Earth’s Most Profitable Heroes

I saw The Avengers. You saw The Avengers. I saw The Avengers again.

At the time of this writing, The Avengers holds the record for highest opening weekend of all time with $207.4M. While this impressive figure serves no financial benefit for myself (in fact I lost money on The Avengers to the tune of $17 – not counting popcorn), the potential for future entertainment dividends are quite prosperous in that the success of this movie will hopefully provide a bit more creative power to writer/director Joss Whedon, who has long enjoyed critical and cult acclaim but is now seeing his first mainstream success. How he will choose to wield his newly acquired power is something that I’m very anxious to see.

The thing about The Avengers that sets it apart from most of the recent box-office record breakers (Avatar, those Twilight movies, etc) is that it’s actually really great. Did I just write “really great”? What I meant was: hyperbole explosions!!! Honestly, any attempt for me to distill my enjoyment of this movie into the English language will most likely be insufficient, but I’ll try:

movie good . . . (ugh . . .)

Seriously though – movie good.

Time will tell if The Avengers stands the test of time (only Time is allowed to administer that particular test), but at the moment I feel that this is the greatest movie ever made, ever. Okay, that’s not true – but what is true is that I cannot think of another movie that I’ve had this much anticipation for that ultimately exceeded all expectations. Most often when a movie exceeds my expectations, it’s because my expectations were not as high as The Avengers.

One of the things that did not occur to me until a few days before the release is that Joss Whedon screenplays are funny. I had mainly been excited about seeing everyone battling it out with their enemies (and amongst themselves), but this movie has some legitimately funny (and most importantly, in character) jokes. Most of them go to Tony Stark, but everyone has at least a couple. In addition to the jokes, the script provides the best on screen presentation of each character. This could be due to the fact that the focus is split between so many people that whenever someone is there, it’s because they need to be not because they have to be. This allows each character to be great every time you see them rather than having the burden of the entire film resting on a single person.

Also, much ass is kicked, and it is glorious.

Anyway – at this point, surely most of you have seen this movie already. If not, what the H?

casualken