The Avengers: Revisited

In light of Marvel's Phase 2 kickoff with the release of Iron Man 3 (and because my fiance had never seen it), we wanted to take a look back at the movie that was the culmination of fanboy fantasies: Marvel's The Avengers.

PLOT

Despite being the sum of four different Marvel franchises, the story is surprisingly self contained: Loki, the Norse god of mischief has come to Earth to steal a power source that will give him and his allies unlimited power and help him conquer the Earth. The only thing standing in his way? The world's mightiest superheroes: Iron Man, The Hulk, Thor, and Captain America. If you have never seen a Marvel movie, you'll have unanswered questions, but it would still be a fun ride. But if you've seen all of the films, you know each character intimately, you know how powerful the Tesseract is and you know how messed up Loki's mind has become. Joss Whedon expertly weaves all of these stories and personalities together. The only problem I had was that for most of the film, our heroes are locked in battle with each other which initially seems logical but eventually winds up feeling like a fanboy argument about who would best who in a fight. But when it finally focuses, the Avengers's story plays out beautifully.

DIALOGUE

You would think a film so full of stars vying for screen time and story to be told would fall prey to an overabundance of talking. Instead, the dialogue in the Avengers is very well done. Each character has their own particular voice in the group and they come in so naturally. Tony Stark hits the humor notes, Captain America hits the inspirational notes, and Bruce Banner handles the scientific explanation. Some lines, specifically Black Widows, were redundant and unneeded, but overall there isn't much to complain about.

VISUALS

When you watch New York City being destroyed, it can be hard to not say "This is over the top". And while some have described the action in the Avengers as such, I feel differently. The movie does such a great job of building the tension and the danger to point that by the time space aliens are ripping up Manhattan, you totally buy it. Having state of the art special effects doesn't hurt either. You'd be hard pressed to find a comic book movie that looks cooler than the Avengers.

CHARACTERS

As a standalone film, the character development is lacking. We see no back stories or anything like that. The reason is simple: we've seen it already in the solo movies. However people who are being introduced to these characters for the first time through the Avengers movie will not feel any sort of connection to most of them. But that's why Marvel released solo movies first instead of jumping straight into this team up. A luxury the rumored Justice League movie won't have.

ACTION

The action in the Avengers is off the charts culminating in the biggest action climax I've ever seen. It's not just mindless shooting and explosions though. Each character has their role to play in the battle based on their strengths and they mesh perfectly. If you're just seeing this movie for the action, you'll get it. And you may end up feeling something too!

Overall, Joss Whedon and the entire cast of the Marvel movie universe comes together to make the Avengers one of the best superhero movies ever made. It is groundbreaking storytelling that raises the bar for future films.

PLOT - 2
DIALOGUE - 1.5
VISUALS - 2
CHARACTERS - 1.5
ACTION - 2

DUSTY'S SCORE - 9 out of 10