The Avengers (2012)
Directed by Joss Whedon
When an unexpected enemy emerges and threatens global safety and security, Nick Fury, director of the international peacekeeping agency known as S.H.I.E.L.D., finds himself in need of a team to pull the world back from the brink of disaster. Spanning the globe, a daring recruitment effort begins!
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61 films that influenced The Avengers
What critics say influenced The Avengers
Director-screenwriter Joss Whedon makes excellent use of 3-D, and, despite the overload of special effects and kabooms, he doesn’t turn the movie into a head-rattling endurance test à la Michael Bay ’s “ Transformers ” series.
It is inevitable that comparison between the final attack on Manhattan and the destruction of Chicago in the third "Transformers" movie will be made because there are too many similarities, right down to the mechanical flying 'creatures' from Chitauri vs. "Fallen's" giant drill bit.
Outstanding special effects and stuntwork contribute to an exhilaration so constant it risks the kind of exhaustion, if not monotony, inspired by the Transformers pictures.
There's a-like intensity of lines filled with portent, and just as "Here's lookin' at you, kid" could have been corny in lesser hands than Humphrey Bogart's, the same dynamic holds here: When the evil, complicated Loki talks of his "terrible privilege" or when Rogers, echoing Tommy Lee Jones in Captain America: The First Avenger , speaks of war being "won by soldiers," they make it work on a visceral, emotional level.To criticize the conventions of superpowers or costumes, or to pigeonhole this into a "popcorn movie" ghetto misses the point: This isn't Transformers .
That said, those action scenes are staged in a manner that puts the sights offered up by their blockbuster brethren to shame--the difference between the graceless pummelings on display in the "Transformers" films and the stylish and cohesive set-pieces on display here is so startling that uber-hacks like Michael Bay and McG should hang their heads in shame at the sight of what Whedon has accomplished here.
They brawl, they bond and then, boy, do they kick some alien butt in a city-wrecking slugfest that puts Michael Bay's bombastic Transformers franchise in the shade.
There’s no moment in The Avengers to compare with the slaughter of Bruce Wayne’s parents in Batman (1989) or Jonathan Kent’s collapse in Superman (1978).
But even the most striking, like Richard Donner’s Superman and Tim Burton’s Batman films, either winked at or took outrageous liberties with the source material, or both.
Not only that, but The Avengers is the comic book movie I’ve been waiting for because it fully, successfully explodes the ‘street level’ stuff we’ve been dealing with since Tim Burton’s Batman .
Up until now, the movie industry has been content to seize on a single superhero and spin out a series, usually lasting three or four films over a 10-year period before running out of gas or becoming bloated and decadent and going into hibernation until it is rebooted (see, for example, Warners’ Superman series from 1978 to 1987 and Batman series from 1989 to 1997, as well as Sony’s Spider-Man series from 2002 to 2007).
When Hollywood began to rediscover the pioneering DC and Marvel superheroes of the 20th century, it was refreshing and delightful at first, and for a while: the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, Tim Burton’s “Batman,” Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, the X-Men series.
Then there is a second level that includes "Superman II," the Tim Burton "Batman" films, the last "X-Men" epic and the first "Iron Man"--all solid films that nevertheless lack that final spark that separates the good from the great.
There’s no moment in The Avengers to compare with the slaughter of Bruce Wayne’s parents in Batman (1989) or Jonathan Kent’s collapse in Superman (1978).
But even the most striking, like Richard Donner’s Superman and Tim Burton’s Batman films, either winked at or took outrageous liberties with the source material, or both.
What we’ve seen since Richard Donner’s original “Superman” from 1978 is the steady closing of that gap.
Up until now, the movie industry has been content to seize on a single superhero and spin out a series, usually lasting three or four films over a 10-year period before running out of gas or becoming bloated and decadent and going into hibernation until it is rebooted (see, for example, Warners’ Superman series from 1978 to 1987 and Batman series from 1989 to 1997, as well as Sony’s Spider-Man series from 2002 to 2007).
