Stark, We Need A Plan Of Attack!
- Alex Clark
- Jul 12, 2017
- 3 min read
The Avengers
May 4th, 2012
Dir. Joss Whedon
In the middle of 2012, Marvel’s big gamble, The Avengers (or Avengers Assemble in the UK and other countries) was released to worldwide and acclaim both critically and commercially, and still to this day 5 years on this movie is incredible. It was a long journey to get to the point of The Avengers being released and the anticipation for this movie was higher than any other Marvel film before it and maybe anything that they have released since, maybe the forthcoming 2 part Infinity War may overtake it once the marketing starts ramping up.
There is always a sense that too many main characters in a movie can have the same issue as having too many villains, the movie can start to feel over stuffed and just too much going on. The Avengers has no fear of this whatsoever, it balances all its heroes perfectly. Bringing in one at a time, when the time is necessary. Starting with bringing Shield in and the Tesseract, to really give you a sense that both Shield and the Tesseract are the driving force of the whole movie and getting the team together. When creating the movie they didn’t just throw all the characters together, they weaved they characteristics together to make their relationships worked, and if they didn’t Nick Fury was there to bring the team back together. The biggest example of this is where Captain America and Tony Stark are constantly clashing with Starks usual pompous ideals and Cap’s quite old fashioned way of doing things.
We’ve always had comic book adaptations made into movies, and we’ve always had franchises, but The Avengers really paves the way to bring movies out in new ways that weren’t really seen before it. The people reading Marvel Comic books for years, generations were excited to see all their favourites come out of the page and onto the screen and because of the success of the first phase every movie released is part of a wider universe where we now have the DC Extended Universe, Universal’s Monster Universe, Potterverse and so on. None of these would be possible without the success that came from The Avengers. As it stands, it sits at number 5 in the highest grossing movies of all time grossing a massive $1.519 billion, sitting behind only Avatar, Titanic, The Force Awakens and Jurassic World. The Avengers also holds the record for the highest US opening of all time as well as many more. Its safe to say people were finally interested in comic books!
I think one of things that really help make this film work is that we already know all of the characters. No one that we meet in this film is particularly new which means that we get over two hours which gets going from the start with fast paced action from the start to the very end and makes a point of ramping up the action for each character’s introduction. With Iron Man we get the scene in Germany where the heroes catch Loki, Thor we get that epic fight in the woods, Black Widow the fight in the warehouse and culminates in the huge alien battle at the end of the movie that has repercussions that ripple all the through the MCU’s future films.
As with all Marvel movies we get a brilliant supporting cast, Phil Coulson gets more of a part in this movie than previous and really shows his funny side that we get to see a lot more in Agents of Shield that follows the events of The Avengers. Loki, as in Thor, is a brilliant antagonist for the movie using his sceptre, unknowing to us at the time was another infinity stone. Although with the size of the cast and who’s involved, the film is more of an ensemble cast where everyone falls into the category of main cast.
10/10 – There was a lot riding on this venture of Marvel’s when it was announced. Planning a big film team up after the first 5 films then planning 3-4 years in advance. Luckily for where we are now in comic book movies, this was a brilliant success. It was witty, funny, there was great action and great visuals, all of which shaped the way we watch all big blockbusters today. Because of this films success, we are sitting here now, 22 films into the MCU with another 8 in the pipeline and many more to come.
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