The Avengers Review

The reason this still plays is that Whedon understood the assignment was traffic control rather than spectacle. Six characters arrive from five films with incompatible tones, and instead of flattening them he sets them against each other inside a flying laboratory for an hour, letting the picture be a bottle drama about ego before it becomes a war movie.

The helicarrier argument, everyone circling a glowing sceptre and slowly getting nastier, is better written than anything in the sequels. Then comes the Manhattan finale, still a model of action geography: one continuous move around the island that hands off from hero to hero and never leaves you unsure who is fighting what. Mark Ruffalo recasts Banner as a man with a permanent low grade headache and fixes the character instantly.

Hiddleston's Loki is the right size of villain, petty and theatrical rather than cosmic. The weaknesses are real. The Chitauri are texture rather than threat, faceless and interchangeable, and the emotional stake rests entirely on Agent Coulson, a supporting player asked to carry more grief than he was ever built for. It remains the cleanest large ensemble action film of its decade.