You might think The Avengers , renamed Avengers Assemble for Britons, in a slight to their intellect, is a new staging post in a cycle than began a thousand years ago with Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000).
Compare this to Bryan Singer’s slickly ponderous first X-Men movie, in which there’s a whole lot of scene setting and not much else.
Most will agree that both the “X-Men” and “Spider-Man” series were for the most part good, but there were bizarre diversions, like “Daredevil,” “Ghost Rider” and the odious and nonsensical “Hulk” by Ang Lee.
Then there is a second level that includes "Superman II," the Tim Burton "Batman" films, the last "X-Men" epic and the first "Iron Man"--all solid films that nevertheless lack that final spark that separates the good from the great.
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It comes tantalizingly close to reaching the level of the very best comic book films of the current generation: Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, Sam Raimi’s first two “Spider-Man” films, and the debuts of Iron Man and Captain America.
In fact, I even preferred the biological web slingers in Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man” series because it just made sense to me, instead of knowing that Peter Parker’s own version of Kryptonite was him running out of web fluid.
Up until now, the movie industry has been content to seize on a single superhero and spin out a series, usually lasting three or four films over a 10-year period before running out of gas or becoming bloated and decadent and going into hibernation until it is rebooted (see, for example, Warners’ Superman series from 1978 to 1987 and Batman series from 1989 to 1997, as well as Sony’s Spider-Man series from 2002 to 2007).
He has a crush on Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone), and he suspects all is not right with his father's former partner, Dr. Curt Connors - who is also known to "Spider-Man" readers as the Lizard.
Jeremy Renner’s work as Hawkeye pales compared to his “Mission Impossible” turn a few months back, mostly because Renner spends much of the film in a literal trance so there’s no time to give him any real development.
Although we shouldn’t feel too bad for Jeremy Renner, who plays him — the man was Oscar nominated for The Hurt Locker and The Town; starred alongside Tom Cruise in the latest Mission: Impossible; and replaces leading man Matt Damon in the next Bourne movie.
That said, Whedon and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey owe a debt to Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt" because they exhibit anything but disregard toward Black Widow's posterior, which gets the Brigitte Bardot treatment.
And such female-centric touches are a recurring theme in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"-creator Whedon's work.
For the ultimate union-reunion, the Lee team called on writer-director Joss Whedon, whose inspired toying with genre tropes gave birth or at least new life to TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Dollhouse, plus the recent smarty-pants horror comedy The Cabin in the Woods and the Internet miniseries Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, a musical comedy whose self-reflexive ingenuity was topped only by its all-sung DVD commentary.
Perhaps the biggest problem facing director-screenwriter Joss Whedon (TV’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”), who co-wrote the story with Zak Penn (“X-Men: The Last Stand”), is that the genre is in danger of being beaten into the ground.
In many ways, “The Avengers” — written and directed by Joss Whedon, best known for the beloved cult TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Firefly”— out-blockbusters its predecessors.
Who better to be behind that camera than “Buffy The Vampire Slayer”, “Serenity” and “Firefly” creator Joss Whedon?
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Thor's megalomaniac half-brother god Loki (Tom Hiddleston, recalling too much of Alan Rickman's Euro-trash villain from "Die Hard") steals the Tesseract as part of his plan to lead an invasion of Earth to subjugate all humans.
At times — when various members of a game and nimble cast amble in and out of the glassy, metallic chambers of a massive flying aircraft carrier, cracking wise, rolling eyes and occasionally throwing a punch — the movie has some of the easygoing charm of “Rio Bravo,” Howard Hawks’s great, late western in which John Wayne, Angie Dickinson, Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson did a lot of talking on their way to a big and not-all-that-interesting shootout.
The story seems unwieldy in scale, broken as it is into two parts: an entertaining Rio Bravo variation aboard an airborne aircraft carrier (!), and an epic “good few versus evil horde” showdown set in and above midtown Manhattan.