Movie Review--The Avengers

"The Tesseract has awakened.  It is on a little world, a human world.  They would wield its power, but our ally knows its workings as they never will."

--The Other, The Avengers

"I am Loki, of Asgard, and I am burdened with glorious purpose."

--Loki, The Avengers

"Is this not your natural state?  It's the unspoken truth of humanity, that you crave subjugation.  The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life's joy in a mad scramble for power, for identity.  You were made to be ruled.  In the end, you always kneel."

--Loki, The Avengers

A movie that is not of poor quality does not become terrible or lesser just because better movies have come out since its release.  All the same, later releases might help people to see the true merits or failings of a work by comparison to other examples.  The Avengers, in 2012, was the first grand live action superhero film featuring an ensemble team of different heroes who had been introduced in prior movies.  This has made some people more willing to overlook its periodic blunders like blandness and overemphasis on attempting comedy when it is actually far from both the elevated character drama of Infinity War and the pathetically relentless comedy of Age of Ultron (which ruined what could have been a far darker, more thoughtful movie that still had moments of humor), presenting genuinely clever character moments, strong action, and the seeds of the MCU's worst flaws alike.

Production Values

The Avengers has clearly been dwarfed by the effects of later MCU phases, and the small glimpse of Thanos in the first credits scene is pitifully animated compared to his later appearances, but scenes like the Chitauri invasion of New York hold up well visually even almost a decade after the movie came out.  It helps that most of the effects budget could be used for the climactic fight due to the story only having smaller action scenes or dialogue scenes up until the end.  Not all of the characters even get one moment of something beyond more generic or trivial scenes, but there are some that stand out thanks to the casting.

Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Hemsworth, and Tom Hiddleston give the performances most focused on the story's core drama and their scenes are the strongest in the film.  Tony Stark is played as a woefully generic comedic character who almost never stops making stupid jokes, and even Samuel L Jackson gives a much less outwardly invested performance than he does in later MCU movies like Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Captain Marvel.  However, to the credit of the film, it does not conflate the personalities of almost all of the characters to the point that they all spew the same kind of petty jokes like many of them do in Age of Ultron or Civil War.  This is a huge benefit in iconic scenes like where Natasha talks to a confined Loki, as they do not suffer from having the better developed characters sound unnaturally similar to each other or prone to jokes.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

In the aftermath of the events of Thor, Loki, the Asgardian "God of Mischief," makes an alliance with an initially undisclosed alien being.  He is to conquer Earth with a loaned army of extraterrestrial cyborgs in exchange for securing the Tesseract for his ally.  Since Nick Fury temporarily gave up pursuing the "Avengers Initiative" and the world's most powerful known individuals are not yet functioning as an organized team, Earth is at first an easy target for Loki.  S.H.I.E.L.D. quickly gathers people like Captain America and Iron Man in response, facing both the threat Loki poses and the overt disunity within the group itself.

Intellectual Content

Other MCU movies like Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Doctor Strange have far more significant philosophical depth, with The Avengers having a much less abstract bent.  Loki does still espouse an ideology centered on freedom from freedom--for humans and not him, of course.  For humans, according to him, the only natural state of humanity is servitude to another species.  He conveniently sidesteps the utter idiocy of freedom from freedom actually being a coherent idea that is even capable of possibly being obligatory or true, but there is at least somewhat more to his intentions than just total philosophical thoughtlessness and lack of self-awareness.  Loki has very little of the nuance, depth, and connection with genuine existential themes that he does in his Disney+ show, but that is no fault of Hiddleston.  The writers just did not explore Loki's somewhat common authoritarian idea with a specially self-refuting, speciesist bent.

Conclusion

The Avengers is far from the best of the MCU even compared to some of what came before it.  The Incredible Hulk is much better at characterization and personal stakes, The Winter Soldier is much better at balancing everything from humor to action to thematic depth, Doctor Strange is much better at showcasing philosophical concepts, Infinity War is much better at handling even more characters while giving all of the primary cast at least one scene of great depth, and so on.  Nevertheless, this first ensemble MCU offering is far better than the second Avengers film and has recently been shown to have even more significance in what it leads to.  One of the absolute best retrospective qualities of its place in the MCU is that it set the stage for the Disney+ show Loki, which explores the villain of The Avengers, the nature of personal identity, and so much more very boldly even if it is sometimes philosophically asinine.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  Most of the fights are very mild PG-13 in execution, with only a handful of truly intense brawls or impalings getting shown.

 2.  Profanity:  Words like "bastard" are used very infrequently.