I saw it today, half the theater stayed for the shwarma and got a huge kick out of it.

Good freakin' movie too.

I don't understand Byrne's opinion regarding the film or several of its individual parts as Paul would say. If Byrne thinks a white Nick Fury would make the film better, if he thinks the costumes, the casting and the characterizations were lacking in some way, well, then he's a bigger idiot than most people give him credit for and he's missing out an damn good film, and as good an interpretation of the Marvel Universe outside the comics that there has ever been.

Best Iron man film so far, and best Hulk film ever. Best fights in a Marvel movie ever.

Probably best Marvel film so far actually. I liked Spidey 2 the best of all the Marvel films so far, this was almost as good but in a different ways.

Gwyneth Paltrow in short shorts was really hot.

The first surprise in the credits was awesome.

There are so many great fun moments and humorous lines, and they all made sense, it was part of the story, in character. There were no awkward or gratuitous lines or "in jokes" like the stupid "Yellow spandex" line from X-men. At least I don't recall any, maybe after a second viewing.

Even the intra-team hero on hero violence made sense, it wasn't gratuitous or forced. And you get nearly every possible cool fight combination.

Spoilery-ish sorta stuff:

At one point Cap deflects Thor's hammer and it makes a weird explosion thing, the whole audience let out an audible "VIBRANIUM! (Followed by a little laughter from all our wives and girlfriends apparently).

Some time early in the film, some people were whispering "cosmic cube" every time someone in the film said "tesseract." About halfway through the film enough people joined in, it sounded like the whole theater was playing along by the end.

I'm confused: what scenes in Russian and Hindi weren't subtitled? There were subtitles when Banner speaks to the little girl in Hindi and Black Widow speaks in Russian to the gangster types.

And Colson uses 'she' when commenting that the cellist had left him. Didn't sound gay to me.

And I'm really glad that I go to decent theaters where they kick guys out for texting on their phones during movies. Jesus.

I'd give it a 3 out of 5. It was a bit weird tonally, trying to be the Ultimates while giving the rah-rah naivete of the 60s comics. And all the Gamera creatures at the end really didn't have much impact -- the best fights were between the superheroes themselves. The CGI characters did look pretty cartoonish. Cap's costume looked worse than the stage one from his film which was supposed to look ridiculous. I thought the movement of the "camera" between the various Avengers during fighting was done really well. And I read the comic for years and years, but wasn't sure if that was Kang at the end. Once I found out it was Thanos, I didn't much care. I remember him as being a Warlock/Captain Marvel villain, but not much of what he did. Really, Ultron, the Skrulls, Kang -- there are your 3 movies.

I gave it a 3 out of 10. It's a shame that this fake CGI written-by-committee predictable product tie-in bullshit is the most hotly anticipated movie in the past decade.

My take on Colson is probably wrong, but infinitely more interestinng than Penn and Whedon's.



And I never said anything about texting from the theater.

Most people who have seen the movie think it was a good one - just like me. This is even true on the Byrne Site with the only caveat being that some of them try and pick a few bits out of it they didn't like, just to stay on side with Byrne I suspect.

My only critique of Allen would be the spoilers that he listed. Not very classy. Thankfully, I'd already seen the film so it didn't spoil it for me.

I think allen may have been watching a screener he downloaded, and whoever shot it accidentally cropped out the subtitles. (He seemed to be posting as he was watching it and he seems to be denying he did it from the theater, my guess is a torrent).

I thought the did a good job of trying to serve multiple masters, make every fan happy, every generation, AND follow several directives from the suits, while not messing with what worked and avoiding what didn't from six other films, by five other directors, and two other Hulks. I mean they had to keep certain things from Cap and Thor, quite a lot of things from Iron Man, a lot of things, and start from scratch with a new approach to the Hulk, all while inventing a film version of SHIELD mostly from scratch. And make it all work as a coherent story.

I've seen much worse films with much lower degree of difficulty issues. Plus, no matter what they did not everyone would be happy, Byrne's a good example. But with all the obstacles they faced, all the disparate elements that had to be blended together, I think it could have been much worse.

Superman Returns is a good example of one that didn't work so well. It was trying to be a sequel and a remake among other things. I thought that was one of the big problems with Spiderman 3, mixing a classic villain with a modern villain, and you got a film fighting itself over what it is.

See this is the serving multiple masters thing, fans who skew a little younger than you got it. Maybe you stopped reading Marvel before the various Infinity Gauntlet series came out? They were huge crossover books, mostly Avengers, with Captain America having an amazingly pivotal scene in one. S I'm looking forward to that being the story that follows.

That is not to say a the Kree/Skrull war wouldn't still be an option for the second film, with Thanos playing some similar role behind the scenes, then the third film is the Infinity Gauntlet. The war was just part of the plot to get the thing.

The Ultron/Antman/Jocasta plot would have all made a great film too. But maybe there was just too much baggage and backstory, I mean you only have two hours wouldn't that take too much time away from the existing characters? Maybe that's better left for an Antman film. Which could then lead to Ultron and the Pyms joining in one of the Avengers sequels.

Yeah, when looking Thanos up on the web, I came across the Infinity Gauntlet, which was indeed past my time as a Marvel reader. However, I did find this list of the greatest Avengers villains, so I don't feel completely relegated to my time (and the Kree/Skrull stuff was certainly before my time). I had a similar problem with featuring Venom instead of the more classic villains of Spidey. And who cares about Bane over numerous other Batman foes? Venom and Bane are bland villains, regardless of age, I do believe.

I think you're right that Whedon did about as good a job as possible in serving multiple masters. However, that's exactly what made the film OK, passable, but not much more. It's the exact problem with all the Marvel movies: very little individual style, just kind of bland. Whether you like them or not, Nolan's Batman films are much more Nolan films than simply DC films. The Marvel films are just that (even though some are better than others). At least, we finally get the answer to the question: what would Marvel have been like if it were the creator, not the likes of Kirby or Ditko?

Anyway, if I were to make these films, I'd probably set them in a technicolor 60s with kooky costumes intact.

I would totally watch the hell out of that.

I completely agree the biggest problem with the Marvel films, is their blandness. Casting RDJ, was the thing that set Iron Man apart not the story. They need to embrace the fun and weirdness that Kirby and Lee and everybody brought to the party. Next Ironman, I want to see Mandarin, Ultimo and Fin fang Foom.

As long as someone can say, "cosmic cube" sounds too silly call it the "tesseract." Or A forty foot purple guy named Galactus is too silly, make it a cloud. As long as they deny the really outrageous fun, the films will always be operating within so many restrictions that something like the Avengers will be the absolute best we can hope for.

And why the hell did the GI Joe movies take away everyones individual looks, that was part of the fun with GI Joe?

Most people who have seen the movie were pre-disposed to see the movie, for a narrow handful of reasons. None of which being that it was a good piece of art. It's a product that fulfills a crass market position — the summer tentpole — which is so predictable in its content that it's a sequel of other predictable content dating back to 2003 (Ang Lee's Hulk, although an argument could be made for 1978, Bill Bixby's Incredible Hulk).



You can't spoil something that's already rotten.

I'm sure the folks on this board feel very privileged that you are here to decide on their behalf what is "rotten" and what isn't.

The Avengers movie is just a symptom of a much larger cultural malaise. Every second of it was crowd-sourced before the first green screen was even erected; and every frame of the finished film was market-tested before being issued for instant mass consumption. The market wants what it wants and doesn't want to be challenged. It's the feature film equivalent of Fox News.