There were a lot of things that could have gone wrong with The Avengers, truth be told. It was helped immeasurably by some solid prequels, great actor choices, and a seemingly great writer/director, but still: I had my suspicions that it was simply going to be too BIG to handle. Comic film franchises tend to suffer in their later films by the attempt to cram too much shit into one film: Spider-Man 3 was a clusterfuck of bad guys, X-Men 3 was a mess of poorly written plot and badly explained detail. I was afraid that The Avengers was pulling too many elements together.
1. Joss Whedon dialed back his "Joss-ness." Yes, I appreciate what Whedon does, and I love the dialogue he writes, but going at this big, hulking Hollywood behemoth with his style turned on 100% was never going to work. I deeply appreciated that he was able to dial the irony back, and that Tony got the majority of his snark (which is where it should have gone) but that he also wrote the characters who needed to be earnest and transparent in that manner (Steve Rogers and Bruce Banner, mostly). He found a good balance between his preferred aesthetic and the Hollywood comic machine, and it works.
2. The direction and cinematography were perfection. Let's talk about Whedon a little more as a director, because this may be his biggest project yet in terms of Hollywood grandeur and dude seriously stepped up to the plate. Shakey-cam was conspicuously absent - I could see and process everything that was going on, which is exactly what the singular power sets of our heroes demands. (This is how you know that someone in the visuals department plays Marvel Ultimate Alliance; who else saw the Iron Man/Captain America fusion power?). In the big fight scenes, the camera moves seamlessly from one hero to the next, so that you can see how, even while they're all fighting their own piece, it's all an interconnected sequence. I called Whedon a virtuoso on Twitter, and I stand by that.
3. Not a minute was wasted. Whedon was not playing around: he dropped you into the story, trusting that you'd done your homework and seen the lead-in films, and kicked the movie into overdrive in a matter of minutes. This made his huge cast of characters easier to juggle, since none of them were burdened with obligatory background; the only characters who hadn't really gotten an origin story already, Black Widow and Hawkeye, delivered exactly as much detail as was necessary to understand their place in The Avengers narrative. I would totally watch a prequel movie about the two of them being superspies, but for the purposes of this film we got what we needed and not a speck more.
That sense that no time was being wasted meant that, even at 2 and a half hours, The Avengers never drags or feels slow. It's a briskly paced action film with rapid-fire dialogue that trusts its audience to keep up.
4. Mark Ruffalo is the best-written, and best-acted, Hulk we've ever seen. I've been told the Edward Norton version of The Hulk gets better on re-watching, but I've never tried to sit through it again so I wouldn't know. I can say, definitively, that Ruffalo does very different things with the character than Norton does and it works COMPLETELY. This is not a Bruce Banner who's just been through the gamma ray accident - this is a Bruce Banner who is totally beaten down and defeated. The way Ruffalo stands, the way he holds his hands, the way he talks to other people are all so indicative of a man who is completely resigned to his life being horrible and isolated. But, and this is important, this is not a man who's lost control - rather, he is SO in control of every aspect, every emotion, every bodily movement that it's tragic. Ruffalo gets my three favorite moments in the film, and I like them so much because they say so much about how Bruce lives with the Hulk, and how extraordinarily sad his life has been. This is also the first time that I've ever been afraid of the Hulk and what he can do on a destructive level.
No, really. He's freaking terrifying.
I really loved the way that Ruffalo gives you the sense that, rather than the Hulk being the product of Bruce "getting angry," that he's ALWAYS angry; the Hulk is a product of him loosing the reigns on that anger. So, you end up with two possible scenarios: Bruce loses control of the Hulk and that destructive energy, and lays waste indiscriminately to everything around him; OR, Bruce CHOOSES to let the Hulk loose, and can thus direct that energy to specific destruction. Both go back to that idea that Bruce is a man tightly, tightly under his own thumb all the time, and it just makes him so endearing and empathetic as a character.
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5. Everyone has a purpose. This is not to be taken lightly. You've got a team with three over-powered superhumans and one literal god, and then...two assassin-spies with a lot of gymnastics training and good eyesight. And yet, I never felt like Hawkeye or Black Widow were shoe-horned in, or a waste of time. They had clearly defined roles in the party and did some useful, kick-ass stuff. I was also impressed with Scarlett Johanson's acting, which I haven't been in a really, really long time. She gets some good scenes and some good lines, and actually delivers on them.
In summary: this movie does not disappoint. I'm ready for the next round of Avengers, are you?
