I went into this movie with a mixture of skepticism and anticipation. The premise of an all-star team of superheroes who had been featured in six other movies between them so far, had a lot of promise, but as good as Hollywood is at selling things, we have seen all too often how a hyped film, particularly those released at this time of year, falls well short, because of a script-by-committee, formulaic production calculated to sell the maximum amount of merchandise and offend or marginalize the fewest demographics.

This was not that.

The action was fluid, fast-moving and engaging. Previous Marvel superhero films were weak on the action, with ore interest in cool poses and one-liners, with team films having individual characters being poorly serviced in the effort to get every fan's favorite a few seconds of screen time (the Fantastic Four and X-Men films come to mind). In this, the annoyances and trivial character issues and background had all been long served by the films for the individual heroes involved. The characterization portrayed in this film is more genuine and relevant to the plot at hand, and denotes the evolution and growth of the characters. In Captain America and Thor, the eponymous characters are problematic due to their natures as paragons or superhuman beings, and being played by actors seemingly more chosen for appearances than performing ability. The weakness of such casting is diluted thanks to the presence of performers like Samuel L Jackson and Robert Downey Jr. With the mix of actors who have made the characters their own, and characters whose mere presence alters their dynamic and sets back such strong and irrepressible figures as Tony Stark or Nick Fury. The new characters are established economically, without a lot of tedious blather about their origins, and creative means are taken to keep at least one of them out of the mix for much of the film.

I don't know whether the multi-film approach was planned to enhance the storytelling as it happened for this film, or if it is simply a case of the creative personnel on this film taking advantage of previously established characters to move forward and tell the story more aggressively. Either way, Joss Whedon, whose flaws and tendencies I have been critical of in the past on this site, has made it work, along with Zak Penn. As a view of much of Whedon's work, I felt this had more in common with his shows Angel & Firefly, which I feel were his best work, creatively speaking. When he isn't trying to make statements about tropes or girlpower, Whedon handles the genre in a way that can be both fresh & original and at the same time, comfortable to fans & respectful to the genre. His ensemble dynamic of established characters works much better than his individual characterizations, and that is the ball he took and ran with on Avengers.

This was primarily an action film, and the action filled up a considerable portion of the not-short running time, and offered a variety of action as well, thanks to the varied nature of the characters and the abilities. There were no over-long flights or sci-fi gun battles or web swinging, which appear to be primarily aimed at showing off CGI motion effects in those films in which they are abused. There was a lot of switching between hand-to-hand combat, big soaring stunt-type action, and science-fictiony looking energy blasts and fantastic machines doing their thing, so you never got bored of one, but did not feel like you were missing out. Also delightfully absent were dance numbers or parties or characters doing regular things which are not what we go to see movies about Norse gods and flag-attired supersoldiers to watch.

And as I discuss in a spoiler-laden sub-thread below, I had the immense satisfaction of having my own skepticism about a couple of issues thoroughly justified without the film being even ruined. It was fun enough and done well enough that even stupid things imposed on the film by the comic books were overcome (i.e. archery and flying aircraft carriers).