Image provided by Cinemablographer.com, trailer courtesy of youtube.com

For Marvel fans, the 2012 film The Avengers will feel like a dream-come-true.

It is a film where their favorite super heroes come to life and battle evil on a mass and explosive scale.

Blessed with heroes like Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the gang of super-humans explodes on camera and just crushes the other comic book films series such as Superman, Batman and Spiderman.

My Rating –

Director
Joss Whedon

Cast
Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark / Iron Man
Chris Evans as Steve Rogers / Captain America
Scarlett Johansson Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow
Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner / The Hulk
Chris Hemsworth as Thor

Writers
Zak Penn (Story)
Joss Whedon (Story & Screenplay)

143 mins.

For intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action throughout, and a mild drug reference.

I saw it differently. For those who are not Comic-Con nerds, The Avengers seemed like a confusing and excessively adolescent gang of grown-men wearing spandex. It has the believability of a James Bond film with a heavy reliance of CGI as seen in Avatar.

The film fails to understand that not everyone is a comic-book junkie. Unless you have seen all these films back-to-back, it is a heap of imploding confusion, strange blue cubes, an unknown portal in the sky and magical scepters.

As a great fan of the Marvel movies, I was disappointed with The Avengers. I wish it could have been similar, in pacing, to The Iron Man series. Jon Favreau, director of Iron Man, did a great job building up the plot, the characters and the conflict. It held your hand while watching and was easy to follow. The characters were not unnecessarily stupid and the comedy that was woven into the script was discrete and subtle. The Avengers blasted through the story and assumed you were Stan Lee himself.

The superhero series started to go downhill with the introduction of Thor. It lacked in overall quality, character development and speed. As Iron Man guided us at a nice and easy pace into the character of Tony Stark and his transformation into Iron Man. Thor was weak. It had too many plot holes that seemed to work themselves out perfectly. How could an alien human species living eons away speak the same language and understand our own ideas?

The main issue with these Marvel film adaptations are mentalities of the super heroes themselves. They are all the same in thinking – saving the world. They see themselves as Gods yet they conform, contradict, play both sides and, in the end, save the world yet killing countless civilians in doing so. If the world ever depended on super heroes, I would be hesitant in leaving our fate in the hands of some megalomaniac with an ego more superhuman than he is.

In speaking of this films confusion, the opening is a perfect example. In an undisclosed outer space location, a mysterious masked creature mutters some language that I assume is English yet will never know. It took a while to make the connection between this masked entity and the villain of the film, Loki (played by Tom Hiddleston). But after hearing some babble about the death of humans, I could only assume he meant Loki.

I feel the film was bit over-hyped and failed to deliver. Since I am not a Comic-con junkie who had an orgasm during this film I think these grade A actors (Downey, Jr, Ruffalo, Johansson and Renner) saw this film as a 200-million-dollar B-class comic-book film and shifted into overdrive.

The end result was nothing special. Black Widow ended up being a large pair of breasts that could kill, Iron Man a sheet of metal that fired rockets from his palms, Captain America had his very adolescent and underwhelming shield, The Hulk had his anger and Thor his wrath. I suppose the combination of these ‘badass’ characters created a cult series that had people waiting all spring and into summer for. I failed to recognize their reasoning.