Four years and five movies in the making,The Avengers is finally here. Right from the first Iron Man & The Incredible Hulk in 2008 to Iron Man 2 in 2010 and Captain America & Thor in 2011, these movies have laid the foundation for cinemas greatest superhero team ever. So does it all pay off? Hell yeah! Joss Whedon has created a movie that doesnt quite touch the The Dark Knight in terms of narrative complexity or inventive action but boy oh boy; this movie surely offers a bang for your buck. It takes its place perfectly by the Batman trilogy as a far more accessible & light-hearted action spectacle.
The world is threatened by Loki (Tom Hiddleston) & his alien army who want the Tesseract cube (seen earlier in Captain America & at the end of Thor) to bring about an apocalypse. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) is left with no choice but to activate the Avengers Initiative which calls upon initially the help of Tony Stark AKA Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Natasha Romanov AKA the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Bruce Banner AKA the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) & Steve Rogers AKA Captain America (Chris Evans). Clint Barton AKA Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) & Dr. Erik Selvig (Stellen Skarsgard) have been put under some sort of mind control by Loki and the first job of the team is to rescue them. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) joins the battle initially looking to transport Loki back to Arsgard to stand trial for his crimes but soon enough joins the team himself after some initial skirmishes with Iron Man. The team slowly overcomes their differences with each other and teams to face Lokis army in New York.
The movie is massive in its scope and relentless in its pacing. Right from the opening sequence which involves an attack on S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters that annihilates the entire structure to the humungous Helicarrier which itself is the setting for a chaotic but quite satisfying action sequence. Whedons plan for the movie is simple, despite the earlier movies and the strong individual characters, he wants to present them as a team over anything else; so while there are personal equations involved, none of them are fleshed out adequately enough.
Robert Downey Jr steals the show yet again as Tony Stark and Whedon utilises the wry humour of the character as a nice off-balance for the seriousness of the others. Tom Hiddleston as Loki has a verbal duel of sorts with each of the characters and some end in quite an amusing fashion, particularly his brief talk with the Hulk.
The Avengers is a rousing, comic-book adaptation worthy of the highest praise in the manner in which Joss Whedon has gone about bringing so many diverse superheroes under one roof. This movie lays the foundation for future movies primarily for the team and not so much for individual members; whose stories I believe will follow their own paths. The movie isn't deep, nor thematically rich, it's just a bunch of guys and gals in costumes trading witty banter, making heroic statements and blowing stuff up, i doubt most can do better than that when adapting a comic-book straight up; unless you are Christopher Nolan!
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