The best comic-book adaptation ever

Rating: 9/10 (12 May 2012)

This is one of the films me and my friends were dying to see this year (the others are Prometheus, The dark knight returns, The hobbit). When it came to the theater I was completely out of my mind. Finally we bought the tickets and the show was about to start. The idea of making movies about comic-book heroes one by one and then mixing them all in one film is a genius idea (economically and sociologically). Iron man, Hulk, Thor, Captain America were great movies but this was beyond great. This is what a comic book hero film should be. 1) The acting. All of the actors are so comfortable and relaxed that one has the feeling they truly ARE those characters. Most of them are Oscar nominees, some of them Oscar winners. Mark Ruffalo is the best Bruce Banner (hats of to Norton but he was not Banner), and he gives the best dramatic performance in the movie. Robert Downey Jr. is, I believe, no longer acting, he is Tony Stark. Cris Hemsworth, I had the feeling, never really stopped playing Thor and gave the exact same performance as in his own movie. The greatest surprise was Jeremy Renner. He was mind blowing as Hawkeye. He got the very essence of how Stan Lee imagined him. Scarlett Johansson gave a slightly different role that in Iron man 2 (probably because she had a bigger and more important role here) but it worked just fine. The only one that was a little off track was Captain America. A young actor such as Chris Evans just couldn't break through on the screen with all the other strong characters. And of course, the almighty Samuel L. Jackson is the master, the student and the God as Nick Fury. It's really a shame he had so little screen time as he did. 2) The story. An amazing idea of creating a super villain that uses an alien army to conquer Earth is something new, a fresh idea. The fact that it was Loki (another great performance) makes the idea even better (because of the relationship with Thor). The movie is divided in three parts, and the first and third are the best. The problem is the second part of the movie that was a little too long. 144 min. is a bit to long. Everything that was said could have been said in 15 min time less. The end battle is so nerve-breaking that I literally had no more nails to bite off! Quite a long story that concentrated 2/3 of the movie on the heroes themselves is great, because every story that deals with people (heroes or not) is a good one. 3) The music. Alan Silvestry can do a good job, but here he did a little less good. In my opinion some sequences should have had better musical backgrounds. The only sequence that the music fitted perfectly was the very end of the movie. All in all, a MARVELous movie, with magnificent performances, a great story with many layers of emotion, humor, drama and psychology. If you haven't seen any other movie of these heroes you might have a problem understanding who is who, and the relationships between them, but in the end you get it all (and that is a sign of a great script). Ladies and gentlemen, this is the best superhero movie ever made!