Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Is The Avengers Marvel’s Best Comic-Book Movie?

Vulture.

“Marvel's The Avengers”

L to R: Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) and Captain America (Chris Evans) with the Quinjet in background

Ph: Film Frame 

© 2011 MVLFFLLC.  TM & © 2011 Marvel.  All Rights Reserved.
Well! That sure went well for The Avengers, huh? Marvel's Joss Whedon–helmed blockbuster raked in $200 million this weekend, which means that a record-breaking number of Americans spent all of Sunday trying to figure out who that last guy was or how, exactly, one spells tesseract. Were you among them? And do you have some opinions to share with like-minded individuals? Great! Vulture now calls to order our latest meeting of Monday Morning Movie Club to break it all down. Spoilers, they shall follow.
Is this Marvel's best movie?Out of the movie prequels that preceded it, the fun, expertly juggled Avengers easily tops all but the first Iron Man, and it may even come out ahead on that count owing to better-plotted action sequences. The movie's greatest achievement may be the one that goes the least acknowledged: almost every character shares a significant moment with every other character. It's a lesson Whedon surely learned from his days in TV (although some shows, like Glee, have multiple characters who've never really interacted), and it pays off in spades here. Sure, there are the fun scenes where the superheroes fight each other, but there are also plenty of telling conversations where they get to test their chemistry in nearly every combination. And every single hero gets a notable moment with Loki, which helps put him over the top as an adversary. Compare that to Iron Man 2, where villainous Mickey Rourke is basically kept in his own B-plot far away from the heroes (and shares only two scenes with Iron Man himself), and you'll see how savvy a script-writing move that was.
More at Vulture.

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