Hawkeye's monologue to Wanda about becoming an Avenger was a true highlight. Next too Natasha and Bruce's bar scene -- actually that whole party scene was fantastic, "...Excelsior..."
Some of you guys have been complaining about the CGI, I remember reading one comment that compared it to the scorpion king in Mummy Returns, which seems a little hyperbolic. The worst of it seemed to be when some of the characters were doing super acrobatic stunts in wide angles, close ups were obviously all the actors/stuntdoubles, but there were a few times where Thor would fly into frame or Cap would do some crazy flips and the CGI characters were just a little rubbery, something about there integration, probably to motion blur made them seem a little off -- but for the most part it was great, Ultron, his bots, vision, Wanda's Hex's, Hulk for the most part, all fantastic, vibrant, and creative -- the step up in lighting and cinematography certainty helped things for sure in the visuals department.
So from the implication at the end, with Cap looking over the new team, are we to believe that at least for some of the films to come that Tony Stark will be retired from being Iron Man, and just being genius-man Tony Stark -- it seemed odd that we first see him back-in-action after the events of Iron Man 3, in-fact, the whole opening scene fucked up the pacing for the first act, we just kind of got thrown into it, no dialogue beforehand, nothing. Hawkeye seems like he'd be out of the picture for good too, they gave him a hell of a sendoff if so. Hulks got to come back, but he's out of the picture for now.
Oh, but shit, the whole "Ultron's in the internet!" thing sounded like it was from a movie dealing with hacking from the 90's, it was especially cringy when Vision said it. Actually it'll be interesting to see peoples reaction to the "birth" of Ultron, at least in how it was visualised by blue and orange fighting back-and-forth. It's a little tropey, but fuck -- they didn't have a whole lot of time to tell a story around the dangers of A.I. And while you might argue that it's an Avengers film, real world comparisions would just bog it down, look at The Winter Soldier, that had all the subtext of surveillance and NSA type shenanigans, so it would have been nice if they focused a bit more on the logic of our villain, instead they were balancing far to many plates in the plot department.
All in all, pretty good, not Winter Soldier good, but as good as the first Avengers -- however in the grand scheme of things, it moved things along, in a really interesting way -- the New Avengers team is dope, Scarlet Witch costume was perfect.
