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TK, here is a spoilers reply to your previous post on Avengers. Favorite it and read it after you've finally seen the film.

I felt all of these concerns were valid about the film. What I admire is that Whedon didn't run away from these potential criticisms but instead addressed them.

"1) They've been trying too hard to make "fetch" happen - the branding of all of the movies as The Avengers has made it seem like they're trying to pre-fabricate this whole process."

Obviously, this is true. Starting with Iron Man, there was a clear plan in place for Marvel to develop all of their lesser characters into something that could approach what they already had, the biggest selling title in comics, The Avengers. It was pre-fabricated, but it also worked.

Thor and Captain America are fairly one dimensional characters yet consensus opinion is that both of the movies were good. Iron Man was great and Iron Man 2 was somewhere in between. The only weak spot was The Hulk, and I think it's obvious from the replies that The Hulk is finally done right in this film. Juggling this many franchises at once (five if you count the four individual characters and the joint operation) is an unprecedented achievement. It is also why Kevin Feige, the Marvel head who has handled this process, is up for chairman of Disney, one of the premiere corporate jobs in the world.




"2) The whole "team of superheroes" just doesn't work for me. If you're a superhero, then you should be able to kick ass on your own. X-Men gets a little bit of a pass on this, but only because they were opposed by a team of equally strong supervillains. Which leads me to this....."

What the movie does particularly well is demonstrate how bad ass each of these people are individually. Then, they collectively get their asses handed to them because they do not work well together. A key aspect of the film is how much the group fails when the sum is much less than the parts. When they learn to work together, as cliche as it sounds, there is a reasonable, logical exploration of how much greater they are in tandem. Iron Man tries to save all of them (and the rest of NYC) and then The Hulk saves him.

"3) The minute that I really lost enthusiasm was when I found out that Loki was the villain in The Avengers. Wait a minute. You have to have an entire team brought together to fight one dude *who had already been defeated* in an earlier movie? Um, okaayyyyy...."

This was the chief concern I had about the movie. To my pleasant surprise, they attacked it head on. Loki is not a fighter and clearly no match for Thor. What he has always been through literature is an instigator who manipulates others into worst case scenarios. Loki gets his ass kicked repeatedly during the movie, but that in no way undercuts the amount of danger his shenanigans create. And anything that enables Hulk's epic beatdown of Loki is well worth it.


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