The Avengers

Are you happy? I finally saw it.

It only took me almost a decade but I finally watched The Avengers. How was it? It's okay. I mean I know the wet dreams of Marvel fans the world over is probably what got this film to be the highest grossing film ever at one point in time, and while I can safely say this movie does not suck I didn't exactly love it either. Don't get me wrong, I'm so happy this wasn't an hour and a half action scene done after an hour of buildup, in fact the pacing of the movie was commendable. Spending significant amounts of time catching us up on what the Avengers have been up to since their last movies, and getting everybody together for the first time. You started off good movie, you gave me Scarlett straight off the bat you get a point just for that! And I gotta say Mark Ruffalo really won me over very quickly, he brings more of that Bill Bixby humbleness and charm which pisses me off to no end that he hasn't got a proper solo movie cause I know he can pull it off! Christ, him and Loki were the best parts of the film hands down, Tom Hiddleston is just savaging this role and relishes every second of it, his acting is absurdly good in this movie. And I liked the dynamic of the team members, some don't get along while others do, they bicker sure but when shit hits the fan they are ready to help each other, the comraderie while brief was quite nice. The action scenes were spaced out and while I've become desensitized to crazy action setpieces I can just imagine the excitement and anticipation people had when seeing this for the first time. This has never been done before on any scale, and it would have been easy to make this a clusterf*** mess but they did good. I harbor no ill will towards The Avengers nor Justice League, I thought both movies juggled the characters and story well, so I can't really pick favorites on that case, I'd call them equals. I will say the plot sort of lost me a few times, mainly just because I forgot Hawkeye was even in this movie let alone brainwashed, and I didn't fully know why Loki decided to bring an alien race to decimate Earth. He had plenty of opportunities to grab the tesseract and GTFO but he just didn't, and I'm wondering what the plan was and how it pertains to a totally not California Raisin looking Thanos. I think the movie wisely focused more on the characters and their interactions than the sheer spectacle of battles, yeah it gets very cliched when the Avengers keep fighting one another and I know about the Civil War comic story so I know it's not impossible for these people to clash, but most of the time in the movie it felt forced and there just to sort of fill an action quota. And what the ass was with the alien/robot/monster things shutting down Phantom Menace style at the end? I thought they were just armored aliens but they work like robots? That...that was stupid, and weird, and didn't make a lick of sense but that's small beans to me with Tony and the nuke. He flat out pulls a Superman in The Dark Knight Returns and diverts a nuclear warhead to not destroy a city, but doesn't get caught in the blast radius this time, but what really gets on my nerves is he didn't need to fully insert it into the hole (Steady now...), just point it up and let go! And don't even try to tell me they were going for suspense if Tony was going to bite the bullet or not, nobody bought that for a millionth of a second. I know story doesn't have to be airtight in a popcorn flick like this, but some things just were odd to me and when the bullshit man says that's bullshit, well you know. It's a decent movie, I got some enjoyment out of it, I would place it with Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk as some of my favorites so far, so I'm just wondering what this Phase 2 or whatever it's called is going to hold for me. 3 stars, 7/10, I can understand why people like it but I am so not feeling the Marvel fanboy syndrome here.