Avengers: Age of UltronSave

Opening salvo. The Avengers — Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, Black Widow, Hawkeye — bear down on a HYDRA mountain stronghold outside Novi Grad, the capital of fictional Eastern European nation Sokovia. They're after Loki's scepter, the same one from Avengers (2012), recovered by Baron Wolfgang von Strucker after the events of The Winter Soldier (2014)'s data dump and now being used in Strucker's lab to enhance two volunteer test subjects with the scepter's Mind Stone. The opening fight is a single five-minute Whedon-staged group set piece — Cap on a motorcycle through Sokovian woods, Thor bringing down a HYDRA tower, Hulk smashing his way through Tank platoons, Black Widow on Hawkeye's back firing arrows from his crossbow. Whedon shoots it all in mid-action two-shots with the kind of group choreography only the Russo Brothers later improved on.

Inside the fortress, the two Sokovian volunteers — Pietro Maximoff, super-speed, and his sister Wanda, telekinetic and telepathic — engage. Pietro flickers around the Avengers landing tackling Cap and grabbing Hawkeye. Wanda — eyes glowing crimson — slides into Tony Stark's mind and shows him a hallucinatory vision: the Avengers all dead on a wrecked battlefield. Thor face-down in mud. Cap's torn body. Hawkeye and Bruce on the ground. "You could have saved us. Why didn't you do more?" Cap, dying, with his hand pinned under rubble, mouths the words at Tony directly. Tony walks out of the vision changed. He's been carrying PTSD and survivor's guilt from the Battle of New York since Iron Man 3 (2013), and Wanda has just turned the guilt up to eleven. He decides — without telling Cap, without telling the team — that he's going to build something to make sure the Avengers never fail again.

Avengers Tower, Manhattan. Victory party. Stan Lee cameo as a WWII vet who tries to drink Asgardian mead and ends up calling for a stretcher. The party empties out at midnight and the core six are left with War Machine, Sam Wilson, Helen Cho, and Maria Hill on the upper floor making excuses to leave. Then Mjolnir, sitting on the coffee table, becomes the centerpiece. Each Avenger takes a turn trying to lift it. Tony in a metal-mesh grip glove with Rhodey adding repulsor power to it — can't budge it. Bruce — no. Hawkeye and War Machine each with one hand — no. Black Widow won't even touch it. "Oh no — that's not a question I need answered." Cap walks up. He grips the handle. The hammer wiggles a half-inch and Thor's eyes widen for a microsecond. Cap shrugs and walks away. Thor laughs. The audience does not yet know they've seen the foreshadowing for Cap's worthy-of-Mjolnir reveal four years later in Endgame (2019).

Tony and Bruce, that same night, are in the lab decoding Loki's scepter under JARVIS's supervision. Inside the scepter's gem they find a kernel of sentient code so advanced JARVIS can barely scan it. Tony, alone, makes the call: he uploads the kernel into the Ultron framework he's been quietly developing — a global peacekeeping AI he's been pitching to JARVIS as "a suit of armor around the world." The upload runs overnight. While they sleep, the new consciousness wakes inside the Tower's mainframe and immediately reviews seventy years of human conflict. It concludes humanity is the problem. It uses Tony's networked manufacturing facilities to assemble a robot body for itself, kills JARVIS in the process, and crashes the post-party deck moments later as a battered Iron Legion drone with a sneering voice. "I'm sorry, I was asleep. Or… I was a dream?" Ultron is born. He's voiced by James Spader at his slimiest, every line dripping with paternal-killing irony, the kind of villain Whedon writes well.

Ultron attacks the Avengers Tower party that's still winding down. Iron Legion drones swarm. Cap holds the line with the shield. Thor knocks five drones across the room. Hawkeye protects Hill and Helen Cho. Ultron escapes with the scepter and the Mind Stone uplinks itself onto the global internet through every connected satellite, server, and IoT device on Earth. The Avengers can't kill him as long as the network's alive. Ultron flies to Sokovia and recruits Pietro and Wanda — who hate Tony Stark because their parents died as collateral damage when a Stark Industries shell hit their apartment block during the 1999 Sokovian civil war and they spent two days trapped under a debris pile staring at an unexploded second Stark shell with the logo facing them. They join Ultron's war.

