Marvel Cinematic Universe: Marvel's The Avengers (Retrospective)

Marvel's The Avengers (2012)

After four years and five films of teases and buildup, The Avengers landed with no small amount of fanfare and unusually positive reviews. The experiment to fold a group of individually popular superheroes together into a single, cohesive story paid off in spades, and it's easy to see why. Almost ten years since it first released, The Avengers remains a well-crafted, engaging, and funny action-adventure spectacle.

When Thor villain Loki (Tom Hiddleston) returns at the behest of a mysterious new master, he arrives on Earth as a harbinger of worse things to come. Meant to pave the way for a coming alien invasion, he wastes little time in decimating S.H.I.E.L.D., placing Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) and Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård, returning from Thor) under some kind of mind control, prompting Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) to finally call in the team he's been building. While Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) retrieves Dr. Bruce Banner (portrayed here by Mark Ruffalo, replacing Edward Norton), Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) approaches Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Fury himself ropes in Steve Rogers (Chris Evans). The team comes together to capture Loki, and it isn't long before Thor (Chris Hemsworth) joins the party to round out the cast.

For being such a big, bombastic movie, the plot is relatively straightforward and relies on the tried-and-true "the villain secretly wants to be captured" twist that became so popular in the wake of the The Dark Knight (2008). It's not a hard twist to see coming, which is probably why the film smartly telegraphs this early on. Rather than muddle through an overly complicated plot in a film that is, by nature, stuffed full of characters, The Avengers wisely focuses on those characters and their relationships. This is where all the magic occurs. It's a thrill watching Iron Man butt heads with Captain America, and good fun to see the mighty Thor come to blows with the incredible Hulk. The vast majority of the film is spent letting the team work out the kinks in their internal structure, which is why the finale is such a rousing payoff. When the Avengers finally come together behind Captain America and begin to function like a well-oiled machine, we get the sense that this dream team is unstoppable.

It's hard to fault the film for not taking itself too seriously, because that's never been the point. These films know exactly what they are and what they want to be, and are content to play within the confines of the comic book genre. Perhaps this is the most refreshing approach to the source material, because watching The Avengers feels very much like reading one of the comic books from which these characters and stories are adapted. Just like comic books are not high literature, The Avengers doesn't set out to be the Citizen Kane of the modern era. Because of this, the film comes across as having an unusual amount of confidence in both its characters and execution. I suspect this has a lot to do with the fact that the characters had already been established in the films leading up to this one, and because each of the actors were already comfortable in their respective roles, allowing for a kind of freedom and playfulness not commonly seen in these kinds of big summer blockbusters.

The Avengers is certainly not a perfect film. The final sequence rolls on for a few minutes too long, and the characters (except for Banner) all pretty much reach peak development by the end of the second act. Taken on its own, separate from the continuity of the established MCU, The Avengers has all the depth and nuance of an airbrush painting. It's pretty to look at, but there's not much there by way of substance. Black Widow carries the weight of the most important conversations, the first with Banner, the second with Barton after he's been freed from Loki's mind control. The rest is all sound and color. But, the film isn't exactly meant to be taken on its own. No, it's firmly planted within a specific context, and sort of expects viewers to already be familiar with its characters. If you're looking for character development, this film probably isn't going to satisfy. But if you're just looking to see all of these iconic characters come together in an all-out blockbuster of a flick, then The Avengers is for you.

Marvel and its collaborators struck gold with this film. The cinematic universe only expands after this landmark movie, eventually blossoming into a full-blown cultural phenomenon the likes of which hasn't been seen since the release of the original Star Wars trilogy. Regardless of the numerous movies and sequels that will go on to populate the MCU, none of them will really recapture the magic of The Avengers, when these heroes all assembled on the big screen for the first time.

Marvel Cinematic Universe: Iron Man 2 (Retrospective)

Picking up in the closing moments of the MCU's inaugural film, Marvel's Iron Man 2 wastes no time introducing us to Mickey Rourke's enigmatic Russian, Ivan Vanko. It's clear from the outset that he has some kind of personal vendetta against Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) who, in the months after revealing himself to the world as Iron Man, has begun a downward spiral into narcissism in the worst way. While government prudes in league with weapons manufacturer Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) attempt to requisition and weaponize the Iron Man suit, Tony learns that the palladium core of the reactor keeping him alive is also poisoning him—or something like that. I don't claim to understand how any of this works, it's the usual comic book nonsense that demands audiences suspend disbelief in order to follow the plot. The point here is that Tony learns he's dying, and there's no apparent cure.

