Beyond Excellent. Avengers Hits At The Highest Level!

Rating: 10/10 (16 April 2012)

Yep, Marvel has done it again but this time to the max! You can rest assured that Avengers is an absolutely amazing movie. I'm so glad Marvel got in to the solo movie making business. Instead of leasing out their characters to other studios, they're making movies themselves and have not missed yet. (Sony pooping on Ghost Rider again this very year is a great reminder of that) Avengers is, without a doubt, their best effort yet! Personally, I think they set the bar leading up to this movie and they just clean blew the bar in to orbit with this movie.
Avengers really takes the comic book genre to the highest level. They along with a select few others reinvented epic adventure as this century began by "Marvelizing" characters by making them more believable and more relatable. Spider-Man and the X-Men did this to a degree but only as far as their respective studios wished to stay true to the source material. Anything added or amended was for the benefit of the live action adaptation. Nolan did this for Batman and Raimi for Spider-Man. They pulled it off by talking to the summer crowd, not down to them. Favreau, Branagh and Johnston did similar good work for Marvel leading up to this gem. Now, Joss Whedon not only continues that tone but adds to the work that's come before. It's like the ultimate team work and Whedon brings it all home and all together perfectly. Like the great films of the past, he grounds the action and the superhero concept in firm reality. The humor and acknowledging the absurd nature of everything we see adds the perfect flavor. Yet, all the character depth and relationship nuances are fleshed out well as with any other good film.
I've said it before but it's brave to reach for the highest common denominator with a big budget film and Avengers delivers a movie with as much feeling as it has action and intensity. It's a movie that has a wonderful balance that delivers intelligence with its fun. This is, without a doubt one of my top 10 movies of 2012, quite possibly THE best regardless of genre. I don't see anything changing that for the rest of the year. This movie is just that good