Movie Review: The Avengers

The Avengers (2012)

And here we are, finally, with the final movie that capped off the first phase of the media juggernaut that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the movie that made everyone around the world collectively gasp and realize that you can build up a semblance of the complex comic-book universe and sell it to the audience as a series of seemingly non-connected movies that each build up the mythos of these different characters, and then have them fight each other in a huge crossover movie that still more or less made sense to those that watch it without too much of a background. 2012 was a wild year, ladies and gentlemen, and when I rewatched The Avengers to prepare for this review, I was genuinely stoked. I have mostly been a DC comic reader prior to this, and most of what I know about the Marvel universe were Spider-Man and X-Men stuff. I know vaguely of the rest of the universe, of course, because I played through Marvel: Ultimate Alliance a lot, but that game, if we're being honest, was more of a X-Men simulator for me. I ignored most of the Avengers except for Thor (I was mythology geek as a kid), so the MCU movies were my first huge forays into the Marvel universe.

And honestly? Honestly, looking at just how successful the movie franchise has been? I'd say they nailed it. Sure, many people complain that the MCU, especially from Avengers onwards, has a bit too many jokes. But these are superheroes... they're never meant to be uber-realistic in the first place, and I feel like this tone of adrenaline straight into cool explosions and then into snarky dialogue works well for this movie. 

That's not to say that The Avengers is anything particularly revolutionary as far as superhero movies go, mind you. In fact, it's actually ridiculously simple. Hell, a year before this movie was released, I remembered that Transformers: Dark of the Moon had basically the same premise and more or less the same climax. Something something something, the superheroes fight over a plot device, then we have a huge rumble that takes our heroes through the streets of a city while a massive beamy portal of doom looms in the sky. The difference, of course, is that we're invested with these characters. Four of them have their own solo movies, Loki was the big bad in Thor, Black Widow and Nick Fury's got a major supporting role in Iron Man 2, and Hawkeye...  okay, yeah, he showed up in Thor but let's be honest, poor Clint got the short end of the stick there. 

And I have re-watched that final battle so, so many times that I keep forgetting that there's nearly an hour of movie before it. And honestly, the first half of the movie do a pretty good job at tying in the plot threads together. It's been a while and it's almost seared into my memory at this point, but back in the day, I actually really liked just how relatively smoothly the plot was crafted. The Tesseract from Captain America: The First Avenger was discovered and experimented upon by SHIELD? Fair enough, we kinda know SHIELD are the good guys but are kinda shady. Loki falling down and tumbling into the depths of space at the end of Thor, eventually getting a snazzy new scepter-weapon granted to him by a mysterious benefactor? Okay, a nice way to bring in a familiar face to herald a bigger threat. And the new mind-control staff gives him kind of a power-up!

And a bigger threat Loki is. It's been so long since Phase I that I actually forgot that the movie opens with Loki utterly and absolutely manhandling a SHIELD facility basically single-handedly. Thanos (well, we don't know it's him) basically just teleports him into where the Tesseract is kept, and Loki just actually shows off that he might be puny compared to the likes of Thor and Odin, but he's still a god that tosses around the Midgardians like dolls, and that's before he puts Dr. Erik Selvig and Hawkeye under his mind-control. The SHIELD agents Nick Fury, Phil Coulson and Maria Hill (newly introduced in this movie, and basically the loyal SHIELD second-in-command) barely manage to get their way out with their lives. 

It's just kind of a shame that the end product actually cuts out the subtlety here that Loki's actually being partially mind-controlled or blackmailed by Thanos via the scepter. It does make a lot of the scenes in this movie read differently, and makes Loki's surprisingly flat characterization as world-conqueror-god-complex here feel less of an anomaly compared to him in the other MCU movies. Still, it works just as fine as this being Loki's huge attempt at world domination. 

Also, having watched most superhero movies with the directors having a 50/50 respect for the comics, I actually half-expected Nick Fury to just get killed off right then and there for drama. Which, I think, is what sets the MCU apart from most prior superhero franchises. They actually take care of their characters reasonably well that most of the time (there are exceptions for sure) we don't get the cheap unnecessary death of established characters from the comics for drama. Coulson, honestly, I felt was invented and built up specifically in order to set up his death in this movie. 