Marvel's Iron Man 2 (2010)

So he sets about putting those he actually cares about at arm's length, like his stalwart and even-keeled love interest, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), and his Air Force officer buddy, James Rhodes (Don Cheadle, replacing Terrence Howard from Iron Man). And for the first half of the film, Tony corkscrews out of control, his worst tendencies rising to the surface in one self-destructive act after another. It turns out that learning to change isn't quite as easy as it seems at first. Perhaps this is the trouble with sequels,  as character arcs completed in the first film usually end up being walked back a few steps in order to accommodate the ongoing story. Tony learns to accept responsibility for his own actions at the end of Iron Man, but by the time this movie gets rolling, you'd never know he learned that lesson in the first place.

Then, right around the halfway point, the film shifts gears. Enter Nick Fury, played by Samuel L. Jackson, reprising the character he originally portrayed in the small after-credits scene attached to Iron Man. This is where the world that will blossom into Marvel's cinematic universe really begins to take shape. Through Fury and his organization known as S.H.I.E.L.D., we reconnect with Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) and are introduced to series mainstay Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson). Both of them are S.H.I.E.L.D. agents working for Fury, and their world of secrets provides our first real glimpse at the bigger picture.

The only problem with handling things in this manner makes for a bit of a muddled story. There is a lot going on in this film. In some instances, too much. On one hand, you have this really compelling story of fathers and sons that plays out between Tony and Vanko. On the other, you have a story about Tony learning to open up to the people around him, especially those who care about his well-being, after he learns that he's dying. It's not that either one of these particular stories is bad; in fact, they're both pretty compelling on their own. But compound both of these stories with the S.H.I.E.L.D. plot, and you have a bit of a messy story to untangle, and the problem arises with trying to do this in a span of two hours—the characters and the film's emotional resonance really suffer.

And the character that suffers the most is undoubtedly Ivan Vanko. Mickey Rourke is a rare talent, and his face is as instantly recognizable as Stallone's or Schwarzenegger's. He's introduced in a very compelling and sympathetic way, but his motivations are still shrouded enough to make him intriguing. And when he finally comes front and center for a harrowing sequence at a racetrack in Monaco, he's presented as this really quirky and intimidating villain. The character is established beautifully, but as soon as the film shifts to focus on Tony's dealings with S.H.I.E.L.D., Vanko falls almost entirely by the wayside. He's saved from the sidelines by Justin Hammer, but one feels as though this film is a bit overstuffed with characters and multiple half-baked characters are in play when only one really compelling villain is needed. Perhaps this is why these characters, despite clear motivations, carry none of the emotional weight of this particular story.

And nowhere is this more evident than in the final sequence of the film. In the same way that I felt putting Jeff Bridges in a big metal CGI husk of a suit in the first film was a kind of injustice to the high caliber of actor playing the role, I literally groaned when Rourke turned up in what looked like a copy-and-pasted version of the same suit that Bridges wore. And after all this wonderful build-up that paralleled Vanko's story with Tony's, he's defeated in an anti-climactic affair with no emotional resonance whatsoever. The movie simply has too many plot threads to unravel, and the culmination is a criminal mishandling of Rourke's character.

This isn't to say that Iron Man 2 is a bad film—it's actually pretty entertaining, in that in-the-moment kind of way. And, amazingly, all of the major plot points are resolved. There are a number of really stunning action sequences, Vanko's introduction at the Monaco race is an instant standout. Another ten minutes or so of character development for some of the new characters might have helped, and a less by-the-numbers ending would have gone a long way in making this film more memorable than it is. Vanko is a compelling enough villain that he probably should have carried this film on his own, with the annoying Hammer character jettisoned altogether. At the very least, Rourke's understated and underrated performance deserved better than to go out with the eye-roll-inducing words, "You lose."

I can't say that there's much memorable about Iron Man 2. It's well-crafted, just forgettable. It certainly doesn't have the quirky appeal of the first film in terms of story or execution. But Robert Downey Jr. is endlessly watchable as he continues to own the role of Tony Stark in what will become a career-defining performance, making this film's two hour runtime blow past in a whirlwind of quips and wisecracks, even if you're left scratching your head by the time the credits roll. The post-credits sequence here is the first to tease a direct connection to the next film in the MCU, and by this point it's clear the course is set. The Avengers are coming, and Tony Stark is paving the way.