Avengers: Age of Ultron was released on Friday with all the hype and box office sales of the original, but does it live up to the first movie?

The film starts off with the team attacking a Hydra facility in the fictional country of Sokovia where they find Loki’s scepter from the last film being used for human experimentation. The group retrieves the scepter and Tony Stark (Iron Man/Robert Downey Jr.) and Bruce Banner (Hulk/Mark Ruffalo) find that there is an artificial intelligence inside the scepter and Tony decides to use the new-found A.I. for his new international defense system   Ultron (James Spader). However, when Ultron is activated, it goes rogue and escapes and takes form of a robot built from parts at the Hydra facility. Ultron then gets help from a pair of twins who were experimented on by hydra Pietro Maximoff (Quicksilver/Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and Wanda Maximoff (Scarlet Witch/Elizabeth Olsen) in his plan the destroy humanity by making the Avengers distrust themselves and then launch a city from the ground and then drop it down causing mass extinction.

Let’s start off with the good of the film. The film is about two and a half hours long but it pace itself perfectly so it doesn’t make itself feel as long as it is. The action scenes are fantastic as with most marvel films, especially a scene where Scarlet Witch causes Bruce to go crazy in a city leading Iron Man to stop him with suit specifically made to stop the Hulk. The character Ultron is spectacular, he’s pretty much an evil version of Tony Stark with the same level of genius and is highly charisma. The Maimoff twins are also great, they are orphans who parent’s deaths were partly responsible by Tony Stark. Bruce has his own side-story of him trying to control the Hulk and has a relationship with Black Widow (Scarlet Johansson) who tries to help him with goal of trying to stay sane.

There’s not a lot of bad things I can say about Avengers 2, but the film requires you to have knowledge of the other films in the marvel universe that came after the first film (with Guardians of the Galaxy being the exception), and the two and half hour runtime might just be too long for some people.

Avengers: Age of Ultron is definite watch for the month of May and great start for summer movie season. Highly recommended for action fans, and superhero fans. And if you’re neither of those types of people, then this film is recommended for you in the same way Saving Private Ryan is recommended for the squeamish.