And, well, this 'threat we could not deal with' causes Fury to activate the Avengers Initiative while Loki spends the first act in the background being cool as he tries to get all the plot devices that he needs. And this is where we get a series of cool introductions to four more of our main cast. Three we kind of already know of, and it's more or less what we expected. Steve Rogers is alone in a world he doesn't belong in, doing the only thing he knows best -- prepare for a next battle. Nick Fury quite literally picks him up in a gym. Tony Stark is also doing what he does best, doing some huge grandiose gesture and setting up a big-ass Stark Tower and living the best life with Pepper, and while he's snarky about it, he also sort-of answers the call when Coulson comes in to collect. 

Black Widow gets her biggest role in this movie and we see her seemingly in distress before effortlessly flipping it around when they need her for more important work, beating down the Russian gangsters while tied to a chair. She goes off to recruit Bruce Banner, playing the "I'm a friend with you, and I am so earnest about it, but I have a gun taped to the bottom of the table I can flick out in two seconds" card that she plays so smoothly here. Oh, and Bruce Banner is recasted as Mark Ruffalo in this movie. And... and not to knock Norton or anything, who I felt was a pretty fun actor for the one movie we got him in, but Ruffalo's Banner... let's just say that the Hulk continues to be popular despite never getting a solo movie, yeah? Ruffalo's acting really channels a nervous geekiness that make him great foils particularly against hammy characters like Tony Stark, but he also has an underlying fury that also makes him feel somewhat like a wounded animal. Like how Black Widow and SHIELD are just not certain how Banner's going to react. Which many people point out why Banner ended up feeling so much at home with the Avengers -- Captain America and Black Widow are kind to him (more of an artificial thing for the latter, at least at this stage of the story); Thor essentially treats Hulk as a warrior of equal measure; and Tony Stark treats Banner as a fellow scientist and isn't afraid of his other side. He feels like a person again. 

Oh, and we get the Helicarrier scene. Which is something that I was wondering if it's something that will ever get adapted in live-action, because I actually know about the Helicarrier, and I wonder that if it's something that'll survive the transition to live-action. Because other live-action adaptations so far have decided that muscle-enhancing steroids pumped through cables, a pool that grants immortality to the leader of a league of assassins, giant humanoid mutant-hunting robots or hulking fanged symbiote musclemen as being 'too silly'. But no, not only did they faithfully replicate the Helicarrier from the comics, they also make it look mother fucking cool. I mean, the movie has been pretty good so far, but I remembered back in 2012 in a cramped theater that when the Avengers land on that aircraft carrier and Black Widow makes a smirking jab at Captain America about seeing something cooler than a submarine... honestly, coupled with the close-ups and the music? Yeah, that was certainly money that Cap spent well on that bet. 

Phil Coulson also shows up, reveals that he's a huge Captain America fandork (very quickly tying him into yet another Avenger) and honestly provides a series of neat exposition for SHIELD and Cap. This series of scenes really is a nice way for the movie to at least trickle-drop some backstory on these characters to the unfortunate newcomers that are dragged by their friends into this movie as their first MCU movie, while also serving as nice character beats, too.

While all of this is going on, we get a couple of, again, pretty cool scenes of mind-controlled Hawkeye and Loki as they go on what can be best described as a heist. It involves ripping out some poor guy's eyeball while operatic music plays in the background, and then Loki just strolls into a public square in Stuttgart to cause a distraction. It's a small scene, but Loki just blasting the cars as he crosses the street while his fancy suit-and-tie shimmers into his Asgardian horned armour? Probably low-key one of my favourite scenes in this movie. 