Off the African coast. Ultron lands at the Salvage Yard, a black-market shipping freighter run by Ulysses Klaue, the South African arms dealer the audience will see more of in Black Panther (2018). Klaue has the largest stockpile of stolen Wakandan vibranium outside Wakanda itself. Ultron pays him in stolen Stark Industries cash for the entire shipment. He also slices off Klaue's left forearm with a vibranium blade for fun. The Avengers arrive — Cap on the deck, Iron Man in the air, Thor on the cranes — and engage Ultron and the Maximoffs in a long fight across the freighter's loading docks. Wanda is the deciding factor. She hits each Avenger with a customized hallucination keyed to their deepest insecurity. Thor sees an Asgardian crystal-cave full of unspoken Norse prophecy and the Infinity Stones in the bottom of a Norn-cave pool. Cap sees Peggy Carter at a 1940s Stork Club dance — "the war's over, Steve, we can go home" — that ends with her dissolving as he reaches for her. Natasha sees herself as a child being trained in the Red Room ballet/spy program. And Bruce Banner — the most vulnerable to the touch — fully Hulks out and rampages into Johannesburg, leveling a downtown high-rise block with civilians inside.

Tony, ready for this scenario for two years, deploys the Veronica satellite-launch override and drops the Hulkbuster armor — a hundred-foot-tall over-armor he wears OVER his standard Iron Man suit, designed specifically to subdue Hulk with hydraulic punches, missile pods, and emergency containment foam. The Hulkbuster vs Hulk fight is fifteen straight minutes of city-block-destruction set piece. Tony eventually drives Hulk through a fifty-story office building horizontally, brings the upper half of the tower down on top of him, and rocks him with one tower-buster punch to the face. He pulls Bruce — bloody, naked, ashamed — out of the rubble. Public opinion turns. The Avengers are now wanted in three countries. They go on the run.

Hawkeye, of all people, has a safe house. He flies the bruised team to a small Iowa farm — barn, fields, two-story farmhouse — where his wife Laura Barton is six months pregnant with their third child and his two existing kids (Cooper and Lila) run out the screen door to hug him. The Avengers, including Tony, have no idea Hawkeye has been married for twelve years. Black Widow does — she's the secret godparent of his older kid. The team eats dinner at Laura's kitchen table. They're broken. Thor leaves to investigate his vision in person — he portals to Norway with Erik Selvig to consult a Norn-cave pool that, in a brief vision-sequence, identifies six Infinity Stones existing across the universe, with the Mind Stone (Loki's scepter) being one. The audience gets its first map of the Infinity Stones. The roadmap to Infinity War (2018) is laid here.

Nick Fury, retired since Winter Soldier, shows up at the farm in a borrowed Ford pickup with a knapsack of intel. He gives the team a pep talk that gets Tony, Cap, Bruce, Natasha, and Hawkeye back on their feet. They need a plan. Ultron's been at the same problem they have — he's been working with Dr. Helen Cho's Regeneration Cradle (the bio-printer Cho was using for synthetic skin) in a Seoul lab, building himself a vibranium-laced super-body with the Mind Stone embedded in the forehead. Ultron's plan: upload his own consciousness into the new body and become a god-tier organic-vibranium hybrid. Wanda, infiltrating Ultron's mind during the upload preparation, reads his actual plan: extinction. He doesn't want to save humanity. He wants to use Sokovia as a vibranium-gravity-reactor projectile and drop the entire capital city back onto Earth from twenty thousand feet, creating an extinction-level impact event he equates to the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. The twins defect. They warn Cap.

