Marvel's The Avengers

This is, if you watch the MCU movies in chronological order, the seventh, after Captain America, Captain Marvel, Iron Man, Iron Man 2, The Hulk, and Thor. If you are watching them in release order, it is the sixth, after Iron Man, The Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, and Captain America. It is in part a sequel to both Thor and Captain America, with the Mcguffin of Captain America (the Tesseract) and the villain of Thor (Loki) being front and center in the story. Basically, Loki is tasked to use the Tesseract to open a portal through which an army of aliens called the Chitari can come through and take over Earth. The Avengers have to team up to stop him, leading to what would be referred to in the subsequent movies as "The Battle of New York" and have reverberations throughout the other movies and the tv series that the MCU would spawn.For those who get the 4k disc, the A/V quality is excellent. I do not count myself as an A/V expert so I cannot really tell you whether the 4k UHD disc is a huge upgrade over the initial Blu-Ray release (there are certainly sites out there that can do that), but as a novice, it does look like, when watching it on a big screen 4k tv playing on a 4k Blu-Ray player, the UHD disc does look better than the Blu-Ray version. The extras include a director's commentary track on the movie, several making-of and behind-the-scenes featurettes, and a Marvel One-Shot short film starring Lizzy Caplan set after the events of the movie. As is the case with many UHD releases, the UHD disc just has the movie itself and then the regular Blu-Ray has all of the extras.Overall, the movie is wonderful. I think Marvel did a good job by introducing the characters in stand-alone films first and getting the origin stories for most of them (all but Black Widow and Hawkeye) out of the way and developed (at least to an extent) before they started doing the big team-up movies. It seemed like the cast had great chemistry, and worked well together. Of course, the big casting change from the prior movies was the fact that Mark Ruffalo was brought in to play Bruce Banner/Hulk, replacing Edward Norton who seemingly wore out his welcome very quickly when filming The Incredible Hulk. Even though Ruffalo was kind of shoe-horned in, given that this was the first movie in which all of the major actors worked together, it worked out well. The movie is, as you can imagine, mostly an action movie, but does have some comedy and even drama mixed in. It also started the tradition of having both a mid-credits scene that advances the storyline (this one introducing the "big bad" of the initial phases of the MCU, and a post-credits scene that is meant to be more fun or tie back into the movie you just watched. So, if you are a fan of superhero movies, this one is definitely worth watching and pays off on the prior movies quite well.

Being a fan of comics and the Marvel Universe, and after seeing all the other movies leading up to it, I obviously had pretty high hopes going into Avengers, and after finding out a while before that Joss Whedon was going to be directing it, I had a gut feeling it would be well done, because Joss Whedon is an awesome director. I went within the first week with my wife and a few of our friends...made a whole day out of it. I enjoyed just about every minute of that movie, from start to finish!All of the characters were really well done, (it helped that each of the directors from Ironman, Hulk, Thor, and Chaptain America came on board to help advise & whatnot), and each actor played their parts very well. At first, my only one real concern was that Edward Norton was not going to be returning as Bruce Banner, but after watching the Avengers, I found that Mark Ruffalo was a bit better for the role in the end...he played the nerd card a bit better than Norton I thought.The special effects were fantastic! I found myself totally pumped and on the edge of my seat during the action bits in the movie, and the effects done during those scenes were very well done in my opinion. In my head, my hopes for the quantity of action was about right on, maybe just a tad higher, but really not by much. The action sequences incorporated into this movie were just simply awesome!The comedy added into this movie screamed Joss Whedon (looking back on Buffy the Vampire Slayer & Firefly and whatnot), and there was just the right amount in it. It was added in at just some of the right times, and they were great! I laughed pretty good in those scenes.The story was well done, and is close enough to the comics as far as my recollection (it has been some time since I have read some Avengers comics). Obviously, not every little detail would be added in, because that's almost impossible to do when you're converting stuff from a story that spans quite a ways. I imagine it differs when transferring from comics as opposed to books too...there is so much detail in books, but at the same time, it's probably very difficult to transfer every detail within animation and whatnot as well. All in all, bravo on the story though. Of course, that's what you get too when you chose a director like Whedon who grew up reading comics and knows the material and has a real passion for that kind of stuff...you're going to get a good movie.All in all, this is a well rounded superhero movie, and may well be the best one I've seen thus far, right up their with the Dark Knight, which is probably my favorite DC movie up to this point. If you have not seen this movie, please Please PLEASE do yourselves a favor and go watch it, comic fan or not...it's freakin great! Even the action fan who isn't a big comic book lover would enjoy this movie. I have already preordered about the best version of this movie that is going to be available, because it's worth it...even with the 3D, although I don't have 3D capability. I don't really care...it's worth it in my opinion, because this was such a kick@$$ movie. Definitely check it out!