[Hack&Lube]

No Spoilers:

I watched the movie this morning. Paul Bettany was great. James Spader was great. I'm bothered that they never took the opportunity to make theme music for each individual character, and then bring those out as each did their thing in the Avengers films. That's a major ball dropped for me and I wonder why I was constantly thinking about that during the film. Then again, they don't really have theme music for superheroes anymore.

I was not hurt by CGI overload in this film. It has incredibly diverse locations and the realism of shooting in Eastern Europe, South Korea, Africa (Wakanda looks more like New York though), etc. made the film look more realistic in a strange way.

My only beef is how clear Hawkeye and Black Widow don't make any sense in this team (Hawkeye even admits it in the funniest moment in the movie) as they are so easily hurt and a hindrance to a team full of super humans.

Quicksilver was alright. He didn't have the charisma of the Days of Future Past version but made up for it by being a total Russian cliche down to wearing track suits and Addidas. Product placement was blatant everywhere.

The change to the character origins made sense. There's no Henry Pim (Antman) or Reed Richards so Bruce Banner stands in as secondary scientist to Tony Stark. Ultron never looked like Ulton to me until the end when some of the minion bots had more of the classic look to them (trapezoidal eyes, red zig-zag mouth).

As far as the plot goes, I totally missed the resolution at the end and will have to re-watch because I have no idea what happened. They just glossed over it and that's the weak point to me.

One final thing, this is almost a G-Rated film in terms of violence. The Avengers really go into saturday morning cartoon overdrive and constantly save everybody when it's on film. The actual casualties from what happens in the movie (unseen) would probably be hundreds of thousands.