Age of rubbish

Despite the slew of bad reviews, I decided to bite the bullet and bought Age of Ultron. I normally hate time travel and alternate reality stories but Brian Michael Bendis did absolutely fantastic job with House of M and Secret Invasion. I thought I should give it a chance. I wanted to buy it during 20% Kinokuniya Liang Court sale 2 weeks ago but my friend happened to ask me if I wanted something from Amazon to combine for free shipping. I bought it from Amazon and with the free shipping it cost me about $10 than Kinokuniya's after sale price. Yay.

Age of Ultron turns out to be a pile of crap. Ultron has taken over (or destroyed) most of the earth and only a few superheroes remaining. After realising that Ulton is actually using Vision as a conduit at a present time, they decide to go into the future where Ultron is really present. Of course that does not make sense, doesn't it? They can't even beat Ultron minions in the present time with everything they have and now they want to beat the real big guy in the future with only 6 of them? Rubbish!

Wolverine has a better idea: go the past and prevent Ultron from being created in the first place. No idea why Invisible Woman decided to follow him. He killed Henry Pym before he created Ultron and then returned to the present time. Due to his action in the past, the present has been altered and the earth is in another doomsday scenario with it being taken over by Morgana Le Fay. So Wolverine returned to the past again to prevent himself from killing Henry Pym and asked him to prepare a code to disable Ultron, forget about it, and only remember it when the time comes. How on earth is that possible?

I shall stop here because I don't think I am writing coherently about the incoherent stories. In summary, Age of Ultron sucks: the story sucks, the battle sucks, the resolution sucks, and everything sucks. Looks like the announcement of the next Marvel Avengers movie to be titled Age of Ultron is just a marketing gimmick to boost of the sale of this utter rubbish. And for once, I find the side stories/related titles to be more engaging than the main plot. Not even the fact that Storm is one of the surviving superhero makes me like this book.

Let's travel back in time to discuss about the 2 books I bought in May but I never mentioned here. Lol..

I was reluctant to get it because of the ugly cover but Secret Invasion is a pleasure to read. The Skrulls are going to take over the earth. They infiltrate and disguise themselves as many of the superheroes. With no way to detect them (unless you knock them out and they revert to their green form), heroes are turned against heroes. It is fast-paced, action-packed, brilliantly written and executed, and I enjoy the fact that for once the good guys and the bad guys fight side-by-side to thwart the Skrull's thread. After all, "no more earth means no more business" for the baddies. Another masterpiece from Bendis which gave me a false hope for a good Age of Ultron.

Moving on to Fear Itself which I find even worse than Civil War which I hated. The synopsis and the setting are actually good. The Serpent finally broke free of Odin's bonds after thousands of years. To prepare for his return, he summoned 8 mystical hammers from outside Earth and whoever worthy to yield them becomes one of "The Worthy". They create havoc and cause people to fear and stronger the fear, the stronger the Serpent will be. Iron Man created 8 weapons, enchanted with Odin's blessings, so I was expecting that there would be an awesome 8-vs-8 fights.

Erm.. Nowhere near to what I expected. Odin knew that he would have to sacrifice Thor to win against the Serpent. So guess what did he decide? He will raze the earth together with the Serpent. Gosh!! And the other Asgardian gods just blindly follow him and support Thor to go alone to fight for the earth?? WTF??!! For goodness sake.. The gods are afraid of 8 superhumans who wield mystical hammers?? Does not make any sense to me.. There is no awesome 8-vs-8 fights too as Thor alone has managed to KO The Thing to revert him to normal and has kicked Hulk's butt to another planet.

Well, with Age of Ultron taking its place, Fear Itself is now the 2nd worse in my opinion :p