Babble: Marvel's The Avengers

Wow, where to begin?

If you’ve been watching the Marvel movies, you’ll know that Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) has been busy behind the scenes (mostly behind the credits) to assemble heroes for a special team. The time has come that these heroes band together to take on something none of them can fight alone: Loki and hordes of creatures that I’m not comic book geeky enough to know.

As I said above, I am not a comic book geek. I think that mostly was due to the fact that I was never really exposed to them and then I moved to this geek wasteland… and yeah. But I followed the mainstream stuff. I knew who Iron Man was and the Incredible Hulk. I had no clue who Thor was until the recent movie (I knew there was a comic about Thor, but nothing beyond that). And of course, who could not know about Captain America? I still remember a platform game with him throwing his shield all around the place. As for the Avengers… I knew the name, knew it was kinda like the Justice League Marvel style but nothing beyond that.

I was excited about this movie though (Ooh! I have another thing to add to my 100 things list!). And the reason I was excited was that Joss Whedon was going to run the show. That instantly made Marvel’s The Avengers a must-see movie for me.

At the same time I was sceptical. There would be so many obstacles to climb over in a movie like this. I didn’t really know whether one could actually make a hit from it. Let’s just have a look:

• You have six Avengers, four of which are power houses with their own fan base. I don’t know how popular Hawk Eye and Black Widow are… I didn’t know about them at all, but anyway. So for each of the Avengers, you’ll need to give a particular amount of time depending on how the story is shaped. Seeing as this movie was about assembling the Avengers for the first time, and not about only one particular Avenger, one would think that all of them would get close to the same time.

• The story would need to touch on the movies made before. With Iron Man you have to have Pepper there; with Thor there has to be some reference of his separation from Jane; with Captain America you have to make sure everyone knows he wasn’t smart enough to turn his plane around.

• You have a cast of established actors – some of which aren’t even part of the Avengers – whom each need their face time
  

• Being a Marvel movie, the story needs to be action packed and entertaining while also taking all of the points above into account.

That’s one massive challenge.

I’d like to think Joss and his crew kicked ass and did it in style. He made the Avengers three dimensional, each with personal issues, their own way of thinking and talking which are unique to each them. They’re all flawed, as they should be, but without melodrama. No one was left behind in terms of character progression and that in itself is one helluva feat.

The story was engaging. I did feel that it they started it off slow – which was actually necessary given the amount of exposition they had to do – but the end was also really fast. There were some things that just ‘worked’ too quickly but then the movie was already over two hours long and taking ten minutes to establish one particular moment would have been a waste of time that they didn’t have.

The movie had a great deal of visual effects – some breath taking, others hardly noticeable and then a LOT of flying monsters.

In the end, all I really cared about was the characters and Joss knows how to take care of his characters. Well, those he doesn’t kill off. He is Joss after all. I loved what they did with the Thor-Loki arc. While not my ‘favourite’ hero (although, sjoe! He’s yummy! Ahem…) Joss really did something special with the two brothers. I also absolutely loved the Hulk’s “puny god” moment with Loki – a Joss special if ever there was one. It was very cartoony, but I was laughing so hard I couldn’t care.

Funny, action-packed, engaging and incredibly entertaining – Joss managed to make something unique and exciting. He has definitely set a really good stage for future sequels. I just hope the next writer/director doesn’t mess it up.

I’m definitely buying this one when it comes out on dvd.

A shout out for Lisa Lassack who was involved with editing the movie. I was so happy to see her in the credits. She’s the fifth geek of the Geekson crew and she’s awesome.