The Avengers Assemble to Create One of the Most Entertaining Comic Book Films

The Avengers (4 out of 5 Stars)

Directed and Written by Joss Whedon (Serenity, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Starring: Robert Downey Jr.,  Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johannson, Jeremy Renner, Tom Hiddleston, Clark Gregg, Colbie Smulders and Samuel L. Jackson

At the end of every Marvel film seeing Samuel L. Jackson show up as Nick Fury to recruit for "Avengers Initiative" made me an incredibly giddy fanboy.  I have read comic  books since as long I can remember.  I primarily used to read the X-Men titles, but ever since Avengers Disassembled  (2004), I have been hooked on this super team.   As a little kid I used to play with the action figures, and played the video games, so for me there was a lot of pressure for this film to live up to my childhood hopes.  It did.

Without giving too much of the film away, the film starts with the evacuation of a SHIELD base.  Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) is racing to the base with his second in command Agent Maria Hill (Colbie Smulders) tells him the Tesseract, an energy source of unknown potential, has activated and opened a portal through space.  Loki steps out of the portal takes the Tesseract and escapes.  Fury has a bunch of hologram screens with government officials telling him he should not go forward with the Avengers Initiative it was disbanded, but of course they need "Earth's Mightiest Heroes" to save the planet, and the story takes off.

Director/Writer Joss Whedon who is best known for his TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel was the perfect choice to direct this film.  Whedon is the eternal fanboy in the director's chair, and perfect person to pen this screenplay.  Whedon knows the comic book world well; he has continued to write the Buff, and Angel comics, he has also created a series entitled "Fray"which takes place in the future of the Buffy world.  Whedon has done writing for Marvel comics as well.  In 2006 Whedon helped relaunch the title series "The Astonishing X-Men" and under his writing it received numerous honors and was one of the best written 24 issue arc of the decade.  I had walked away from comics for a few years, but I credit Whedon's writing on this X-Men series to be the reason I returned to comic books.

Fans have been clamoring for Whedon to step behind the camera for years, with a variety of different comic book films, but he waited for the perfect moment.  Whedon's only other film credit is Serenity, but boy does he know what he is doing.  Whedon makes you feel as though he is one of the fans; he knows the comic book crowd and how to make them happy with both his direction and writing.  As a comic book fan he made the film speak to me, and put into full realization everything I had always imagined this experience to be, and he is especially good at bringing the different cast members together.

From Tony Stark's (Robert Downey Jr's) one-liners, to the Hulk smash the cast meshed well together.  The core four Avengers (Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, and Hulk) were the best part.  I read Whedon wants to shrink his cast down in the next film and I have a feeling it will involve these four and maybe one more new cast member.  I enjoyed Hawkeye; he was cool, but without his own film you lose the characterization.  The Black Widow kicks ass and Johansson was better in this than in Iron Man 2, but I still  did not care about her character's development because of the lack of depth behind her.  Other than that I may have given a few fan boy shrieks, but this movie was just great.

Avengers Assemble: Hulk aka Dr. Bruce Banner

The Hulk or Dr. Bruce Banner is another creation from the brilliant minds of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.  Dr. Bruce Banner was a mild mannered, emotionally stunted genius who created a gamma bomb.  The gamma bomb exploded causing Bruce Banner's emotional distress to shape his transformation to the Hulk.  While the Hulk;s color, origin, and characterizations have changed throughout the years, these are the basic principles that remain the same.  The Hulk's first appearance was in The Incredible Hulk #1.  The original series only lasted 6 issues, but the Hulk made a quick appearance in The Fantastic Four #12 and soon became a founding member of The Avengers in their first issue.

While the Hulk story has been retold many times the basic premise still is there.  Stan Lee is cited as saying that Hulk origin came from combining a lot of different stories.  Lee stated ""I combined Jekyll and Hyde with Frankenstein," he explains, "and I got myself the monster I wanted, who was really good, but nobody knew it. He was also somebody who could change from a normal man into a monster, and lo, a legend was born." Lee remembers, "I had always loved the old movie Frankenstein. And it seemed to me that the monster, played by Boris Karloff, wasn't really a bad guy. He was the good guy. He didn't want to hurt anybody. It's just those idiots with torches kept running up and down the mountains, chasing him and getting him angry. And I thought, 'Wouldn't it be fun to create a monster and make him the good guy?"


While I have never been a fan of the character listening to Lee's explanation of the character's origins is fascinating. The problem with the Hulk is that beyond this logic he has two problems.  The first major problem I see is the reason many people find Superman boring, the Hulk has this eternal invincibility that is almost unstoppable.  While the character appears to have emotional vulnerabilities the Hulk was never a character I gravitated towards.  I think the second problem is that that every good hero deserves a great foe, and I never remember him having one, that made his struggle worth the journey.  


I have never seen either of the Hulk films.  The first film entitled Hulk (2003) was directed by the genius director Ang Lee and starred Eric Bana as Dr. Bruce Banner.  From what I heard Lee's artistic style was lost within this genre.  The film series was re-launched five years later in 2008.  The Incredible Hulk was directed by Louis Leterrier, and starred Edward Norton in the role of Dr. Bruce Banner.  Norton is a brilliant actor who was cited as being a major improvement on Bana, and the film received slightly better feedback than the first screen version.  In The Avengers Dr. Bruce Banner has another new actor, Mark Ruffalo.  While Marvel stated that Norton was not joining because Norton did not embody the spirit of the role, Norton's agent sided money as the factor.  The key to this role is Bruce Banner, but I am looking forward to watching the big green guy smash stuff with the other super heroes on the big screen at midnight tonight.