I couldn’t be more excited for The Avengers movie next year. The Avengers is the most exciting movie project that’s come along in a very, very long time. This is an actual movie experiment. Something that, as far as I know, has never or at least rarely ever been done before. Instead of just being a sequel, The Avengers will combine the characters and plots of four other movie franchises into one gloriously epic adventure! Superheroes having been teaming up since the world of comics began, and now we’ll finally see it happen in the movies! I can’t remember the last time I was this excited about seeing a movie, about the potential that a movie has.

Sure, I’ve looked forward to movies (like Little Miss Sunshine or Scott Pilgrim vs. The World), and there have been some pretty great trailers. But The Avengers is in a league of its own. It will be the crowning achievement of superhero movies, the climax of the past 10 years of awesome films.

I really, really hope it lives up to the hype. I have a lot of faith that it will.

Avengers Assemble!

Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, the Incredible Hulk, Black Widow, Hawkeye and Nick Fury. We couldn’t have asked for a better team line-up (though I will, later in this post). This team is cinematic gold, and the story of how we got here is just so fascinating. Nobody knew Iron Man would do as well as it did. Iron Man is  still my favorite of all the movies in this line, though I’ve enjoyed them all. Everybody knew that the Spider-Man movies would be awesome, that Batman would succeed; but once the movie makers started experimenting with relatively unknown characters, untested properties, we just had to hope. And it paid off again and again and again.

First and foremost, The Avengers is in good hands. The movie is written and directed by Joss Whedon, the god of all geeks.

And Whedon said, "Let there be vampires."

Joss Whedon is the guy who invented Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and helmed her 7-seasons long television series. He’s also the brilliant mind behind Angel, Dollhouse, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and possibly the greatest science fiction show on television: Firefly. If you haven’t seen Firefly, I’ll wait here while you go out and rent it or download it and watch the entire series. It’s amazing. I was literally angry and sad after watching the full series on DVD because I knew there would never be any other episodes. It was mishandled by FOX and is championed by the Internet as the greatest show to have ever been killed before its time. And Joss Whedon is the mastermind behind it.

He also wrote and directed the Firefly movie, Serenity. So clearly he’s got the chops to make a Hollywood movie and make it awesome.

Whedon also wrote a particularly amazing run on Astonishing X-Men. Both that series and his handling of Firefly are prime indicators that this man knows how to write a great group dynamic. Buffy the Vampire Slayer did so well because of the Scooby Gang, of Buffy and her friends just joking around and being fun while all the craziness went on around them. That will be key to a successful Avengers movie. In fact, that is the most important thing Avengers has to get right to be a success: the team dynamic.

Moreso than beating up the bad guys, The Avengers has to be about the heroes and how they interact with one another. Whedon understands this and Whedon will do a great job with this.

Chris Hemsworth as Thor; Chris Evans as Captain America; Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man; Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye; Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk and Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow

So let’s talk about the cast and the team for a moment. Obviously we’ve got the big three: Captain America, Iron Man and Thor. That is the key difference between the main superteam in Marvel and DC comics: the lineup. The Justice League over at DC is composed of all the big, popular characters: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, etc.  The Avengers, however, were never made up of Marvel’s top characters. Spider-Man and especially the X-Men, the biggest sellers and most popular, were never a part of the Avengers. Sure you had Cap, Iron Man and Thor, but they were mostly seen as Avengers first and solo heroes second. The Avengers had their own little corner of the Marvel Universe alongside Spidey and the X-Men.

That not only ensured that Spider-Man and the X-Men got their movies first (being the most popular), but it also meant that I was never much into the Avengers as a comic book. I read Spider-Man and X-Men growing up. I’m still not very big into the Avengers as a comic. I simply never cared much for the characters enough to follow their books.

But then, of course, we’ve got this movie magic. Once the Spider-Man and X-Men movies made hundreds of millions of dollars, Marvel decided to clamp down and take control of their own characters. They launched Marvel Studios and made Iron Man, which was an out-of-the-park hit! The brain trust at Marvel then decided to keep going, and someone had the brilliant idea to make solo movies of the Avengers characters and bring them together into the big film next year. And sure enough, Incredible Hulk, Thor and Captain America were well-made, quality movies. They weren’t the runaway hits that Iron Man was, but they have definitely been successful films, especially the two this year. Marvel Studios is taking care of their movie properties, their heroes. There’s no reason to believe they won’t take good care of The Avengers.

It’s just a shame they couldn’t get Edward Norton back to reprise his role as Bruce Banner. There were some disagreements behind the scenes between Norton and Marvel. It’s key that they kept the same actors, essentially preserving the characters from those earlier movies, so that they are definitely linked. If they’d simply recast all the Avengers, it just wouldn’t be the same, it wouldn’t have the same magic. Which is why I’m so sad that they couldn’t get Norton. I was looking forward to scenes between Norton’s Banner and Downey’s Stark.

