The Cosmic Cube (here, called the Tesseract) has been stolen by Loki, who wants to trade it for use of an alien army to conquer the world. Nick Fury of SHIELD has called together a variety of super powered and non-super powered heroes to counter this threat. We get a team of Black Widow, Hawkeye, Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, and to a lesser extent, Fury himself.
Throughout the viewing, I kept thinking how difficult this movie must have been. Not just the logistics of the photography, the action, the stunts, or anything like that, just that it's a large cast that required so much attention to balancing the movie. And it was handled expertly.
When I saw Thor, I wasn't terribly impressed. It was passable, but it didn't speak to me. This time, I felt like Thor was a better defined character. I still liked Edward Norton's Hulk, but Mark Ruffalo did just fine. I was a bit disappointed with Hawkeye, but that was for a few other reasons; he had a laser sight mounted on his bow, and I kept imagining that Daniel Craig should be playing that part.
The real star of the movie was Black Widow. I didn't care about her role in Iron Man 2, but here she was just amazing. She gets excellent fight scenes. She proves useful, she teams up well, and she winds up saving the day.
One of the difficulties that many of the superhero movies have is that when people team up, it comes across more like two people having a fight in the same room. This movie had a sequence that showcased the characters working with each other. And that feels good.
I'm looking forward to more Marvel movies. I haven't been disappointed with many of them. Even the ones that didn't work too well - like Fantastic Four or Ghost Rider, aren't horrible. But the studios are getting better about managing these stories carefully, and I hope that gradually, the movies will feel like a huge a universe as the comics.
There was also a scene during the credits that I'm incredibly enthused about.
You see, I really like comics. I've got a stack of collections under my desk that I haven't started on, and I'm usually working on at least two different collections at a time. I started reading comics in the early 90s, and abandoned it around 94 or so. I've since fallen back into reading collections.
I've never been too much of a fan of cosmic stories, but I really enjoyed Infinity Gauntlet, and to a lesser extent, Infinity War and Infinity Crusade. All of these stories helped to define Thanos.
And that's who was shown during the scene in the credits. I'm thrilled.
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