Spoilers are all over this article, so if you don’t want the new Avengers movie ruined for you, stop reading. Avengers: Age of Ultron premiered at midnight on May 1. This film was one of my most anticipated movies of the year, being the sequel to the extremely popular Avengers.  Ever since the release of the trailer earlier this year, Marvel super fans have been following this movie’s every move with great excitement. With all of the hype and intrigue surrounding the movie, was it able to live up to its predecessor? I think it did, but it also had some issues.

Right off the bat, I thought the movie was amazing. Writer/director Joss Whedon did a great job with what I thought to be a flawed vision (pun intended). I won’t get into the bad just yet, though. The movie just looked good, from the beginning. The fight scenes don’t look too CGI-ridden and are just terrific examples of creative violence. We see everything we loved about the first Avengers, with the added bonus of the team actually knowing how to work together.

Action aside, the cast of this film all capitalize on their previous performances. Scarlett Johansson, who was pregnant during filming, kept the same mysterious tone Black Widow requires, but allowed more sympathy to be felt for her this time around. Jeremy Renner shines in this film. Hawkeye is now one of my favorite Avengers. Since he spent the majority of the first movie under Loki’s mind control, we didn’t get to see much of who he actually was. That is not the case at all in Ultron. He has control of his brain the whole time, and uses it in a way that makes the audience laugh, cry, and cheer.

Chris Hemsworth is just funny. Whedon uses Thor’s disconnect from our earthling customs as a source of pleasant humor. However, out of all the heroes in the movie, I think Thor is the most neglected. Chris Evans (Captain America) does a good job at being the team’s disgruntled leader, but I felt like a lot of his dialogue outside of the fight was just a bunch of whining. “My team doesn’t tell me things” is kind of his motto through the whole thing. Robert Downey, Jr., returns as the best Tony Stark since Iron Man 2. He, like Chris Evans has a motto through the whole movie, only his involves creating robots that either end up being protectors (Vision) or destroyers (Ultron). Mark Ruffalo’s performance as Bruce Banner makes me want a standalone Hulk movie so badly. I think his relationship with Black Widow works well.

Speaking of the Hulk, the Hulk Buster fight was probably the second coolest part of the whole movie. It had been built up heavily in the trailers and delivered exactly what we ordered. Watching Iron Man and the Hulk face off against each other and level a city in the process was well worth the wait.

James Spader is going to have his own paragraph. He does such a good job as Ultron, I wish he had more scenes. Don’t get me wrong, he had a fair amount of screen time. I was just hoping that we would get to see more of him being evil. Also, I wish he could have won a fight. Iron Man has no trouble tearing him apart in their first battle, I mean what the heck? Isn’t he supposed to be the toughest villain they’ve faced so far? James Spader gave an amazing performance, but was drastically underpowered and in my opinion underscripted.

This movie’s pacing is probably the worst of any Marvel movie to date. You can tell how severely it was cut down. The original movie was probably three and a half hours long. The story moved weird throughout, but was saved by a drastic improvement in dialogue. I don’t know why, but the dialogue in Ultron just seemed so much better than in the first Avengers. Joss Whedon did a great job at making what the characters say interesting; he just didn’t have enough time to pace the story better. This movie is a big set up for Civil War, which I’m sure is going to be a good movie, however, I don’t think this movie had to be as much of a build up as it ended up being. Ultron was never going to be perfect, and it isn’t, but it’s still a great movie and it’s still worth watching again and again. Avengers: Age of Ultron is awesome, and phase three of the Marvel universe is going to be just as good or hopefully better.