Reviews are beginning to roll in on THE AVENGERS and, to our utter surprise, reviewers like it! Well, anyway, Justin Chang at Variety liked it.
Like a superior, state-of-the-art model built from reconstituted parts, Joss Whedon’s buoyant, witty and robustly entertaining superhero smash-up is escapism of a sophisticated order, boasting a tonal assurance and rich reserves of humor that offset the potentially lumbering and unavoidably formulaic aspects of this 143-minute team-origin story. With fan-ticipation reaching Hulk pressure-cooker levels, Disney’s domestic and international returns will be nothing short of stratospheric, ancillary streams close to eternal.
The entire review is a gush; here’s one germane passage:
“The Avengers” fully keeps the promise implicit in that plea, taking one of the dominant movie trends of recent years — the nonstop proliferation of comicbook-based superheroes — and pushing it to orgiastic new levels of CG-inflated, 3D-augmented geek-out mayhem.
Orgiastic mayhem! That is what has been missing from our lives of late.
There’s a smattering of other reviews at Rotten Tomatoes for a very early 100% rating.
Todd McCarthy at The Hollywood Reporter wrote:
The All-Star Game of modern superhero extravaganzas, The Avengers is humongous, the film Marvel and its legions of fans have been waiting for. It's hard to imagine that anyone with an appetite for the trademark's patented brand of fantasy, effects, mayhem and strangely dressed he-men will be disappointed; not only does this eye-popping 3D display of visual effects fireworks feature an enormously high proportion of action scenes, but director Joss Whedon has adroitly balanced the celebrity circus to give every single one of the superstar characters his or her due. Worldwide box office returns will be, in a word, Marvelous.
THE AVENGERS has been on a whirlwind tour of world premieres, and many photos are out there. A curated selection:
We liked the one where Iron Man and Thor hugged!
Is it hot in here?
Stan Lee, unstoppable.
ScarJo cleverly found a dress with a chest fan to cover her battery cover.
If all goes well, this man will soon be rich and powerful.
I imagine there’s a lot of teeth-gnashing over at the Warner offices…
Also, I have to say that the marketing power of the House of Mouse is downright frightening when coupled this movie. I thought it used to be strong with the latest Pixar film but this is downright overpowering…
the only achilles heel i see in the marvel movies masterplan is the strange habit of dropping the auteurs who give us such enjoyable pics from the sequels in favor of seemingly less qualified and less expensive directors. Hopefully they won’t make this mistake with whedon!
One should never doubt the quality of a Joss Whedon script.
I can’t wait to see this one…and then 6 months later watching all of the deleted scenes on the blu ray. Whedon has said in other interviews that a bunch of “self indulgent” scenes were cut. I wanna see self indulgence!!
Amen to that, @Alex. Also – YEEEEEE! Nice Helmsworth close ups!
Unfortunately, this will only cause Marvel Studios to think they were right to interconnect all of these characters and their films.
If we’ve learned anything from the past, we should be getting ready to see these same stories on the big screen again in 10 years. At least Marvel Studios isn’t the only one that thinks they can get away with that (Sony–Amazing Spider-Man.) Who knows…it might work for them. At least movies are still able to bring in a younger audience in order to tell them the same old stories.
The thing is Whedon is while he has been talking about possibilities of an Avengers sequel, he has also been talking about taking a break from “playing with other people’s toys” and wanting to get back to his own creations for a while. The question is if this is a huge success, will Marvel want to get a sequel out as quickly as possible or would they be okay in giving Whedon a bit of time off before jumping into the next Avengers.
Yeah, I imagine the chances of Whedon coming back to direct the sequel are slim, given Marvel’s affinity for switching out directors and what I imagine will be Whedon’s lack of desire to return to this particular franchise.
Hopefully they will at least get him to write the sequel, maybe with one of his people (Goddard?) directing. Also looking forward to Whedon finally being able to ride the success of this film and have his pick of projects.
Joss (if he makes a sequel) will have some time in between as we have sequels featuring Iron Man, Thor and Captain America coming (at the very least) before an “Avengers 2.”
Dear Marvel,
Please do not substitute a Michael Bay-alike for the sequel.
Love,
Your Audience
(Remember Iron Man 2? Remember the sound of that fizzle? Good.)