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MCU Rewind: Assembling the Avengers Was An Impossible Task, But Marvel Studios Did It Perfectly
The hype leading up to the first MCU team-up film was nowhere near the level the hype leading up to Endgame has reached. Still, at the time, The Avengers was one of the most hotly anticipated superhero movies of all time. I honestly don’t recall what the prevailing feeling on social media was about the movie, but personally, I believed it would be a disaster. Taking four distinct characters from four discrete stories and putting them together in a single movie felt like too much for anyone to achieve. Even though my expectations were low, I planned to see it opening weekend. I wanted to support the effort because, even if the execution were flawed, I wanted the MCU to try again and again until they got it right. So, imagine my surprise when after the wordless post-credits scene closed, I was left stunned in my seat because they did it. Avengers was about as perfect as such a film could be, and it marked the beginning of a new era in cinematic storytelling.
The opening of the film was something of a risk, and it actually made me very frightened about what awaited us. A character known as The Other — played and/or voiced by Alexis Denisof — opens with some straight-up exposition. He talks about the Tesseract being “awakened” and reveals that Loki, his magic spear, and the Chitauri are all ready to make humanity burn. It’s strange and evocative of a kind of 1990s sci-fi movie storytelling. It’s brief and quickly we find ourselves on the site of some unknown S.H.I.E.L.D. base where the Tesseract is “misbehaving.” This film is the payoff for putting agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in every Phase 1 movie (save for The Incredible Hulk, though their absence there gets justification in this film, too). It provided the pathway for the unification of each film’s heroes, all of whom have some sort of history with S.H.I.E.L.D. It also allows Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury to maneuver the individual characters into becoming a team.
The structure of the film is pretty straightforward and what you might expect from it. It starts with the heroes separated, a threat arrives, they come together, then split apart, then come together again, and save the fricking day. It seems an almost elementary structure in hindsight, but it was actually revolutionary in its…