Loki does a 'kneel before your god' sequence which gives us a dramatic entry for good ol' Captain America, and we get one of the first couple of Loki beatdowns that this movie hands the poor god of mischief. And you'd think it would cheapen Loki's threat a little, but the movie honestly does a pretty good job of making Loki not an enemy that's hard to take down because he's so damn tough -- the way that Thanos would be -- but none of the good guys have any idea what Loki's full plan or his knowledge are. Regardless, after Captain America and Loki fight a bit, Iron Man swoops in with AC/DC blaring, and the three of them arrest Loki.

...only for Loki to be kidnapped right under their noses from the Quinjet. And honestly, again, despite us knowing that it'll happen, I really do like that this is most of the cast's first meeting with the god of thunder. With a thunderstorm appearing and Loki making a quip that he knows what's going to come, then Thor just lands on a jet, flies in and takes Loki away.

Then we get probably the third-most-memorable action scene short of the final climactic New York battle. Thor and Iron Man fights, and then Captain America jumps in to stop the battle. Lots of great moments here -- Iron Man mocking Thor's speech (which he doesn't even do in the MCU), Cap blocking Mjolnir with his shield, Thor accidentally supercharging Iron Man's armour (surprisingly not foreshadowing)... it's very cool stuff, and after the boys calm down, we cut away to the Helicarrier. Thor being, again, on friendly terms with the 'Son of Coul', makes it believable in this movie that he would even entertain working with them. A little nice detail is the off-handed dialogue that SHIELD made sure Jane Foster is protected and fine, which is neat!

The next series of scenes, basically Act Two of the movie, show the Avengers divided. And... and it's a couple of great scenes, but we don't really get too much of a payoff beyond 'they rally together around Coulson's death and decide to work together as heroes'. Although I suppose Civil War would be its own payoff in a way? The best-acted and probably best-built-up conflict is between Steve Rogers and Tony Stark, and there's a lot of great analysis to both the acting and the lines specifically being thrown around by these two characters. The two of them are heroes, make no mistake, but the two of them are also exactly the type to rub off wrongly on each other. Tony intrinsically hates Steve for how much his dad keeps praising Steve and for his optimistic, buddy-boy attitude. Steve hates Tony for being a grandiose jackass with a smart-aleck answer for everything, and for not seemingly taking anything seriously. The 'genius billionaire playboy philanthropist' line and the 'cut the wire' argument are well-written lines, but the seething anger between Tony and Steve are really what sells it. 

I could talk a lot more about this, but between Civil War, Infinity War, Endgame and even on the course of this movie, both Steve and Tony basically disprove the other one's criticism of their character, or grow out of it. Which I really like. 

The other characters get a lot of interactions here, too -- which is what makes Hawkeye's lack of inclusion in any of these all the more tragic. Black Widow hints at her own motivation during her talk with Loki, talking about clearing the 'red from her ledger', and Tom Hiddleston's amazingly rage-filled performance as he snarls at Black Widow, seemingly shocking her... only for Natasha to just deadpan back into 'we figured out Loki's plan' is amazing. The conflict mostly centers around Steve-vs-Tony at this point, but when Steve and Tony both independently figure out that SHIELD is keeping many secrets around them, and when other voices get thrown into the mix? Black Widow and Nick Fury champion that 'it's for the greater good', Thor just puts his nose up at all the petty mortals, and Banner? Banner gets so angry at everything, and the compounding aggravation of learning that SHIELD has a special cell for him (that they're storing Loki in) and that SHIELD is lying to them gets him pissed off. And, well, there's also the scepter, which they are analyzing and they don't even realize is corrupting their mind. 

It's honestly kind of a shame that SHIELD harnessing the Tesseract and Loki's scepter to make weapons as a deterrent against hostile forces doesn't actually go anywhere. Some deleted scenes indicate that Maria Hill was originally written less as an Avengers/Nick Fury yes-woman and she's actually trying to be a much more stern 'for the greater good' SHIELD leader, in the extremist way that she was written in the comic-books' version of Civil War, but all of that got exorcised. And it just means that the shady things SHIELD is doing just... just peters out at the end, and Winter Soldier reveals that everything is kind of a Hydra plan. And that's all well and good, but I feel like having the heroes confront Nick Fury for not being on the up-and-up would be interesting as well. 

