Assembly Required (An Avengers review)

Well, it was all leading up to this, wasn't it? If you need a refresher, I've compiled a page leading to all my previous reviews here.

Poster by Matt Ferguson. Check out his deviantArt page here.

This is it. The big one. The one Marvel was building up to all this time, one that's taken five years, five films and about $1bn to pull together. Just the preparation for this has been something new for filmmaking - characters from different films interacting together in the same universe. We got glimpses of it in a few Tarantino-related projects (Vincent Vega from Pulp Fiction is the brother of Mr Blonde from Reservoir Dogs), but nothing on this scale, a world where a science fiction franchise, a monster movie, a swords-and-sorcery epic and a WWII-era pulp actioner exist comfortably side-by-side.

For the flagship title of this universe, and Marvel's only dog in the fight for best summer blockbuster, Avengers needed careful guiding. After all, otherwise you've spent five films leading up to a dud, and nobody wants that - not audiences, not executives, not the studios and certainly not the fans. Marvel scored a coup by getting nerd god Joss Whedon to both write and direct, but since Whedon has only one film credit to his name, and no experience with directing big-budget blockbusters, this was still a risk. A script is only as good as its direction, and while nobody was really doubting Avengers would provide high-octane action, the Marvel Studios films had a reputation for providing good plot and characters. That's quite a juggling act, and one that couldn't afford failure.

I've no doubt that Avengers is going to kill at the box office and make enough money that Disney could potentially give all its employees a vacation for a week. But has all that time been worth it? Find out after the jump.

I Wanna Be Your Sledgehammer (A Thor review)

Two more days until the UK release of Avengers Assemble, meaning there are two more Marvel Cinematic Universe films to look at. We've already looked at Iron Man and its sequel, plus The Incredible Hulk, so let's press on with the fourth film in the inventory.

Poster by Olly Moss.

Marvel faced an interesting challenge with the last two films before Avengers; how can we get Thor and Captain America on the silver screen without them looking silly? Of all the superheroes to adapt to film, they had to sell a guy in LARPer gear who spoke in Shakespearian prose and swung around a magic hammer, and a soldier in propagandistic American garb with little wings on the side of his head, to audiences across the world without getting laughed out the door. Thor was also high fantasy, a genre that has never really done well critically or commercially. For every Conan or Lord of the Rings that managed to strike a chord with audiences, you had an Eragon, a Dungeons and Dragons, and several dozen Krulls or Hawk the Slayers that bombed HARD.

At the time of its release, however, Marvel once again had good fortune. Prior to Thor's release, HBO had begun airing its epic medieval fantasy saga Game of Thrones, which pushed the original book's political intrigue and scheming amoral characters to the surface, and was picking up enough praise that fantasy looked like it would have a second chance of popularity. Thor itself sweetens the pill somewhat by putting a more sci-fi bent on it - the Norse gods are in fact an alien culture whose frequent visits to Earth resulted in worship from the locals - and setting a good deal of the film in contemporary America, but it still traffics in fantasy tropes, and it still grossed nearly $450m at the international box office. What with Game of Thrones  currently storming the ratings, maybe medieval fantasy's getting a second wind in pop culture.

Thor managed to rise to the challenge well enough, but does it still hold up on a second viewing? If ye be worthy, we're reviewing the Viking god of thunder's cinematic début after the jump.