Just finished. Liked it much more than the first one. Whedon's massively improved in terms of direction, pacing, and the weaving in and out of characters. Dialogue is more natural, the plot is better and more settled now the Avengers are already together, and it's all coherent despite the amount of things going on. The action probably isn't as good as the first one - some of the editing here is a little haywire - , but it works far better in other departments.
The performances are generally better; Evans and Johansson doing CA2 work, Renner taking his beefed up part and running with it, and all the new additions adding something at least (both twins are fine, Bettany has a real presence even if I remain a little confused about Vision's origins!). RDJ and Hemsworth suffer a little because there's just so many characters, but both actors are so comfortable in the roles that it's negligible. Whedon's very good at getting the best out of chemistry, so all the Tony/Cap scenes, all the Bruce/Widow scenes, they all really worked for me. The party and safe house sequences were very strong.
Ultron is both a pleasure and a disappointment in ways; he's absolutely the best Marvel villain so far (note I don't really understand the fuss over Loki), and Spader is 75% the reason it works. He gets some good lines that would come across far less menacing without that cadence and voice, so props to him for that. I like what the intentions with him are - so revolted by humanity despite just being one himself, in everything but physical form - , but in the end he just lacked danger. How I wished for a representation of that comic panel where he kills an entire country just to get their attention. It would have done a lot for his impact if something similar was done here.
It absolutely is a sequel - enjoyed seeing the guy who defied Rumlow in TWS working for SHIELD! - and the best way to view this films really is as almost ludicrously high budgeted TV shows; serialised continuations and advancements of other plotlines. Works massively for me when I have an understanding of the MCU as a whole.
Things I didn't like: Thor's visions, entirely irrelevant to the film and not interesting enough to get me interested in Ragnarok (and I didn't understand how what he saw led to his part in Vision's birth). The aforementioned lack of real impact Ultron had. Quicksilver's quip when he died (don't have a problem with the death per se, but that was a bit shitty).
And most of all, the massive wariness that they're going to fuck Thanos up. This is all just extremely presumptuous, but based on their villains so far, their lack of physical threat and the way he's been handled up to this point, I'm not exoecting much.
He gets the gauntlet from some unspecified location with no build up whatsoever, the scene is ten seconds long so offers literally nothing, and because of the placement of the gems so far - one on Asgard, one on Knowhere, one on Earth and one on Xandar - I fail to see how they'll 'Thanos Quest' it and show him using tactics and his own strength and intellect. It'll probably just be him using armies of faceless aliens to blow holes in safes while he grabs them.
No. Let me see him tear the Vision apart and rip the stone from his head. Let him trick the Collector like he does in the Thanos Quest. Let him lay waste to Asgard, swatting Loki aside like a fly. Let him travel into the cosmos, resisting the forces of space and time and reality all to have a chess match. It doesn't matter if you turn back time at the end and everyone comes back to life because the gem is a viable deus ex machina, but at least let me feel the danger of Thanos before you do that.
That mid credits sequence was fucking rubbish. It really was.
But yeah. Good film. High tier Marvel. One of their top tier films, along with TWS, IM3 and GOTG. Phase Two > Phase One by some distance, even allowing for the distinctly average Thor 2 (and even that was far better than the first).