Anyway, Hawkeye and a group of evil agents attack the Helicarrier (with a USB arrow!) and we get an action scene! Banner Hulks out and chases down Black Widow a bit before we get another fan-favourite fight, Hulk versus Thor. Otherwise known as the second-most-memorable action scene in the movie. It's surprisingly shorter than I thought, though I really like the scenes here particularly with the slow-motion when Thor clobbers Hulk. As someone who didn't care for these characters before this movie, I found myself cheering with the audience when Hulk and Thor clash with each other and that, I feel, is a sign of the movie doing what it needs to do. Also, yeah, bigger budget does mean better CGI for Hulk. 

Iron Man and Captain America, in a pretty cool scene, show that they immediately drop the conflict and jump straight into superheroing when the world needs them to be, and it's kind of undercut by everything else happening around them but I did like this brief scene of them fixing the Helicarrier. Black Widow whacks Hawkeye down and beats the mind-control out of him... and Loki tricks Thor into being jettisoned out of the Helicarrier before shishkebabing poor Agent Coulson. (Don't worry, he gets better.) And Coulson went out like a champ, shooting Loki with a giant Destroyer cannon and trying his darndest to do his duty. Shame it just isn't enough. 

And this is the darkest hour in the movie, so to speak. Hulk was dropped out of the sky after destroying the F35; Thor was shot out of the Helicarrier by Loki; Loki himself has escaped... and everyone is down in spirits. But then Fury spins it so that Coulson's sacrifice should mean something to them. And I do like that it's Tony and Steve, again, that ends up being galvanized for this, because we can see throughout the movie that Tony's got a friendly relationship with Coulson despite all the bluster, while Steve clearly sees this guy who idolizes him. Fury, of course, gives them an extra push by staining the mint Captain America trading cards with some fake blood... a less scrupulous way of showing his shadiness, I suppose. I approve. 

Then the Avengers assemble! Sort of. The three 'normals' -- Captain America, Black Widow and Hawkeye -- suit up and deploy on the Quinjet. Thor summons the rest of his armour from where he crashlanded. And Iron Man flies all the way to Avengers tower where he figures out Loki is at, and the snark-to-snark combat between Tony and Loki was pretty fun to listen to. Neither of them really manage to intimidate the other, and Loki's scepter doesn't work through Tony's arc reactor, so Loki falls back to the ol' Asgardian strength and tosses Tony out of the window. In comes the Mark VII Armour, a big-ass missile that transforms mid-air to wrap around Iron Man. So fucking cool, and seeing how Iron Man's armour would escalate over the next couple of movies, yeah. Tony does a neat "his name was Phil" badass one-liner, before realizing that, hey, Loki succeeded in opening that dang portal and he summons a giant alien army! And I really do like Iron Man's short and brief one-man standoff against the first wave of Chitauri goons. 

All the Avengers arrive, including Bruce Banner (on a random motorbike!) and I do like that Tony has a good enough read on Banner that he's confident Banner will make it there. Banner shows off that he's 'always angry' and one-shot-punches the first Leviathan that gave Tony a lot of trouble. That's honestly pretty damn fucking awesome, and we get the ever-iconic 360 degree rotation of all the six original cinematic Avengers. Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk, Thor, Black Widow and Hawkeye. You know the shot. And, again, going back to me in the cinema in 2012? That was the best feeling ever. Rewatching the movie for like the twelfth time or whatever last night? Still pretty awesome. 

