Earth's Mightiest Nerds Heave a Sigh of Collective Relief

Rating: 10/10 (11 May 2012)

Comic book nerds, like other nerds, worry a lot about film adaptations of the works they cherish. This is for good reason, since the majority of Comic Book Movies (CBM's) created so far are still bad to awful. But ever since Brian Singer's X-Men in 2000, they've been mostly getting better.
X-Men was revolutionary because it was very good, camp was minimized, and it was the first watchable film to feature a super team.
'Avengers' is revolutionary for the 1st two reasons, and because it weaves together 3 previously existing movie franchises plus supporting characters into a unified, cohesive whole. Imagine if someone tried to blend The Terminator with James Bond.
A lot of us nerds were worried that this movie would be a big, crowded, confusing, silly bit of idiotic posing and exploding emptiness. But fortunately, it is not so. The script is true to the respective characters and is great fun. Especially to anybody who grew up reading Marvel comics.
We called ourselves Marvelites back in the day, and when we were 12-years-old reading Marvel comics, we felt that the Marvel Universe was somehow real in a sense we couldn't articulate, and deep down we all wanted to be heroes living in a world of other heroes. This movie gets you as close to that as you can, at least within a theater.
We comic nerds like our heroes, and we want our heroes to have interesting and distinct personalities. We like them to have weaknesses and emotions, but we like them to suck it up and be heroes when the chips are down. And at the same time, we don't want them to cross the line into corn or camp.
Well, I guess you can't avoid a little corn, but thankfully there is no camp.
This isn't Citizen Kane, mind you, but then, Citizen Kane didn't have the Hulk. So there you go.
Based on what my non-nerd friends say, this film is good fun for non-nerds too.