The Avengers Review

The decision to make the Avengers into a movie, to be completely honest, was an extremely risky decision by Marvel. They put their plan into place four years with the idea in mind that The Avengers was going to be a great movie that everyone loved. A 30 second scene back in 2008 changed everything as Samuel L Jackson appeared as Nick Furry to talk about the Avengers to Tony Stark in the end of credits scene in Iron Man. Following that, Marvel moved forward by presenting The Incredible Hulk a couple months later followed by Iron Man 2 in 2010 and finally Thor and Captain America just this past year. Each movie was building up to the Avengers and included at least a scene or two with Nick Furry or others from SHIELD. Each moment this happened, fans got more and more excited for the Avengers. After what seemed like four long years, it was time to bring The Avengers movie to the big screen. After all of this buildup, the Avengers had to be huge and epic or else it would be considered one of the biggest flops and disappointments in movie history. That would be the definition of high risk, high reward. Well, I am here to tell you that the risk payed off in very big way. I got the opportunity to see the midnight showing of The Avengers and I honestly thought it was one of the best movies I have ever seen and easily the best comic book movie I have ever seen.

The premise of the movie comes with Loki causing a lot of trouble. Without going into much detail, there is this powerful energy source called the Tesseract. Loki gets his hands on this and uses his abilities to control the minds of Dr Erik Selvig (from Thor) and Agent Clint Barton (Hawkeye). In addition to this, he summons an army of Chitauri to attack earth. This sparks Nick Furry and the other SHIELD members to assemble the Avengers to save the earth and stop Loki. Now logistically, organizing the Avengers would be a really tough thing to pull off. Here you have a group of superheros that are all used to being center stage. Stepping aside slightly and learning to work with a group of people would certainly bring conflict and strong emotion. Now the movie could make things all happy and peachy by ignoring this and making this group work perfectly from the very beginning, but it wouldn't be realistic at all and would be fake and cheap. The great thing about this movie is that it does not ignore this aspect. In fact it does a dang good job with using this aspect as a good portion of the movie is the Avengers fighting amongst themselves, which is brilliant. In addition to this conflict, bringing them all together made it very comical as Tony Stark of course had to make smart comments about everyone on the crew and the rest of the crew were all comical in their own way, the most apparent one outside of Iron Man being Captain America making comments that showed he was a man from the 40's living in the modern day.

The character development throughout the movie was brilliant. Every single member of the Avengers grew a lot throughout the film as they all learned how to work together as a team to resolve the conflict. In connection with this, one worry going in was that it would turn into Iron Man and friends, meaning people that the movie would give Iron Man most of the screen time and less for everyone else, but this certainly wasn't the case. With me saying that each character developed a lot throughout the movie, adding to that was that all the characters got equal screen time, giving them all a time to shine, which was awesome. 

Lets see, what else? There is so much good about this movie that its hard to sum it all up and do this movie justice. Joss Whedon did a fantastic job as the director. The cinematography was stunning. The music was amazing. All of the acting was great. Robert Downy Jr, Chris Evans, Chris Hemingsworth, Scarlett Johannson, Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L Jackson, and Clark Gregg all did a perfect job in their roles. The two big name newcomers were also amazing. First off Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye was great. I feel that this role will help him be a much bigger name in Hollywood and after doing this and Mission Impossible at the end of last year, people should be more excited for the new Bourne movie with Renner taking the lead spot with no Jason Bourne in the story. Second newcomer in the Avengers would be Mark Ruffalo as the new Hulk. And boy was he fantastic. The old saying 'the third time is the charm' certainly rings true. No one liked the first Hulk movie and while Edward Norton was a good Hulk in a good Hulk movie, his departure is not missed as Mark Ruffalo feels perfect and natural as the Hulk, more so than Norton did, if you can believe that. And when he turned into the Hulk, oh my goodness. Breathtakingly awesome. The scenes with the Hulk are so totally awesome that he almost steals the show. I forget that there was even other Hulk movies and will be very excited to see any new Hulk movies with Ruffalo if/when they decide to do them. Lastly, can I praise the action enough? 

You may be able to debate that there are other movies that could be given the title of best movie of all time, but in limiting it to just action movies this had to be the best action movie of all time. The final battle wasn't a wimpy Iron Man 2 final battle, it was a humongous final battle that I swear lasted for the whole second half of the movie giving every single character involved time to show off his or her way awesome moves for a significant amount of time. And it wasn't just the final battle action that was awesome, the whole movie was action the whole time and it was all amazing.   

I may have missed a thing or two, but you get the point. This was one of the best movies ever made and easily the best comic book movie and best action movie ever made. That is putting it pretty high, but I truly believe that. What criticism do I have for this movie? None. I honestly can't think of anything wrong with this movie at all. And thus I give it a perfect 10 out of 10. Anything less than that, even a 9.9, is an insult.