Oh, hey. It's been a while. I know it's been a while since we've talked, but I feel I should let y'all know ....The Avengers came out last night.
And it was bleeping amazing.
There are so few movies that have been able to genuinely impress me lately (cough the suckfest that was Hunger Games cough), but I can honestly say that this is probably my favourite movie ever made. Early predictions are slating it to take over as one of the biggest grossing weekends ever, and I'm sure that that'll come from me somewhat since I'm seeing it a few times this weekend.
I am against spoilers. Therefore I won't post what happens in the movie until a few weeks from now, but I just want to preface the movie for you: all of my friends and I are huge comic nerds. Really, we could probably write a book called "Nerdism Amongst The Corn" because I really think we were the most obsessed people in the theater that night. I'm going to skip straight to the end (side note: stay all the way through the credits), but two of my friends and I let out a collective three-person-consecutive gasp when we saw the proceeding scenes. You don't understand. Now we have to wait for Avengers 2 to come out, even though we've already planned out what's inevitably going to happen in this movie.
This movie was so well done. All hail Joss Whedon. It's the kind of movie where it got out at 2:30 am and we stood around outside the theater and talked until 5am. Everything about this movie thoroughly impressed me. We laughed. We cried. I screamed a few times and I hit one of my friends when something really upsetting happened.
The Avengers movie was the kind of movie that had very serious undertones--we're talking about the destruction of our world, here--but then there's people like Tony Stark who have an inability to take things seriously until shit gets really real, but who will do anything to save people. We have Thor, for whom this battle is considerably more personal than for everyone else. Hulk, who befriends one of the Avengers as we see at the end of the film and despite his previous saying of "we're not a team, we're a time-bomb", ends up having that view challenged. Captain America, who has some of the funniest comic-relief lines because, well, he's from the forties. Hawkeye, who gets a considerable amount of screen time and is proven to be an integral part of the team and Black Widow, a formidable assassin who, under her tough-girl exterior, exhibits true fear in the face of death.
And then there's Loki. Before I get into Tom Hiddleston's performance, I have to preface this by saying that Loki is my favourite Marvel character ever. And this is a girl that loves Thor and loves Iron Man, for me, it will always be Loki as my favourite character. It is incomprehensible how much I love Loki. In the film, Loki is perfect. Loki is flawless. In Thor, we're introduced to this 'son' of Odin who is somewhat timid, living in the shadow of his older brother. Loki's descent (or ascent) into the powerful being that he appears as in Avengers is a completely different character from what we see in Thor. It's still very distinctly the trickster, but it's more the Loki we see towards the end of the film. It's the sarcastically callous and yes, evil, god that we are introduced to in this film. I always think back to Thor when I look back on this movie now, because there's a scene in that movie where Loki is speaking with Odin, and the conversation goes:
Odin: You're my son. I wanted only to protect you from the truth.This conversation is the turning point in Loki's character development. There is a moment in Avengers where we briefly see his good side again but it's very brief. In Avengers we see a dark side of Loki that was only slightly explored in Thor. He's a wonderful villain. The best.
Loki: What, because I am the monster that parents tell their children about at night?
And then, right here is where we see the anger:
Loki: It all makes sense now, why you favoured Thor all these years. Because no matter how much you claimed to love me, you could never have a frost giant sitting on the throne of Asgard.
And oh my. I had my doubts about Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk, but he was so, so impressive. I loved his performance through and through, and furthermore, I rescind my previous doubts because he erased them all. He was funny in a very deadpan way--he had a certain kind of self-depreciating humour.
I can't say enough about this movie. Which means that it's time to go and see it again. The Avengers Assembled and they were great.