Instead we get Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner, the Hulk

The Hulk/Banner is the character I am most looking forward to in The Avengers. Word has it he may start out as a villain (or at least a handful that the other heroes have to deal with), but I oh so hope he is heroic by the end and part of the team. The Incredible Hulk was a good movie, and they portrayed a brilliant Bruce Banner. He’s struggling to get control of this beast within, but at the same time he knows that he can use it for good. When the Abomination is attacking New York, Bruce has the idea to ‘aim’ the Hulk at Abomination and save the day. Hopefully they will carry those ideas over into The Avengers.

Like I said before, how these characters interact with one another will be the key to this movie’s success. They were the protagonists in their own films. Everyone else in the movie reacted to them, bowed down to them. So how are they going to share the screen? It’s going to be fascinating to watch, especially when it comes to the Hulk. Bruce Banner is the other side of the heroic coin. Banner is as smart, if not smarter, than Tony Stark; but when his brush with superheroics came along he got cursed. He doesn’t get the women or the popularity. He’s a monster…but he’s a monster that’s stronger than Thor or anyone else. Hulk is the strongest one there is, after all.

I can’t wait to see how the rest of the team treats him. Will they pity him? Will Tony Stark make fun of him? Will anyone be nice to him?

Bruce Banner and his place within the Avengers was brilliantly written in The Ultimates series. I’ll be doing a blog post about them eventually.

The first picture of the team together

My only complaint about the movie is the lack of female characters. It feels a little overly feminist of me, but they couldn’t come up with any other women to put on the team than the Black Widow? She is a super spy who had a supporting role in Iron Man 2, so that makes her part of the team? Yes, the Black Widow was a member of the Avengers in the comics. But in the movieverse, she’s just a secret agent, not a super hero. Yes there were movies for Iron Man, Cap, Hulk and Thor, but they’re putting Hawkeye on the Avengers when all he had was a tiny cameo in Thor, which they only put in because of the Avengers. So clearly someone was OK with introducing brand new characters just for the Avengers.

My bet is that they’re just riffing off the Hawkeye/Black Widow team-ups in The Ultimates. Hawkeye’s costume in this movie will be his Ultimates uniform, not the comic book outfit.

So why not introduce some new female Avengers? The problem is that a lot of them are derivative of something else. The most prominent female Avenger is the Wasp. But she’s the wife of Giant-Man, Hank Pym. If they ever plan on doing the Wasp someday and want to stick with the comics, that means she has to be connected with Giant-Man. It worked wonders in the comics, especially Ultimates, but that’s probably too much baggage for the movie. Same with the second most prominent female Avenger, the Scarlet Witch. She’s the daughter of Magneto (the X-Men villain), and twin sister to Quicksilver. Again, a lot of baggage.

But who’s left? She-Hulk? Not gonna happen. Ms. Marvel? She’s just Wonder Woman-lite. Spider-Woman? Again, too connected to somebody else. Their only other options would be Tigra, who would work, or Mockingbird, who is essentially Black Widow-lite.

I guess there just aren’t many options for female Avengers. Which is a sad shame. I hope we at least get a cameo for the Wasp. Black Widow is just going to have to carry a whole gender on her shoulders!

I think she can handle it!

That leaves the villain and I have no idea what they’re going to do about it. Very little has been released about the villain. We know that Loki is going to reappear from the Thor movie, but surely he can’t be the only villain. He had his big chance in Thor, and he wasn’t so amazing in that film that fans would want to see him again so soon. Yes, Loki was the first villain in the very first Avengers comic back in the 1960s, the reason the team got together, but they can’t be so devoted to the comics that they’d tank the film with a lame villain.

But the problem is that most of the Avengers’ prominent villains are lame, in my opinion. Kang the Conqueror is a big purple guy who time travels. That is far too complicated for this film. Keep It Simple, Stupid! Ultron is an evil robot, but he was built by Giant-Man and so once again that would add more baggage than one would want for a film. Who’s left? Not many villains. Heck, none of the Avengers villains are famous enough that the public would care about them. They don’t have a Joker or a Lex Luthor.

One rumor that’s being spread around are the Skrulls, an invading alien race. They used the Skrulls in the Ultimates as the first real outside threat that the heroes had to take down, and that story was amazing! It had everyone one could want in a movie!

So in my opinion, the Skrulls should be the villain in the movie. They’d just be an invading alien force that requires all of these heroes to team-up to defeat. Everybody understands an alien invasion. It’s not complicated and it wouldn’t detract from the character interaction. People have said that superhero movies rise and fall based on their villain, but with the Avengers, that shouldn’t be the case.

This movie will rise and fall based on how well they make a movie about The Avengers.