The Avengers

Two men in Halloween costumes fight to save the world.

The Avengers is, among other things, one of most audacious marketing ploys Hollywood has ever conceived.  Sure, it’s a summer blockbuster at heart, complete with an enormous budget and a smorgasbord of special effects designed specifically to melt the eyes out of your head, but it’s more than that.  It’s a direct continuation of no less than three entirely discrete big-budget super-heroic action movies, and in making it Marvel Studios and Walt Disney Pictures have demonstrated a commitment to bigness seldom seen even in an industry as overblown as the movies.

Thinking about it, something like The Avengers was bound to happen sooner or later.  Comic books about superheroes are known for taking place in complicated, densely interconnected universes, so it makes sense that the movies based on them would eventually start to link together.  You don’t need to have seen the movies leading up to The Avengers to enjoy it, but a bit of context helps.  The plot revolves around the Tesseract, a mysterious alien cube of great power that was last seen plunging to the bottom of the ocean in Captain America: The First Avenger.  The Tesseract is currently being studied by S.H.I.E.L.D., a clandestine espionage agency headed by veteran spy Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson).  When it’s stolen by demi-god Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who himself was last seen plummeting through a dimensional worm-hole at the end of Thor, Fury enlists the help of super-spy Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) in rounding up a crew of heroes capable of getting it back.  That group includes the brilliant but abrasive Iron Man (Robert Downy Jr.), recently revived World War II legend Captain America (Chris Evans), and Bruce Banner, aka The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo).

Thor (Chris Hemsworth), god of thunder and Loki’s brother, eventually joins the team as well.  It’s a big cast, and each of them brings along their own unique star power and iconographic baggage.  To manage it, the producers tapped writer-director Joss Whedon, a man known mostly for the creation of television series like Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  It was a smart hire.  Whedon has plenty of experience directing super-powered ensembles, and his script takes the story seriously enough so that we can get invested but not so seriously that the going gets dreary.  Laughs are plentiful, and they go a long way toward helping viewers settle into the premise.

Whedon also does a good job of pacing the movie such that almost everyone is given a chance to shine.  As the smug, cynical Iron Man, Downy Jr. gets the lion’s share of the crowd-pleasing lines along with the movie’s most moving heroic moment.  Evans’ Captain America provides an effectively earnest foil.  Chris Hemsworth’s Thor adds conviction and weight to the central plotline, and Tom Hiddelston has a blast smirking and sniveling his way through his role as the villain.  Even Johansson’s Black Widow, who has no superpowers, feels like she matters.  She has an especially great scene with Loki where she tries to fake him out into revealing some incriminating information.

Everyone, in short, is sure to have their favorite, and for me the Hulk nearly runs away with the show.  Ruffalo is the third actor to play the role in recent years, and he brings a wry, smirking self-pity to it that somehow never becomes grating.  The lone dud of the group is Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), an expert marksman whose role is so slight it almost feels like he doesn’t need to be there at all.  That hiccup aside, each member is well-developed enough so that we don’t want them to die once they arrive at the inevitable special effects-laden battle toward the end of the third act.

As spectacular as that battle is, and much credit is due to the effects team for some imaginative and technically immaculate work, its inevitability does take away slightly from the overall effect.  For all of its meticulous craft, for all the jokes and the bombast and the carefully choreographed characterization, The Avengers is occasionally too busy being an action blockbuster to dive as deeply into the characters as I wanted.  That’s part of the plan, of course.  If the movie holds things back, it’s so they can be better explored in the series of spider-webbing sequels.  The Avengers is a great time at the movies, but it’s also a link in a chain so wide I don’t think even Marvel knows where it ends.  With The Avengers, Marvel has committed not only to a franchise but to a network of franchises, and if the quality remains this high it’s a network in which I’m glad to be caught.