Cinema review: Avengers Assemble

Earth’s Mightiest heroes.

The third highest gross of all time, more than a billion and a half in box office, it’s difficult to argue with such numbers, and I won’t even try, this movie deserved such a rich financial windfall. There’s an interesting argument on how some movies not only break out of the relatively small circles of genre fans, whatever the genre may be, but also to break out of the movie goers circle unto the general public conscience. I, being a comic book guy, started getting enquiries about this movie from extremely unsuspected parties, coworkers and the like that you’ll never imagine watching a comic book movie.

General considerations aside this movie is really that brilliant and virtually flawless.

Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and comic book fan, is largely responsible for it as the writer/director of the movie. First of all he perfectly understood what makes the Avengers, as a concept, work.

Broadly speaking the Avengers is the all star team of the Marvel superhero universe, the best of the best. The tricky part is that all these characters are normally the stars of their own shows so they must all shine individually, you can’t have a single superstar and all the rest filler, it just doesn’t work this way. Whedon manages this perfectly, every hero gets his chance to shine, repeatedly, over the whole movie. They are all concisely and perfectly characterized.

Then comes step two. The interaction. Sparkles should fly, there are all stars here so they can’t operate like a perfectly oiled team. The old comic book crossover tradition dictates that every time two superheroes meet they should start fighting over some kind of silly miserunderstanding. This of course stems from the age old question “Who’s stronger between xxxxx and xxxxx?” but in the end it highlights that this isn’t a stroll in the park, this is a super group.

Also on this Whedon get everything perfectly right. The infighting between the superheroes is so cool that you almost wish for the bad guys to stay home so that you can have more of that.

The casting is of course very good. Marvel made a lot of smart choices while casting his various heroes and we already knew that from the other movies. It’s kinda pointless the reiterate again how awesome Robert Downey Junior is as Tony Stark so let’s move on to the new guys.

Scarlett Johansson gets something more to do as the black widow, she gets some of the best bits of the action and it’s really good at it. Jeremy Renner got something of a short stick with Hawkeye, the part is not really that developed and I still have to see a convincing modern take on the super archer. None the less he is still enjoyable.

The show stealer is Mark Ruffalo as Hulk. The precedent iterations of the character all got their roots in the terribly depressing 80s movie serial and so they were all more or less exercises in unhappiness followed by some hulk smash.

Whedon and Ruffalo brought the fun back in the Hulk, it’s that simple.

Wait it’s not really that simple, there’s another ingredient. The hulk, by his very nature, as a character, works much better in a team. It’s like the penguins in Madagascar, amazing as part of an ensemble but imagine two hours straight of them.

The climatic ending battle is a relative let down. After so much build up you expect at least the destruction of a pair of cities but, in my opinion, even on this they made the smarter choice. A bigger ending, with a more menacing enemy, would have stolen the spotlight from the Avengers, and this is their movie. We can wait for something bigger for the inevitable sequel, in 3 years time.

Conclusion: A masterpiece. You haven’t seen yet? What you’re waiting for? Got and get it!