Road To Endgame: 'The Avengers' Changed Cinema And Avoided The Mistakes Of Past Marvel Movies

You know the one. You remember seeing the Avengers assemble for first time, as the camera circles around them and Alan Silvestri's musical theme reaches its crescendo. You may even remember cheering or applauding.The film was shot in a narrower ("taller") aspect ratio — 1.85:1, compared to the other films' 2.39 and 2.35 — to accommodate the eight-foot-tall Hulk in group shots where in the team occupied the entire frame. Run a quick search on YouTube, and you're likely to find dozens of videos capturing live audience reactions to this climactic scene, from all over the globe and in more languages than you knew the film was even dubbed into.What's more, this now-iconic shot is sandwiched between two other major moments, each of which hits similar highs in quick succession. On one side, the Hulk's "I'm always angry" and his transformation before punching an enormous Leviathan. On the other, Captain America's order of "Hulk? Smash!" after which the Hulk lets loose on alien invaders. It was clear from this one-two-three punch, and the ensuing rapturous response, that the Marvel party wasn't going to stop.What's sometimes forgotten, however, is that this sequence arrives nearly two hours into the film.The Avengers is one of the rare MCU films where the action beats feel entirely like extensions of story and character. The whole film is built around this rousing sequence, answering the looming question asked by both the film, and by the audience: after a six-year buildup, can these disparate elements come together to become greater than the sum of their parts? The answer was a resounding "Yes," and what followed was Marvel's victory lap, an explosive payoff to an entire movie's worth of character dynamics and interwoven themes (a feat that was replicated in Avengers: Age of Ultron).

The Avengers is also the first Marvel movie that takes place on an Earth significantly different from our own. The settings in prior entries felt distinctly familiar, from caves to factories to tiny towns. Here, the pretense that Marvel's superheroes exist in a "realistic" universe was finally done away with. The world of The Avengers is, unequivocally, the future of the series' fantasy World War II, where Nazi factions used an Infinity Stone to build weapons of mass destruction (Unfortunately, this through-line also results in its own complications, since the mal-formed politics of Captain America: The First Avenger carry over as well).In prior films, superheroes were unique elements in otherwise normal surroundings. In The Avengers, nearly an hour of the film takes place on an floating, invisible aircraft carrier transporting magically-powered weapons, the same weapons Captain America once tried to get out of the hands of H.Y.D.R.A. (Red Skull's Diet Nazis). This is a world where some far-off, unseen villain in space grants Loki mystical objects — we now know all about Thanos' plan — and it's a world where shadowy international councils have become necessary, now that monsters roam the streets and Gods fly through the skies.However, the film isn't as far removed from "real world" concerns as this setting suggests. If anything, The Avengers is about fantasy clashing with reality to see which one wins out.

Marvel films like Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Captain Marvel were made with U.S. military assistance, and thus, with military-approved scripts, making them government propaganda. The Avengers however, was actually turned down during its production, because The Pentagon couldn't reconcile the idea of the U.S. military answering to a higher authority. Granted, the production was lent Humvees and other ground equipment regardless (the F-22 and F-35 fighter jets in the film were digitally rendered) so the conundrum here vis-à-vis The Avengers' place as propaganda is noteworthy.On one hand, the production most certainly set out to appease the powers that be. The World Council, a fictional consortium of international leaders, embodied authoritarian overreach despite American military equipment being employed to bomb American citizens. America itself is never really framed with any military outlook, let alone one that could be held accountable.On the other, one might argue that The Avengers is able to side-step the propaganda issue given that it eschews real-world militarism, unlike its Earth-bound predecessors. The fighter jet sent to bomb Manhattan, while representative of U.S. military equipment, is ordered by an organization whose reach supersedes America's (the council members aren't given national designations until later in the series), so it's enough of a fantasy that the propaganda question doesn't really matter.It's a double-edged sword, narratively speaking. The reluctance to contextualize America's place in the S.H.I.E.L.D. hierarchy turned the Pentagon off subsidizing the film; the U.S. military could not, given its relative absence in the story, be presented as heroic. And yet The World Council, a fictitious entity whose only real-world counterpart is the distinctly non-militaristic United Nations, is presented as villainous, without ever framing America's place in its ranks, despite S.H.I.E.L.D. being coded American through-and-through. In effect, the U.S. military can't be presented as having questionable motives either.At best, this incidental political apathy is an upgrade from prior entries like Iron Man, in which U.S. military occupation is the status-quo, but its ill-effects originate elsewhere. At worst, it's the series' continued failure to say anything of consequence, hinting at statements about power without ever daring to actually make them.

