‘Avengers’ Assembles Thrills, Laughs and the Ultimate Superhero Movie Experience

'Avengers' Assembles Thrills, Laughs and the Ultimate Superhero Movie Experience

by Mariana Paola Vicente | May 2, 2012

Marvel’s The Avengers brings it up a notch with a story line full of action packed scenes, conflicting character dynamics, and some unexpected humor that will keep fans wanting more. Based on comic book tradition, our villain Loki (Tom Hiddleston) introduced last year in the movie “Thor”, comes down to Earth to steal the Tesseract, an interminable source of energy. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) from the covert S.H.I.E.L.D. assembles a team of superheroes to save the world, thus The Avengers are born.

Like many Marvel fanatics, Clark Gregg (Agent Phil) was afraid The Avengers movie was not an achievable task when first approached with the idea. According to producer Kevin Feige, his biggest fear was that the whole thing would collapse under its own weight. To Feige, who admitted wanting to do this film his whole life, his priority was the interaction between the characters. “Looking at [director Whedon’s body of work, the characters never get lost and that’s why to me, he was by far the best choice,” Feige added.

Director Joss Whedon found his challenge in creating the structure of the story, bringing all the character’s stories together to create a different entity while still managing to embrace the audience, a distinctive trait in Marvel’s films that started out with the first Spiderman movie. “Marvel really cracked the code when they figured out super heroes are just like us,” said Whedon. “These guys have super powers but they have normal kind of attitudes,” added Samuel L. Jackson.

Jackson, who had done several cameos in some of the previous Marvel films, mentioned that what he most liked about portraying Nick Fury is the fact that he believes that these unique individuals deserve the love and admiration of the world who “they pretty much owe everything to because there are bigger things out there.” Chris Evans, plays the straight man as Captain America while the rest of the cast get to each have a comic relief moment.

“These are the moments where the sentiment of The Avengers could have fallen flat on its face, but they turned out to be the moments where the movie succeeded,” said lead actor Robert Downey Jr, who has successfully launched his franchise of Ironman movies. Downey also added that he enjoyed not having to carry the movie and just being a “worker amongst workers”.

The rest of the Avengers are composed by Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow) and Jeremy Renner (Hawkeye). Nonetheless, it was newly integrated actor Mark Ruffalo that surprised everyone with his refreshing take on Bruce Banner (The Hulk). Ruffalo said he based the character in his 10-year-old son who has “all the force of nature like screaming out of his body but at the same time having everyone around him telling him to control himself.”

Everybody could agree the most exciting moment while filming The Avengers was when they all got to “assemble” in their costumes. Other fun moments mentioned by the cast included roof parties, group hugs, and games like Dance Dance Revolution, “Nobody Lambada like Loki,” joked Clark Gregg. “The family feeling was definitely there,” mentioned Jackson.