MICHAEL LOMAX: Age of Ultron officially begins summer season

If you plan on watching “Avengers: Age of Ultron” at any point in the next couple weeks, don’t be late. I got there fifteen minutes early and the theater was packed out the door. The only seats I could find were right at the front. So come showtime, I reclined as far back as I could, rubbed my eyes down, and readied myself for a half-hour of previews. And as the trailers started going, I finally realized the summer movie season was officially here.

I said the same thing when I saw “Furious 7” a month ago, but in hindsight, that film was little too tender to kick off the blockbuster season. It’s not that it didn’t make a lot of money, but the entire film, while definitely exciting, couldn’t help but feel like a Paul Walker tribute with explosions. The new “Avengers” installment, on the other hand, is an apologetically good time from start to finish. You feel few emotions, and other than the occasional plot question, your brain doesn’t move. It’s shameless entertainment, and I have no complaints.

“Age of Ultron” finds our heroes mostly tired of the supervillainy they can’t seem to shake. It’s one galactic threat after another, and the Avengers are getting a little worn out. So Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) decides to jump start a peacekeeping project called Ultron that would create “a suit of armor around the world.” The only catch is that the program runs on artificial intelligence that is quickly corrupted. Now the Avengers must fix Tony’s mistake or the whole world faces annihilation.

Sound familiar?

The idea isn’t new. Human beings are always trying to save the world, but more often than not, they end up making things much worse. It’s like when you try to fix something by applying a little too much pressure, and the whole contraption falls apart. The problem is that when you fly around the world fighting crime in a metal war machine, your room for error is nonexistent. So would Earth just be better off without the Avengers?

In the Marvel Universe, the answer is emphatically “NO.” At least on our planet, in the real world, aliens don’t fly out of giant holes in the sky and burn our buildings to the ground. For such levels of constant cosmic threat, having a gang of uniformed superheroes at the ready is a blessing. It would just be nice if these characters would stay out of their own way.

That being said, watching these superhumans make very human mistakes is exactly what keeps drawing us back to the theater. If the Avengers were all perfect, we’d get pretty bored with them pretty quickly. We need to see these guys fail every now and then to keep us compelled.

The film as a whole unfolds in much the same way. It’s far from perfect, and it trips over its own feet here and there, but “Age of Ultron” makes good on its promise by the end. It also doesn’t hurt that the action is predictably fantastic and the main villain is as smooth a criminal we’ve seen. All in all, the film is a worthy sequel to the first blockbuster, and I have no problem recommending it.

If this is a sign of things to come, we’re in for a popcorn bucket full of treats this summer.

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Michael Lomax is a writer-filmmaker currently at work on a film script to be set and shot in Albany.