I am huge comic book geek. I love everything about them: vibrant colours, getting to see a variety of different artists work, seeing how different people view the world around them and how different authors can have different takes on such legendary characters as Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, Captain America and many others. That being said I am a DC Comics fanboy and only a moderate reader of Marvel books. But when it comes to superhero movies, Marvel has that field covered.
Marvel started off with their Spider-Man flick back in 2002 and they haven’t looked back since. They’ve made great movies such as the recent Captain America, Thor, and X-Men First Class and they’ve made not so good movies, Hulk, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and Spider-Man 3 to name a few. So when they announced that their greatest heroes would team up this summer movie season I was excited and nervous. I was excited to see such big characters all in one film written by fanboy icon Joss Whedon, but I was nervous cause to me there seemed to be a chance that this movie would come across cheesy having all these heroes interact with each other. I was dead wrong.
Avengers just hit theaters on Friday May 4th but has already received some very high praise from sites like Rotten Tomatoes who gave it a 96% after 81 reviewers had managed to get into one of the many advanced screenings last month. I was lucky enough to see this movie this last Saturday. The plot is true to comic book form for The Avengers, some big threat is coming and only a group of “The Earth’s Mightiest Heroes” can save us. That threat: Loki trying to recover a device called the Tesseract, a source of unlimited power and the deadliest of weapons in the wrong hands. The Earth’s saviours: Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk, and Thor, with Black Widow and Hawkeye thrown in for some extra favour.
There is so much I can say about this movie and so much that I would love to just talk about but I don’t wish to ruin it for anyone. The film is filled with memorable moments, it is a perfect mix of action, comedy, and plot, as is to be expected at this point with anything done by Joss Whedon. The interactions between all of the characters were great, they all were on par with their other performances in their solo movie and you could tell they all had fun making this film, which is so important and comes across on-screen. Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner is the best I have seen in the three movies that Banner has been in. He managed to become the Dr. Banner I have always envisioned when reading Hulk or Avengers comics: calm, cool, collect, and impassive. It was a brilliant performance and I hope that he sticks around.
There was very little about this movie that I did not like that I only have two major problems with it. Problem one, this movie, as seems to be the trend, is a waste of 3D, there is nothing special about the 3D in this film, it looks nice but it isn’t anything that blew my mind or made me say “Everyone needs to see this in 3D, don’t even bother seeing it if you see it in 2D.” So go to this one in AVX if you want, it is nice to look at and the chairs are comfortable, but 2D is fine for this. The other gripe I have is a fanboy one: why didn’t I get Tony Stark and Steve Rogers as best friends by the end of the movie? Yes, they got along but not a well as I was waiting for. It will come…it must.
As with all Marvel movies stay after the credits of this one, and then stay after the second set of credits. That’s right, there are two post credit scenes at the end of Avengers, the first gives us a taste of Avengers 2 or possible Thor 2 and the second is just plain fun.
I give Marvel’s The Avengers 9/10.
The Ubiquitous Gentlemen 