The review
Joss Whedon's The Avengers is stop five on our road to Doomsday, and the first one where the couch ran out of complaints before the movie ran out of lines. Their own movies walked most of these people in one at a time; this is the one that locks them in a flying aircraft carrier and lets them talk. The script is the star. Waifu's word for the whole thing was "near perfect," and she got no arguments from me this time.
Everyone sounds like themselves, and the movie knows exactly who belongs in a room together. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) meets Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) and the two scientists click on sight, yo-bro energy from the first handshake; one of them announces that finally someone speaks English, and Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) asks if that's what just happened. Put Stark next to Steve instead and you get this: "Is this the first time you've lost a soldier?" "We are not soldiers." That's the whole gap between them in two lines, delivered with a chef's kiss. Cap is the all-rounder of the party, good at everything except the tech; he's the one you count on when it gets hairy, because he knows how to stay calm and make the call.
Her one note on the first half is the bickering: a tiny bit forced, since she's seen where these people end up. Then she talked herself out of it: none of them has ever needed a team, every one of them won alone their whole life, so of course they don't get along. My addition: the movie hints that the scepter is sitting on the table, sowing strife while they shout. Where we landed: the scepter stirred it, the characters finished it, and the shouting is how the movie pays for the moment they stop. Her other theory: maybe she just doesn't like confrontation. Bold position for someone married to a man whose website is called ScreenScum.
Scarlett Johansson is so good here. Natasha is a god-tier spy: tied to a chair by Russian thugs, pliers on the way, she's the one running the interrogation, and then she does it again to Loki, who thinks he's the one playing her. The best lies are wrapped in truth, and she hands him a real one to get what she needs. What got me is the fear underneath. One raised voice from Banner in India and her hand is on her gun; after the Hulk comes for her on the helicarrier she's on the floor shaking, and it's real. The only thing on this team that can scare her is a teammate.
The Hulk is so much fun. Even with "control," he sucker-punches Thor the second their monster is down; he catches Tony out of the sky, roughly pushes him off like an icky bug, then wakes him up by roaring in his face. And of course "puny god": the best part of the movie the first time I saw it, and still amazing. It just has more competition now, because we keep catching great lines.
Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is as good as he was in Thor, every move on point; he just has more company now. Back then he stood out because the comparison was jarring. Here everybody carries their weight, and that's a compliment to the movie, not a knock on him. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is getting there, and his best line comes on the helicarrier: Natasha reminds him his brother killed eighty people in two days, and out comes "He's adopted." The forest fight is the reintroduction: Thor and Iron Man try to flatten each other over who gets the prisoner (Stark: "Then don't take my stuff!") while the prisoner sits up on the mountain and enjoys the show. Waifu asked why Loki doesn't run. My answer: he wants to be captured, and his brother would only fetch him back.
Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) spends a good chunk of the movie on the wrong side, and it isn't just a plot tool, it's character work: his turn is what gets Natasha's story out of her, and their chemistry lands when they reunite. The cure got a laugh on our couch too: she hits him really hard in the head and calls it "cognitive recalibration." The man himself split the room. Waifu: an angry guy. Me: he didn't seem angry, maybe motivated? Her: grumpy, always perched somewhere up high, and when Fury asks why, he says he sees better from a distance. Me: he's a guy's guy, he says what needs doing and not much else. Her: I need him to say even less. Me: then we'd have no movie. She gave him "resourceful" and we moved on.
Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) is always great, and his best fight in this one has no punches in it: it's with the World Security Council, who think the answer to an alien invasion is a bigger bomb. Agent Hill (Cobie Smulders) is the badass-woman archetype done right. You know how sometimes they make the badass women faultless and insufferable? She's dependable, she can take care of herself, she still has her shortcomings, and she's not snobbish about any of it. Waifu still sees the girl from How I Met Your Mother every time she's on screen, and says she complements the movie well.
My defense: their game plan was never quality, it was quantity. The mothership keeps sending more, and they're banking on the portal never closing, so Dr. Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård) and his back door are what save the world. My own nitpick is a genre habit: a lot of alien movies give a huge, nearly unbeatable army one central brain, so you blow up the mothership and the rest switch off like someone pulled the plug. It's a storytelling tool, and the alternative is a slog cleaning up stray aliens until Tuesday. I asked Ava out loud for the other movies that do it. (Ava says: Battle: Los Angeles, The Phantom Menace, Edge of Tomorrow and Ender's Game, Couch Dad. Independence Day gets half credit: the virus drops the shields, then everyone still has to shoot every saucer by hand.) I've seen every one of them, apparently. They're all on the rewatch list now.
The Battle of New York is the whole reason the movie exists, and it earns every minute. Waifu's shot is the six of them in a circle, finally in position. Mine is the Hulk punching a flying whale the size of a building in the face. What makes the fight is the teamwork: Iron Man bouncing a blast off Cap's shield into a row of aliens, Hulk ripping a plate from the big one so Thor can hammer it home, Cap calling the plays from the ground, because somebody down there has to. A whole run of solo movies, and suddenly they're a party with a plan.
Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) fanboying over Cap is funny as hell. He owns the vintage trading cards, he tells Steve "I watched you while you were sleeping" before correcting it to "present while you were unconscious," and he had "a little design input" on the new suit, because people "might just need a little old-fashioned." One emotional beat hit a lot harder on my first watch, and those trading cards are part of it: Coulson dies. The first time it really struck, a huge loss; now I know a TV show brings him back, so it lands softer. Fury's play right after hasn't aged a day: he throws the cards on the table, bloodied, and tells the team they were in Coulson's jacket. They were in his locker. The team needed a push, and he found one, a genius move and very on character. This movie also made me want to get back to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which I may have abandoned halfway for a reason I can't recall.
So why not a 10? Because 10 is reserved for Interstellar. Waifu said it before I could, and all I had to add was "Yes." Everything else here is really, really well done, and that circle in the street still works fourteen years later.
The Avengers: six egos, one script, and not a single puny line.
