It has taken five films to get to this point – the backstories of the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor and Captain America have all been fleshed out separately and now they are to be brought together to form a superhero gang. Somehow it still takes this film a while to get going, but when it does it really soars.
Loki, Thor’s adopted brother, comes to Earth and steals the Tesseract (a magical power cube) from S.H.I.E.L.D (a powerful espionage agency). S.H.I.E.L.D’s leader Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) gathers together some of the world’s greatest heroes to retrieve the Tesseract and defeat Loki’s army of aliens.
The lengthy set up before the big battle involves a lot of waiting around on S.H.I.E.L.D’s hellicarrier, but luckily the audience is waiting around with some great characters and a script by Joss Whedon. The comic tone set by the Iron Man films continues here, and Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark is still a hoot. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is hilariously serious, and Captain America (Chris Evans) is also nicely confused by 21st century Earth. Even Scarlett Johansson isn’t awful as the Black Widow, doing a lot of nice double crossing.
The final battle is spectacular, if a little long. A huge amount of destruction takes place as the aliens attack Manhatten (which will always be less fun to watch than it was pre-2001), with the Hulk, Iron Man and Thor doing the heavy lifting, while the Black Widow and Hawkeye basically lend moral support.
Out of all the preceding films, Thor was the most silly, and The Avengers unfortunately uses that film’s main villain. Not that Tom Hiddleston isn’t good as Loki, or that the other possible villains are realistic and sensible, it’s just that after the first Avengers film we’ve already had a Norse god leading an army of angry aliens. Where do you go from here?
All in all the first Avengers film is certainly worth the price of admission – great one-liners married with decent action and excellent performances. Frivilous fun for superhero fans.
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