It’s hard to imagine, after four years and over a billion dollars, a time when The Avengers seemed like a risky proposition - but even with the successes of Iron Man, Thor, and The First Avenger, a team-up movie on this scale was a big gamble. Getting Nerd God Joss Whedon to take the helm helped build up a lot of good will, though - after if anyone could handle an ensemble this outlandish, it was going to be Whedon.
So out it came, and the rest is incredibly profitable history. Marvel cemented themselves as a box-office force to be reckoned with, letting them run wild with their weirder properties and led us to the five-year slate of releases ahead, including Doctor Strange, Black Panther, and Captain Marvel - all of which would have been completely unimaginable a few years ago.
So, the gamble paid off - in just about every way. The Avengers Assembled, and to a great reception.
So, four years and six more movies later, how does it stand up?
Pretty well, I think.
The key to the whole thing is that Whedon just gets these guys, and not just that - he knows how well they get each other. Stark, who’s been nothing but charm personified in his solo movies, surrounded by friends, is described for the first time as arrogant, flippant - a liability, even. Captain America is decried as a relic, nobody trusts Fury, Hawkeye is compromised, and Thor fights just about everyone at some point.
And that’s the arc of the first two-thirds of the movie - although it’s pretty well-disguised as a search for the tesseract, it’s actually posing a question: how the hell are these people ever supposed to work together?
Reams have been written about the character stuff here, and I don’t want to just parrot what’s already been said about Captain America, Black Widow, and Hulk by better and more literary writers than me.
So let’s talk about Hawkeye.
At the time, Hawkeye’s arc was… not popular. Clint Barton’s always been a few tiers below the heavy hitters, but he’s got a solid fan base - so turning him into a brainwashed henchman wasn’t going to be greeted with universal praise (even Jeremy Renner was apparently unhappy about how things worked out).
But I have to say, I don’t think Hawkeye is too badly misused. He’s not simply reduced to a lackey, and still operates pretty autonomously (even taking the lead on some parts of Loki’s plan), and the temporary switch to villainy allows him to show off his skills early on in a way that just standing around on the helicarrier wouldn’t. He’s employed to his strengths - just on the other side.
The conversation with Natasha, once she’s completed his “cognitive recalibration”, is one of the stronger character beats, too - in that brief exchange, you get the full weight of their history, their mutual respect. And having been turned to the dark side is a better motivation for Barton fully joining up than “because he’s there in the comic books”.
The only negative things I can even think of for The Avengers seem pretty petty; some of the gags don’t quite stick the landing, the action doesn’t have the same weight and impact as The Winter Soldier, and a few shots could have done with being a couple of fractions of a second shorter or longer, but… yeah - that’s all I got.
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