Fury & co. are working on bigger, more destructive devices than the ones dropped on Japan. Upon discovering these secret weapons, Steve "We have orders, we should follow them" Rogers decides he can no longer follow blindly. While questioning his own commitment to S.H.I.E.L.D., Rogers also questions Tony Stark's commitment to the mission. Stark is a man who tries to think his way out of every situation, claiming he'd "cut the wire" rather than laying down on it for anyone else, the way Rogers would, and has in the past.Stark, at this point in the series, thinks mostly of himself. He builds monuments unto his own image, touching the skies with buildings bearing his name. In fact, he only figures out Loki's (Tom Hiddleston) plan once he has his narcissism reflected back to him by the murderous demigod, who plants his flag on Stark's skyscraper for all the world to see.While Steve Rogers' arc in this film forms a bridge between entries (The Winter Soldier builds on his newfound skepticism), The Avengers concludes a major part of Tony Stark's story, in which he finally attempts to fight for something greater than himself. It also sets into motion the next phase of his life, in which he fails, repeatedly, to figure out the path to doing so. Instead, Stark creates newer, bigger problems in the process, escalations that Rogers must eventually deal with.Despite the tensions between them, the two men also become linked by their experiences in a way few that other characters are. Stark's major turn in The Avengers involves flying through a wormhole. It's rather traumatic, something Iron Man 3 eventually tackles head on. In flying a weapon of mass destruction away from New York, Stark takes the same "one-way trip" Rogers was forced to decades earlier: a willing suicide mission, as he tries to contact the woman he loves (Stark survives, albeit barely).Rogers and Stark butting heads over loyalties is fun to watch, but the film's most enjoyable element, ironically, happens to be the character who mentions trying to kill himself while being cursed with the strength to survive: The Incredible Hulk.

At one end of the spectrum we have Thor and Loki, figures of myth and legend who have the powers of Gods. At the other, we have Hawkeye/Clint Barton and Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff, assassins who use guns and arrows. The latter duo ought to have no place within a cosmic sci-fi film. In fact, they replace superpowered heroes The Wasp and Ant-Man from the original Avengers comics. Yet it's this very dynamic, the contrast in the genres to which they belong, that makes all four characters — Thor, Loki, Hawkeye and Widow — feel narratively vital.They represent the extremes within which this world operates. The Asgardian princes embody the operatic grandeur of a story of armoured aliens and magical kingdoms. Barton and Romanoff however, ground the film in a human perspective, reflecting the real-world effects of super-powered battles.By this point in the series, Thor and Loki's arcs are, admittedly, at a standstill. Their story here, much like Captain America's story, is connective tissue between entries. Their main function however, is fleshing out what this mish-mash setting feels like, and their interactions with "realistic" elements like Hawkeye and Widow help dramatize this world's fabric.A spy working from the shadows, Romanoff is one of the team's most surprising members. She fights shoulder to shoulder with the Avengers, not only to escape her bloody past, but to atone for it. She's also a foil to Hawkeye, who's hasn't yet had to contend with the kind of guilt Romanoff lives with. If anything, Barton's conscience is clear, having rescued Romanoff when he was sent to kill her, but more recent events have forced him (literally, via Loki's mind control) to take innocent lives."Don't do that to yourself," Romanoff tells Barton, when he asks how many people he's killed. Romanoff is familiar with the emotional consequences of being a killer — another element carried over into Avengers: Age of Ultron — her very reason for joining the Avengers. Neither Black Widow nor Hawkeye take narrative precedence by any means, but they flesh out the human stakes of this conflict in a way that endangering abstract billions no longer does at this point in blockbuster history.Some say these characters are wasted in the film; I disagree, and not just because they get their own stellar action beats. Thor, after a solo entry in which he faces up to his warmongering (at least in theory), finally accepts that Asgardians may not be much better than humans. He likens his brother, and thus himself, to mystical creatures that destroy everything in their path, a perspective that plays a vital role in the Avengers' sequel.Thor, Black Widow and Hawkeye, much like Bruce Banner, see themselves as monsters with destructive capabilities. That's four out of the six Avengers, people who according to Loki "lie and kill in the service of liars and killers." He's not wrong, which is exactly why the camera circling around the team in their moment of heroism works as well as it does.It's the beginning of the Avengers becoming more than their pasts.