Phase 1 Revisited: The Avengers

In which I revisit a previously explored topic with fresh eyes and an open mind.

It only took them four years and five "prequels" to pull it off, but in 2012 we finally got Marvel's money shot: an superheroic, cross-franchise team-up that everything up until that point had been doggedly building towards.  And today, on Ultron Eve we finally get to answer the question that this entire series has been building towards: was Avengers really that good?

In the wake of the New Mexican incident, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s main concern has been harnessing the limitless power of the Tesseract for the good of mankind.  The problem is, however, that that kind of power tends to attract unwanted visitors.  When Loki arrives on the scene, he steals the Tesseract and brainwashes top S.H.I.E.L.D. agents into becoming his loyal servants.  Fury needs a response team - a collaboration between Earth's mightiest heroes - regardless of whether they actually want to, or can,  work together.

Let's get something straight from the get-go.  The Avengers is nothing more or less than the apotheosis of blockbusters.  It's big, loud, splashy and designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator.  It's a party thrown in its own honor to commemorate somehow managing to tie together four action franchises into a cohesive shared universe: a series of over-long action scenes strung together with the barest semblances of plot.

And yet, when all was said and done, it was unquestionably the best movie of the year.  Between Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner and Tom Hiddleston, it had the most absurdly well-crafted cast that money could buy.  With Joss Whedon helming the camera and penning the script, the comic book titans were brought down to our level: throwing out witty quips and intelligent dialog in favor of yet another action scene.

The movie understood what it was: not a heavy-handed treatise on the Human condition, but a light-hearted romp to pass a lazy afternoon with.  That is why Joss Whedon was the only man for the job behind the camera.  He knew that the heart of the story was the Avengers interacting with one another, not on Loki's invasion of New York.  Sure, the invasion was the perfect action set piece to end the film with, but it was hardly what the movie's ultimate success (or failure) was riding on.

Despite its bloated size and unwieldy cast, there's a shocking amount of character development that happens in its 2 1/2 hour run time.  We see the weight of time acting on Captain Rogers: how he struggles to come to grips with a world that he sacrificed his life for and yet is entirely alien to him.  We watch Thor struggle with his conflicted feelings toward Loki - the love he bears his brother and the hatred that he harbors against his enemy.

We're shown the darkest depths of Banner's soul - how the Hulk incessantly tears at him from the inside to degrees we'd never imagined before.  Stark's character arc that began in Iron Man comes to a head when he has to come to terms with a friend's death and the part that he played in it.  Natasha, who was  given very little in the way of a developed character in Iron Man 2, is fleshed out as a shrewd, calculating and surprisingly vulnerable person.  And even if Hawkeye ended up drawing the short straw for screen time, his relationship with Black Widow is developed vividly enough in their few scenes together that most fans were demanding to see the duo's origin story on screen.

Although narratively simple, The Avengers is unquestionably the best possible version of the movie that it was trying to be.  It was better shot than it ever deserved to be and better realized than we ever could have reasonably hoped for.  With its balance of character and action, it remains the absolute standard of summer blockbusters

Rating:  10/10

Buy on BluRay:  Unquestionably

So what did you think of the first Avengers?  Was it worth four years and five movies worth of anticipation?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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