The Grand Marvel Rewatch: The Avengers

Face front, true believers! Welcome to the next astonishing addition to “The Grand Marvel Rewatch,” designed to get us all sufficiently amped up for Captain America: Civil War, which comes out May 6, 2016. Each Wednesday, The Cinema King casts his eye back upon the twelve films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and offers five salient observations about the caliber of the films and the way they might play into Marvel’s latest installment in America’s favorite franchise.

Today’s fantastic feature film takes us to 2012 for The Avengers, a film which The Cinema King can confirm is best enjoyed with a nice shawarma sandwich.

1. Can we take a second to talk about how good this movie is? This flick is airtight. Joss Whedon had to pull together multiple disparate threads from other directorial/authorial voices, and he accomplished it in spades. The Avengers does an amazingly effective job (re)introducing all the main characters for experts and neophytes alike, and he does so in a way that never loses sight of either its main storyline or its infectious sense of fun. Simply put, this film is an accomplishment, well-crafted and perennially entertaining. I’ve seen it umpteen times by now, and there’s not a dull moment. This thing just clips. 
2. Civil War prologue? “What are we, a team?” Bruce Banner asks in a particularly heated moment in The Avengers; “No, no, no, we’re a timebomb.” It looks like that timebomb is set to go off in Civil War, and we can see the seeds of that conflict already being sown. These are superheroes with personality clashes like you wouldn’t believe, who find it intensely difficult to work together. They’re heroes because they manage to set those differences aside, but every situation has a breaking point. We can already see the debates about the limits and abuses of power; with SHIELD out of the picture, The Avengers will have to field those questions. 
3. The Avengers Initiative. Remember Nick Fury’s words at the end of Iron Man? In hindsight, a preexisting team of Avengers didn’t really pan out in the MCU plot, so those words are retconned into a failed experiment based on the aforementioned clash of personalities. Instead, The Avengers become literal instantiations of their name, avenging both the late (well...) Phil Coulson and promising to avenge the earth, if need be. It’s also much stronger characterization to give the Avengers a reason to assemble beyond Nick Fury and the government asking them to work together. Every character has a valid motivation, telegraphed with immense clarity.
4. Hail Hydra! This movie sure looks different in hindsight, though. With the revelation in The Winter Soldier that SHIELD is pervaded with Hydra agents, you can’t help but cast an eye askance at nearly everyone in the film. Why does SHIELD want to recreate Hydra weapons? Hey, isn’t that Agent Sitwell on the Helicarrier? Why did Gideon Malick (Powers Boothe, now a major antagonist on Agents of SHIELD) really want to nuke Manhattan? And was the guy playing Galaga secretly sabotaging SHIELD in his own slacker way? Of course, it’s unclear whether that twist was planned out two years in advance, but it’s fantastic continuity either way. 
5. To Infinity and beyond! Having praised the forwards and backwards interconnectivity of The Avengers, I’ve got to quibble with its treatment of the Infinity Stones. Thanos gives Loki a scepter powered, as we learn in Age of Ultron, by the Mind Stone. Did Thanos know the scepter had an Infinity Stone? If so, why relinquish it? Then again, Erik Selvig tells us that the scepter is powered by the Tesseract – “You can’t protect against yourself.” And yet the Tesseract is its own Infinity Stone, the Space Stone. So are the gems interrelated, or is Selvig just wrong? We have to get to six Infinity Stones in time for Infinity War, but I don’t think the films have done a very clear job of sussing out which are which.
6. Bonus round: Can anyone explain to me how Chief Sousa got all the way from 1947 Hollywood to the Battle of New York? Please tell me that this cop is actually the grandson of Peggy and Sousa, and he's finally meeting the man he heard his grandmother talk so much about.
   

There’s so much more to be said about The Avengers, so be sure to check out my original review. Join me in the Grand Marvel Rewatch over the coming weeks, and hit the comments to share your thoughts about the MCU. And don’t forget to tune in next Wednesday for the next installment, in which we take a closer look at the beginning of Phase Two, 2013’s Iron Man 3. Excelsior!