The Avengers: Review
The Avengers is a near perfect big summer blockbuster. This movie featured everything that I hoped it would include, epic action sequences, entertaining dialogue, humor, and most importantly lots of fun. Honestly I am struggling to think of the last time I walked out of a movie and I immediately wanted to go back to watch it all over again.
For as long as Hollywood has been making movies based on popular comic book characters, comic fans have been looking forward to a day when these characters would start showing up in each other’s movies the way they guest star in one another’s comics from time to time. With their comics Marvel has created rich full universe that all of their characters inhabit together, yet for one reason or another we have never seen these characters interact with one another in their cinematic universe. That was the case until 2008 when Marvel Studios released Iron Man and hinted at the idea of “The Avengers Initiative” and suddenly there was hope that one day we would get to see some of Marvel’s biggest characters all working together in one big event movie. Over the next few years Marvel continued lay the ground work with The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, and Captain America: the First Avenger, with each of those movies serving as a prequel of sorts for The Avengers.
The films basic plot consists of Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) gathering together some of Earth’s mightiest heroes; Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo taking over the role from Edward Norton and doing an excellent job), to face off against Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and an army of invading aliens. Along the way the heroes will fight one another (in true comic book fashion), and eventually will have to come together as a team to face a threat that is too big for them to face on their own. I was impressed that with a movie this large they were still able to fit in a few surprises that did not get spoiled for me before the film opened, and that the movie was also to fit in some good emotional elements as well. The film makers did a good job of quickly addressing elements from the previous Marvel movies, so that The Avengers felt connected to the previous Marvel movies (though hopefully Thor 2 will address how he returned to Earth a bit better than this movie did).
Director Joss Whedon deserves a ton of credit for successfully combing 4 film series together into one big spectacular movie. Then again maybe I should have never had any doubt that he could pull it off, as the man has some serious nerd credibility just go check out his 25 issue run on The Astonishing X-Men to see his take on Marvel’s favorite mutants (it is currently on sale over at Amazon.com and is worth every penny, I highly recommend it). One of my worries going into this movie was that one or two characters would get elevated over the other Avengers, making this feel more like Iron Man 3 or Captain America 2, thankfully each character feels important and gets his or her moment to shine.
I loved The Avengers and I am already planning to go and see it again next weekend. I can see this becoming one of my new go to movies after a bad day, the type of movie that regardless of what ever is going on in life it will make you smile, laugh, and cheer at least for 2 hours before you have to return to reality. If you have not yet seen The Avengers and you have enjoyed the previous Marvel movies, go and see it I don’t think you will be disappointed.
The Avengers gets a very enthusiastic 5 popcorn buckets out of 5.
