How Avengers: Age of Ultron undercut the emotional significance of the preceding stand alone movies, a short thread:

Now don't get me wrong, I loved Age of Ultron its actually a very good movie, one of the most enjoyable in the MCU & Ultron was a fantastic villain. It also set up much of the future of the MCU, I'd say it was the larger set up for Infinity War, it gave us Wanda and Vision +more

Loads of great scenes, Hulkbuster, that opening sequence, the party scene etc. My problem with the movie isn't so much what takes place in the movie but rather when it takes place because this movie came after stand alone movies of each of the "big 3"

Iron Man 3, Thor TDW and Captain America TWS all come right before Age of Ultron (GOTG vol1 also but that's not important for now)

The movie undercut the arcs of all the "big 3" members which had just been set up and imma take a look at all 3

Iron Man 3:

so Iron Man 3 picks up after the end of the first avengers movie and Tony has PTSD from the whole aliens thing, which was a great story arc that made lots of sense. He spends literally all his time building new suits and Pepper isn't a fan of that.

fast forward to the end after the big fight scene and Tony in attempt to fix things with Pepper initiates the clean slate protocol destroying all his suits and moving on from his mansion to go be with Pepper, sweet

problem with that is Age of Ultron literally ignores this and starts the movie with Tony deploying the Iron Legion, essentially AN ARMY OF IRON MAN SUITS?

like why? what did his big clean slate protocol moment in the previous movie mean then if he continued to build more bots?

yeah they tried to play it off at the party scene with the exchange with Thor and Maria Hill (more on that later) but that was just annoyingly backward for his character development

Captain America TWS:

such a fantastic movie!
so here we find out that S.H.I.E.L.D. which was pretty much the big bro to the Avengers was secretly Hyrda all along. Cap and Natasha then essentially work to shut it down with the help of Nick Fury and all the agents are re-assigned

key takeaways from this movie were
1. Natasha dumped all S.H.I.E.L.D files onto the internet for the general public to access
2. The project insight helicarriers all crashed at the Triskellion
3. S.H.I.E.L.D shut down and agents scattered

also, Nick Fury is officially "dead"

how then was this bad boy able to make some deus ex machina appearance to save the Avengers literally right after the events of TWS?

Age of Ultron actually references TWS so much and this didnt really get enough explanation

it seriously undercuts the whole point of shutting down S.H.I.E.L.D if a couple of months later they are back helping you clean up your messes then right after that they conveniently disappear again...

Thor TDW
one of the black sheep of the MCU, left much to be desired but essentially showed that Thor is willing to risk literally EVERYTHING, including his birthright as king of Asgard all for Jane Foster, he even came back to earth for her at the end

then she's passed off in a cheesy line of dialogue, gets the same treatment as Pepper in explaining why she's suddenly out of the picture. Thor literally then leaves on a quest to look for the stones and no goodbye to Jane who somehow meant the world to him a few moments ago?

anyway, Age of Ultron is underrated. It was a cool movie it just missed a couple of beats in terms of connecting itself to the stand alone movies