The Avengers

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The Avengers

by Philip Chien

Thor, Black Widow, Hawkeye, Hulk, Captain America, and Iron Man The highly anticipated "Avengers" superhero movie is an incredibly exciting summer action movie. Superheroes Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, the Hulk, Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Nick Fury team up to fight Loki.

Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and the Hulk have all had their own feature movies, with more planned for the future. Hawkeye appeared as a minor character in the "Thor" movie and Black Widow was a supporting character in the second "Iron Man" movie. Nick Fury has made small appearances in all of those movies. There are scenes in some of the earlier films, in particular "Captain America" and "Thor", that lead up to the Avengers movie, but you can follow the new movie even if you haven’t seen the earlier movies. It helps to have at least a passing familiarity with the characters.

The movie stars Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark/Iron Man along with Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Chris Evans as Steve Rogers/Captain America, Jeremy Renner as Clint Barton/Hawkeye, Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner/Hulk, Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow, Clark Gregg as Agent Phil Coulson, Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, and Tom Hiddleston as Loki.

Director-writer Joss Whedon (second from left) with Robert Down Director and screenwriter Joss Whedon said, "These people don’t belong together, these people wouldn’t get along. As soon as that really came into focus I realized, ’Oh, I actually have something to say about these people.’" The Avengers are all extremely powerful and with great powers comes great egos and individual ideas for how things should be done. But all of them need to work together to bring Loki down and save the Earth. As with the original Avengers comics published in 1963 it’s Loki’s actions which lead to the Avengers becoming a team.

Joss Whedon’s an unabashed comic book fan, growing up with the "Avengers" when you could buy a comic book for a quarter - and get change. While his story is true to the characters the history has been changed. For example, the movie leaves out Giant Man and Wasp, two of the founding members of the Avengers in the comic books. In addition SHIELD was not involved in the formation of the Avengers and Captain America, Hawkeye, and Black Widow were not members of the original team.

Thor and Captain America.

Villains question Black Widow while she’s tied to a chair. The Black Widow’s the trickster in the movie, letting herself get captured and tied to a chair where she’s apparently vulnerable, but actually extracting information from an adversary.

Another disappointment was the Hulk. The Hulk’s a very difficult character to write. When a character has a monosyllabic vocabulary of about 10 words, and about three emotions (angry, angrier, and angriest) it’s difficult to do anything more than, "Hulk smash", "Hulk kill". Whedon’s Bruce Banner is an extremely interesting character, but it would have been nice to add more depth to the Hulk too.

An early scene in the movie shows Professor Erik Selvig working on dark energy in a laboratory. The lab includes a liquid rocket engine, possibly the Merlin engine Tony Stark talked about with aerospace maverick Elon Musk in the second "Iron Man" movie?

The special effects are, as you’d expect, amazing. It was incredibly exciting to see the SHIELD helicarrier in a live action movie.

Hawkeye, Captain America, and Black Widow. The movie was filmed with ordinary two dimensional cameras and converted into 3-D with computers in post-production. The computer experts did a good job, especially with the special effects scenes, and the 3-D experience is excellent. But you won’t lose much if you watch a 2-D version.

Enough footage was shot for a three hour movie. Some of the unused footage will be released on Blu-Ray/DVD, in particular scenes of Steve Rogers reuniting with Peggy Carter, who he last saw in the 1940s.

Walt Disney Studios acquired Marvel Entertainment in 2009 primarily to make action movies featuring the more popular characters. Comic books generally make relatively insignificant income. It’s the marketing of licensed images (toys, clothing, video games, etc.) and movies where comic book characters really make profits.

As a result of the Marvel-Disney deal Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and Nick Fury are all in the same ’universe’ in the movies and the "Avengers" is the first movie under the Disney banner. The movie has a Paramount pictures logo because Paramount originally licensed the rights for several of the characters. Characters like the X-Men and Fantastic Four have been licensed out to other studios, but it’s possible Disney may buy out those rights to put everything under one roof.