And what happens next is a long drawn-out action scene, and short of describing each and every awesome scene that happens there, I really don't have much to say about these things. And that's not to undercut the awesomeness of this action scene, though. We've waited multiple movies and an hour of buildup for this, for the Avengers to fight as a team, and the movie delivers. Poor Hawkeye and Black Widow still get the short end of the stick because, well, compared to Thor and Iron Man their power-sets probably don't really make for the most dynamic action scenes. Black Widow at least gets a couple of neat sequences involving her hitching a ride on a random Chitauri flier, though. There's a pretty cool tracking shot following all the Avengers through the city at one point, ending in Hulk jabbing a giant chunk of metal through a Leviathan's head and Thor slamming it down with Mjolnir. And the subsequent Hulk Punch afterwards. There's the brief combo move between Iron Man and Captain America. There is Captain America calling the shots both for the Avengers and for the random policemen in New York City. Again, lots of very, very cool action scenes happen here... honestly, all the CGI is on-point, the action scenes are easy to follow, and honestly, isn't this like what we're here to watch in the first place? 

And poor, poor Loki is just not having a good day, huh? Iron Man zapped him with a repulsor beam at the beginning of the invasion, Thor beats him up as they yell in each other's faces, Hawkeye shot an exploding arrow that ruined that smug smile, Hulk shows up and bashes him around like a ragdoll and snorts at him being a 'puny god'... yeah, at this point the threat is more of the invasion and less of Loki. I'm pretty sure that after Hulk's puny-god moment, the audience basically realized that Loki's done for. 

We get the World Security Council sending a nuke at New York, and while Nick Fury manages to bazooka one of the planes carrying the bombs, a second one is successfully launched. Tony ends up carrying the nuke through the portal in a defiant act of self-sacrifice. A really cool scene, and in a nice callback to Iron Man 2, he even makes a point to try and get Jarvis to call Pepper for him. He blows up the Chitauri mothership which coincidentally shuts down all the drones on Earth, and he plummets back through the Earth portal just in time (and Hulk resurrects him by screaming really loudly) but I kinda like this little 'wait, is he really dead?' moment. 

And then we get a series of epilogue scenes. Thor carries the Tesseract and Loki back to Asgard for judgement, which is a way for the Avengers and Fury to give middle fingers to the World Security Council for what they did. And I guess that's Fury's decision regarding the Tesseract weapons? That Earth has Avengers now, and the Avengers are their contingency? Okay, sure, I could live with that. Tony gets shown basically finding a new purpose with creating a new Avengers Tower, Bruce Banner has friends now... and somewhere deep in space, Loki's sponsor, the Other, talks to his enigmatic master... who's revealed to be Thanos! (I didn't know who Thanos was at this point, so I was like, 'oh, okay, another comic villain, cool?')

So, yeah, pretty basic movie, honestly, as far as superhero movies go. Especially since I looked up the deleted scenes and realized just how much they left at the cutting room table in terms of subplots for Loki, Fury and Maria. And poor Hawkeye didn't even get a 'they were planning to do something with him', because he really felt almost as an afterthought to the team. Like, sure, he gets a couple of cool lines and action scenes near the end, but as a character it's not a surprise that he was kind of treated as the black sheep of the team for a while. And Black Widow, if we're being honest, also doesn't really do a whole ton in this movie. 

And... and, yes, I'd have preferred, perhaps, a more cerebral version with more discussion of using the Tesseract weapons in case of contingency reasons. Or to have a Nick Fury vs Maria Hill subplot throughout the MCU, or to have a full one-hour subplot starring Hawkeye and Black Widow, or to have Loki's machinations at the hands of Thanos be more explicit to the audience, or to have War Machine show up or something. There's always things that could be done and didn't, and ultimately, honestly, these are nitpicking that I certainly didn't care about when I first watched this movie. Or when I watched it for a second, or a third time. 

But all in all? All in all, I think they still did a great job at communicating who these characters are and balancing so many characters so well. One of the biggest strengths of the MCU is continuity, and that's not just in the specific events that occur, but also that the writers remember character interactions and personality, which is what makes moments like Tony and Steve's or interactions so interesting, for example. Or why Tony is so untrusting of the government-types,  r why Steve's soldier nature is to basically go 'give 110% to the fight, question orders later', or why Thor is initially so insistent on bringing Loki home, or why Bruce and Tony ended up being buddies. 

