The Avengers

The Avengers got too much hype, and it went on for too long. It missed the mark in a lot of ways, but the dialogue was good. Tom Hiddleston pretty much made the movie as Loki, and I like Chris Hemsworth and Robert Downey Jr., too.

Somehow, I haven't been able to see The Avengers until now. I did request it from the library four months ago, but the library system in this county really sucks in terms of having enough media for the amount of patrons they serve. So, I'm late to the party, and I already knew all of the funny/interesting scenes.

I'm not a fangirl; I'm not into comics at all, but I've spent enough time around them to be bored to tears. I haven't seen The Hulk or Iron Man. I've seen enough parts of Thor and Captain America to know I'm not interested in the rest. I did like Iron Man 2, and I liked Hellboy. They should've brought him in, too. But I guess he's not Marvel.

The Avengers movie got way too much hype, at least in my circles. I heard about it for months before it came out. I didn't like the marketing, either. Too full of itself, maybe. I wasn't expecting a whole lot out of the movie. I do like the Iron Man character, and Robert Downey, Jr., and that aspect was good. The light on Tony Stark's chest is always a distraction for me. I imagine filmmakers are always thinking about when and to what extent it should be visible. I don't think they always made the right decision on that in this movie. Chris Hemsworth does a great Thor; that's a character I enjoy, too. Ruffalo was good.

I watched the featurette on the DVD, and I think it was Whedon (maybe not though) who said something like, "You'll always see Chris Evans as Steve Rogers now, it overrides all his other roles." No, actually, I won't. I see him as the guy from The Losers, which I liked better than this movie, anyway, thank you very much. I like Evans, but he looks kind of weird as Captain America. It doesn't really work for me.

Johansson did a fine job with Black Widow. Renner didn't do anything for me as Hawkeye, though. Loki was a great villain. That part totally worked for me from his first scene. Tom does a leer that's perfect for the role. Going in, I felt like the plot was going to be kind of dumb, but Tom at least made that part of the movie better than I was expecting it to be. I loved what they did with his hair, too; the little bits curling up in the back were a great touch.

I felt sorry for Loki, though. Just like all mean people, when you get right down to it, he's not happy, and that's sad. Poor guy. Speaking of sad, the Shawarma scene at the end! I had heard all this stuff about Avengers and Shawarma. I thought they must've visited a Shawarma restaurant five times in the movie for all everyone kept talking about it. But, no, just one little scene after the credits, where they're all sitting there looking tired and bored. More like a commercial against Shawarma than for it, geez.

I got sick of The Avengers fighting each other. Iron Man vs. Thor, Black Widow vs. Hawkeye, etc. I'm sure all the fanboys got a kick out of it, but I didn't like it. I didn't really enjoy the part where they all had to be brought in, either. We know they're going to team up, so let's just get to it already. Same with Renner being controlled by Loki. We know he gets out of it, we've all seen the big fight scene in the city, so just get him back with the team already.

The movie as a whole went on for way too long. It certainly didn't need to go past two hours. I got interrupted about two hours in, and I *almost* wanted to go to work instead of finishing the movie. That is not a good sign.

I wasn't impressed with the Black Widow's chair fighting scene. I've seen a couple of those recently. I even liked Glenn's from the Walking Dead better than this one. Natasha's hair always looks fake, too. Maybe it's supposed to. Maybe that's part of her spy disguise. I don't really buy Jackson in that role, either. Just something off about it; it doesn't work.

Speaking of people who didn't work, Cobie Smulders! She's just the actress from How I Met Your Mother, she's not an agent! Someone on the featurette said "you don't think 'they cast a pretty woman as an agent, you feel like she fought her way up the ranks to get there." No, actually, I think exactly the former. Didn't work for me at all.

Clark Gregg was good as the other agent, though. He always does a good job with his characters, and I liked Phil. It was a bummer that he died, but we weren't losing anything too major. Some of the action was cool, and the special effects were good. The dialogue was solid; clever without being clunky.

I guess the bad guys worked, whatever they were called. They were kind of unintelligent. Their flying monsters were cool. I didn't get why they all died when their ship blew up, but that was pretty convenient. I liked what Thor said about Asgardians thinking they're more advanced, then coming to Earth and fighting like barbarians.

I spent a good part of the movie being kind of pissed about it being a comic book adaptation, because I feel like comic books never end. The dead guy, good or bad, always just winds up coming back. They find a loophole, they reboot the whole thing. I thought I would want some closure at the end of the movie, and I knew I wasn't going to get it.

But it turns out that I liked the ending. Loki's going away to be dealt with, supposedly, and Thor's taking the Tesseract with him so it's not our problem anymore, so there you go. It's open to a sequel or continuation, but it got wrapped up nicely enough to be satisfactory, and I wouldn't feel cheated if Loki came back or something. I guess by the end it just didn't bother me that it could go on and on forever.

Some parts of the movie worked for me, and others didn't. There aren't any big surprises, though. You know what you're getting into when you sit down to watch this one.