Do you ever find that when you first watch a film, you don't have the highest opinion of it? Then marketing and general hype makes you want to dislike a film even more. I think I was a bit like this with Avengers: Age of Ultron. I still went to the cinema to watch it but I felt it was a bit meh. Visually spectacular but bereft of substance or a strong narrative to latch onto. It's a bit of a thematic soup probably a result of competing forces both creatively and economically. On the surface, it's just a case of Tony Stark wanting to use the most advanced technology to protect the world and not showing enough caution in doing so. And so Ultron is born, or manufactured. Let's bear in mind that this film came out in 2015, seven years before Open AI's Chat GPT shoved AI into the average person's thinking. Then beneath that is the aftermath of war, as the characters Pietro and Wanda Maximoff talk about being trapped next to an unexploded missile bearing the name of Stark across it. This is their villain origin story. The film tackles the horrors of war in one moment and then in the next makes a locker room joke. That's a weird thing to do. Also, throughout the film is a litany of product placements, which is normal for a film of this size but some are so subtle that you have to wonder if there is any return on investment. But when all of that is sorted through, it is a good film. Yes, it's made to gain big box office numbers, meaning it has to be enjoyed by the lowest common denominator but it also attempts to encourage the viewer to think about global philosophical challenges. Should AI be deployed rapidly? What do you do about innocents that have seen the terrors of war in their youth and have had their hearts hardened against the nations that are major economies? Are we, the individuals that live in these major economies (most of which are democracies), the real monsters and would we even know if we were? A: AoU may not have stuck the landing but it made a truly impressive attempt.