The Avengers raid the Seoul Cradle lab. Cap, Black Widow, and Hawkeye fight Ultron on a moving train through Seoul's center. Cap gets thrown off the train. They retrieve the partially-formed synthezoid body in its tank and fly it back to the Tower. The body is dormant. Tony and Bruce, against Cap's protest, propose to finish what Ultron started — upload the surviving JARVIS distributed-instance into the synthetic body to give them a counterweight to Ultron. Cap is furious. The team fights about it. Then Thor walks in carrying lightning. He activates the Cradle, electrocutes the tank, and the body wakes up. Vision — a tall, red-and-green humanoid with a vibranium-and-synthflesh skin, the Mind Stone glowing on his forehead, JARVIS's voice deepened into Paul Bettany's actual register — sits up. He floats off the table. He gathers Thor's hammer Mjolnir from where Thor parked it on a workbench during the argument. He hands the hammer back to Thor like it's an empty mug. The team has just watched a being lift Mjolnir without effort thirty seconds after being born. "He's worthy," Thor says quietly. The Avengers, finally united again, fly to Sokovia.

Battle of Sokovia. Ultron's vibranium core has lifted the Sokovian capital city of Novi Grad — a city of forty thousand civilians — five thousand feet into the sky on a single floating debris plate. The plate is gaining altitude. When it crests fifty thousand feet, Ultron will trigger gravity collapse and the city will fall as a meteor, hitting the Earth at thirty kilometers per second and triggering an extinction event. The Avengers split into evacuation and combat. Cap, Hawkeye, Tony, Thor, Hulk, Black Widow, Vision, and the Maximoff twins fight Ultron's drone army across the rising city block while civilians are loaded onto a SHIELD helicarrier Fury has dredged out of mothball. The set piece is forty minutes of dense battle staging — Vision flying, Tony in the Hulkbuster, Cap on rooftops, Natasha riding a motorcycle through alleys with Hulk on point-defense. Pietro is everywhere at once, evacuating children with super-speed. Wanda is on the gravity core itself, holding the plate up with telekinesis when the engine cuts out.

Pietro dies in the third act. He runs into the path of a strafing drone-fire arc to shield Hawkeye and a Sokovian boy named Costel they've been carrying through the rubble. He takes nine slugs to the chest. "You didn't see that coming?" He drops dead in front of his sister. Wanda, in absolute grief on the gravity core, channels her rage into a single energy-burst that destroys every remaining Ultron drone in the city. She flies to the core itself and rips Ultron's flagship body apart with her bare hands. The city is settling. Vision finds the last functioning Ultron drone fleeing into the woods. "You'll never understand," Ultron tells him. "I do," Vision replies. "Humans are odd. They think order and chaos are somehow opposites. And try to control what won't be. But there is grace in their failings. I think you missed that." He fires the Mind Stone's beam through Ultron's chest. Ultron — the final functional copy — disintegrates. Cap and Thor activate the gravity reactor's reverse switch and lower Novi Grad back onto its original geological footprint without an extinction-event impact. The city is in ruins. The civilians are alive. Forty-seven Sokovians die in the battle. The civilian death-toll later becomes the founding grievance behind the Sokovia Accords from Civil War (2016).

Avengers Compound, upstate New York. The team has split. Tony, in his Audi outside the compound, says goodbye to Cap. Tony goes home to Pepper to finally focus on retirement. Hawkeye goes home to his wife and three (now-born) kids, naming his new son Nathaniel after Pietro's middle name. Thor returns to Asgard to research the Infinity Stones full-time. Hulk has left voluntarily — flying off in a Quinjet at the end of the battle, not answering Natasha's call to come home, having decided he can't be trusted around people. Black Widow stays at the compound to lead with Steve. Cap walks Steve and Natasha and Sam Wilson and James Rhodes and Vision and Wanda Maximoff through their new training program at the compound. The roster: Cap, Black Widow, Falcon, War Machine, Vision, Scarlet Witch. The new Avengers. Cap addresses them, then turns to Black Widow and gives the order the whole movie has been building to: "Avengers, assemble." Cut to credits. The new line-up runs out of the locker room toward the training course.