The Avengers

The Avengers

And this is it.  After years of planning and hundreds of millions of dollars invested, Marvel's master plan has finally come to fruition and The Avengers has been released in theaters.  The film is the culmination of a strategy that began with 2008's Iron Man, a plan to introduce all the major Avenger super heroes in their own films and then bring them together in a big old fashioned crossover.

And the strategy worked brilliantly.  The Avengers lives up to expectations and even manages to exceed them.  After his defeat in Thor, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) comes into contact with an evil alien race called the Chitauri.  He makes a deal with them.  He will retrieve the all-powerful Tesseract (the super weapon from Captain America) and turn it over to them in return for an army with which he will conquer the Earth.  What stands in Loki's way?  The Avengers!  Assembled by S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), The Avengers team includes Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.), Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson), Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), and Captain America (Chris Evans).  Together they have to band together, defeat Loki, and save the planet.

That's a lot of characters and that is where Marvel's gambit paid off.  Because we have already been introduced to these characters, we don't really need to waste time delving into their back stories.  We can just jump right into the movie.  Because I'll be honest, the movie is two and a half hours long, as it is.  If we had to introduce audiences to these heroes, we would be in big trouble.

As it is, the film's weakness is in its first half hour.  We have all these characters and we need to get them all together somehow.  Sometimes these moments seem a bit forced, others - such as Thor's introduction - are downright contradictory to the earlier films.  Not that these scenes are particularly bad.  They just have some...speed bumps, I guess you could say, and are not as strong as the rest of the movie.

Because once we have everyone in the same room, the film really begins to hum, and then it churns, and then it explodes.  Every member of the cast is pitch perfect - especially newcomer Mark Ruffalo, who replaced Ed Norton as Bruce Banner/Hulk.  I initially thought Ruffalo was miscast, but he won me over pretty quickly.  And now I think he is the best cinematic Banner we've had yet.  He's almost the MVP of the movie.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that even though this movie is super crowded, everybody - and I mean, everybody - has their moment to shine, including smaller characters like Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg).  Every hero has a crowd pleasing kick butt moment, especially in the final battle.  This is a tricky juggling act and we have to credit Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy and Firefly) for shepherding such a complicated cast through the film.  Give him credit, too, for the great sense of humor that permeates the film.  Simply put, The Avengers is funnier than most of the comedies we get these days, plus we get great effects, great heroics, and great acting, too.  There are other summer films coming out that might end up being better than The Avengers, but I doubt any of them are going to be anywhere near as entertaining.

But in the end, The Avengers is not just a fun summer film, it is also accomplishes a remarkably feat -  it captures the spirit and the magic of the comics.  The Avengers really feels like a comic book come to life.  It is easily Marvel Studios' best film and rightfully takes its place as one of the best comic films of all time.


MVP:
Full disclosure - I am not a Whedon fanatic.  I think he is a talented writer and director, but I do not fawn over everything he does.  I loved Firefly and Serenity, but Buffy was just okay (here comes the hate mail) and Angel was just slightly better.  I want to qualify that just so you know I can be unbiased about this whole MVP thing, because I gotta say that Whedon just upped his game 500%.  I felt comfortable as soon as he was hired because I knew he was adept at handling team dynamics.  But I didn't think he would knock it out of the park like he does here.  I am still incredibly impressed how no character was under-utilized.  Everyone had something important and relevant to do - and we had eight major characters.  That is pretty remarkable.  And as a writer, he was able to give each hero their own distinct voice, which is also pretty difficult to do.  It's just impressive all around.  Whedon captained this ship and gave us one of the best of the genre.  I can't wait to see what he does with the sequel.  This was an easy MVP decision.

BEST LINE:

Ouch, so many.  Lots of good lines.  But I can say this line got a lot of cheers in the theater:

Captain America: "Ma'am, there's only one God, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't dress like that."

TRIVIA:
Some fans were disappointed that the villainous aliens in the movie weren't the Skrulls, Marvel Comics' go-to evil alien race.  The aliens in the film, the Chitauri, actually come from the Ultimates comic version of The Avengers.  In the comic, they do claim that they go by other names, including The Skrulls.  So why not just use the Skrulls name?  Well, turns out there were some legal issues.  The Skrulls were also villains in the Fantastic Four series, and since Fox Studios currently has the rights to Fantastic Four, that means they couldn't be used in The Avengers film.  Bummer.