earth. Tony Stark makes that mistake by trying to create an A.I whose task is peace-keeping, and what else can result in a long lasting peace that the extermination of these petty nuisance called humans. What Tony didn’t know was that this will make for an awesome movie.

The movie is not without some negative points. Though I cannot point it out, it did feel that the movie was lacking some of the flashy charm of the first movie, maybe because of so many superhero movies coming out these days. Some dialogues were left incomplete and several actions seemed too scripted instead of looking natural. I saw the movie in both 3D and 2D. The 2D version is naturally much clearer, but surprisingly Marvel knows how to make good 3D also. The post credit scene was awesome. Even though it was only about 10 seconds long, it has made me restless until the next movie “Infinity Wars”.

If you haven’t already watched the movie, what’re you doing? Go watch it now!