<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\nIt basically survives solely on the strength of its characters and their banter. I don’t think most people realize how precariously this movie is balanced. If you take out some of the laughs and feels that make us want<\/em> to believe in this world, the whole thing unravels in an instant. This movie survives for the same reason I put up with parts of Mass Effect 2: We like these characters and will hand-wave silly ideas as long as their parts workAlthough having NO rules is still better than having rules and then later BREAKING them, which was what Mass Effect kept doing.<\/span>. Characters can’t carry a story forever, and there’s a limit to how much crap the audience will tolerate, but Age of Ultron gets farther than I ever thought possible.<\/p>\n Here is an odd sort of praise: I liked it better than my first viewing of Avengers 1, but I’ll bet Ultron will have less re-watch value in the long run. Contrivances and BS tend to stick out more on repeated viewings, and Age of Ultron has a lot of them.<\/p>\n There are ten screens at the local Cineplex. On Friday, Avengers was playing on four of them. I’ve never seen that happen before. Not in this town. <\/p>\n SPOILERS!<\/p>\n FOR REAL!<\/p>\n DO NOT READ MORE IF YOU DON’T WANT TO BE SPOILED! I’M NOT PUTTING SPOILER TAGS AROUND THESE HUGE BLOCKS OF TEXT! ALSO THE COMMENTS WILL BE FILLED WITH SPOILERS! <\/p>\n The ending drove me crazy. Okay, the city is going to slam into the earth and kill “billions”. But then they blow it apart. That shouldn’t actually help. (Much.) You still have the same mass heading at the earth at the same speed, which means it’s going to deliver the same amount of energy. In asteroid movies you can kind of hand-wave this by saying that if we make the pieces small enough they could burn up in the atmosphere instead of hitting the ground. I guess the idea is that the energy gets absorbed heating the upper atmosphere instead of shoving the tectonic plates around and kicking up world-enveloping dust clouds? <\/p>\n