Again, Iron Man was where it begun, but The Avengers was where the MCU truly cemented itself that, hey maybe they can really do it. Maybe the franchise is in good enough hands and can consistently make solid, profitable movies. And hoo boy, the sheer amount of superhero movies that was born from this movie alone? Yeah. This is a very solid movie that I honestly go back to and rewatched a lot of times. It's just pretty fun in general! Very awesome debut for the Earth's Mightiest Heroes.

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

(Phase II reviews are upcoming... maybe next month. I've finished writing maybe half of it, and I kind of want to do what I did here and release like five or six reviews all at once.)

• Post-Credits Scene: The mid-credits scene shows the Other talking to his dread master, Thanos, setting him up for future movies. The post-credits scene is just the Avengers hanging out eating Shwarma. 
• Stan the Man: Stan Lee shows up in the montage of NYC citizens being interviewed, playing chess and deriding the idea of 'aliens in New York? Give me a break!'
• Future Movies Foreshadowing: Thanos shows up in the post-credits scene, and he'll be revealed to be behind many of the subsequent Avengers movies. Otherwise, there's not much!
• Past Movie Continuity: Basically all the events of all prior five movies get referenced in one way or another, though between Loki and the Tesseract, the two movies that built into the plotline of this one the most are Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger. Nick Fury and SHIELD shows up in some degree in both Iron Man movies, Thor and Captain America; while Tony Stark's involvement in 'keeping certain parties' off of Hulk's scent explains his otherwise odd cameo in Incredible Hulk. Coulson made the huge cannon from the remains of the Destroyer in Thor; and the destruction of the Bifrost Bridge in Thor is also referenced. In a smaller scale, Tony immediately calling Pepper when he thinks he's about to die is the reversal of how he kept his sickness quiet from her in Iron Man 2. 
• Movie Superhero Codenames:
  
• Iron Man gets called by Iron Man or Tony Stark interchangeably.
• Captain America's superhero name is basically a legendary title at this point, so he also gets called by it a couple of times in the movie, though his real name or 'Captain'/'Cap' tends to be what most characters call him as. 
• Bruce Banner very notably tries his best not to refer to his alter ego as the Hulk, calling him 'the big guy' or 'the other guy', but everyone else has no problems calling to Hulk as Hulk.
• Hawkeye gets called 'the Hawk' by Selvig, and 'Hawkeye' once by Natasha, but otherwise is just 'Barton' most of the time. 
• Natasha Romanoff gets called by her name almost in the entire movie, except during the first scene where she's with the Russian gangsters. One of the Russian gangsters call her 'Black Widow' in Russian.
• Thor and Loki's codenames are, well, just their real names, so they get called that all the time. 
• Favourite Action Scene: I mean, can it be anything other than the massive battle against the Chitauri in New York City? There's this one long tracking shot that ends with Hulk and Thor beating up one of the leviathans, that's probably my favourite one. 
• Funniest Line: A lot to pick here, but it's honestly "puny god" for me. 
• Tony Stark name-drops the term 'life model decoy' as a snarky joke to Coulson at one point. LMD's are a major part of the Marvel comic book universe, being robots that are indistinguishable from real humans. In the broader MCU context, later seasons of Agents of SHIELD would feature them. 
• The Tesseract site at the beginning of the movie is called Project PEGASUS, a SHIELD site from the comics.
• Tony at one point handwaves the Avengers as 'Avengers, Earth's Mightiest Heroes', which is a term that the group is well known for. (Speaking of which, the very first enemy that the comic-book Avengers fight is Loki!)
• The state of the Stark Tower with its destroyed letters leaves behind just a single 'A', making it resemble the Avengers Tower in the comics. 
• When Thor and Loki have a conversation on the cliff, two ravens are shown prominently. Odin in both the mythology and the comics have two ravens that act as his eyes and ears. 
• Captain America orders Hulk to "Hulk? Smash." which is one of Hulk's iconic battlecries in the comics. "Puny god" is a riff on how Hulk usually describes his alter-ego or humans as "puny Banner" or "puny humans".
• The Other telling Thanos that fighting Earth is to 'court death'. In comics, Thanos's biggest motivation is to literally court Death herself.