The Avengers is the movie that proved the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe experiment was going to work. Released on May 4, 2012 and directed by Joss Whedon, it took the heroes from five separate films and jammed them into one room to see what would happen. What happened was a $1.5 billion box office run and a blueprint that every studio has been trying to copy ever since, mostly badly. I went opening night to see it and it was the last movie I saw in the theater. We got there so late that the only seats were in the front row, it was hard watching it that close.
What is The Avengers about?
Nick Fury, director of S.H.I.E.L.D., pulls together a team of enhanced individuals after Loki steals the Tesseract, a cube of near-limitless energy, and opens a portal to bring an alien army to Earth. Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Bruce Banner, Thor, Natasha Romanoff, and Clint Barton are the answer, though calling them a team early on is generous. Half the movie is these people arguing on a flying aircraft carrier and barely tolerating each other.
That friction is the actual point. Whedon spends the first two acts letting the personalities grind against one another before the third act forces them to work together over the skies of Manhattan. The Tesseract is the plot engine, but the real story is six stubborn people figuring out they are stronger as a unit than as a collection of egos.
The Avengers cast and characters
Robert Downey Jr. returns as Tony Stark and Iron Man, and by this point he is running the entire tone of the franchise on charisma alone. Chris Evans plays Steve Rogers and Captain America as the earnest moral center, the guy who still says things with a straight face while everyone else is trading insults. Mark Ruffalo takes over as Bruce Banner and the Hulk, and the recast landed so well that most people forget he was not the first choice.
Chris Hemsworth brings Thor down from Asgard, Scarlett Johansson gets the first real showcase for Natasha Romanoff and Black Widow, and Jeremy Renner plays Clint Barton and Hawkeye, though he spends a chunk of the movie mind-controlled by Loki. Samuel L. Jackson holds it together as Nick Fury, Clark Gregg returns as Agent Phil Coulson, Cobie Smulders plays Maria Hill, Stellan Skarsgard returns as Erik Selvig, and Gwyneth Paltrow shows up as Pepper Potts. Alan Silvestri wrote the score, and that main Avengers theme still hits every time it swells.
Who is the villain in The Avengers?
Tom Hiddleston plays Loki, and he is the reason the movie has a villain worth remembering. Fresh off his turn in Thor, Loki arrives on Earth as an agent of a larger threat, trading the Tesseract to the Other in exchange for the Chitauri army. He spends the film smirking, manipulating, and generally acting like the smartest person in every room until Hulk introduces him to the floor.
The Chitauri themselves are faceless cannon fodder, which is fine, because the movie never pretends they are the threat. Loki is the threat. The aliens are just the mess he made. That distinction is something a lot of later Marvel movies forgot when they buried their villains under armies of interchangeable drones.
The Battle of New York
The final act is the Battle of New York, and it is the sequence the entire movie was built to deliver. The portal opens over Stark Tower, the Chitauri pour through, and the team finally clicks into place. The long tracking shot that sweeps from hero to hero, Iron Man to Cap to Thor to Hulk to Widow to Hawkeye, was genuinely new for a superhero film at the time, and it is still the shot everyone remembers.
Hulk punching a giant Leviathan out of the sky, Hulk slamming Loki around like a ragdoll, Cap actually commanding the team, all of it pays off the two hours of setup. The Battle of New York also became the event that ripples through the rest of the MCU, referenced in everything from Daredevil to Spider-Man for years afterward.
The Avengers post-credits scenes
The Avengers has two post-credits scenes, and one of them changed everything. The mid-credits scene reveals Thanos for the first time, turning to face the camera with a grin as the Other reports that challenging Earth would be to court death. That single shot planted the seed for Infinity War and Endgame six years before they arrived.
The second scene is the exact opposite in tone. The exhausted team sits in a wrecked shawarma restaurant, saying nothing, eating in silence. It is a stupid, perfect joke, and it became one of the most quoted moments in the whole franchise.
