AVENGERS: The Golden Alliance1

Written by Cheng Hui Jie

I would really love to keep this review short and sweet but that’s almost impos­si­ble because AVENGERS was just too awesome!

That’s right! MARVEL’S AVENGERS was a huge suc­cess, earn­ing over $1 Billion world­wide and also the title of the FIRST MOVIE EVER to make a 9-digit sum in just 2 weeks after its première!

I must admit that AVENGERS was a movie that I ini­tially thought would turn out bad because of the say­ing, “too many chefs will spoil the soup”, but I was proven wrong. All it needed was a sure-to-succeed recipe that they could fol­low and in this case, the mighty amaz­ing Director Joss Wheden (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) was their ulti­mate cookbook.

I’d have to admit that the open­ing sequence for this highly antic­i­pated movie was rather dull but the remark­able flow of the movie sal­vaged it. Thankfully, the ori­gin of each mem­ber was not looked into for this movie that was meant to be a sequel for sev­eral other movies. We were brought right-smack into the mid­dle of a sit­u­a­tion and all the char­ac­ters were intro­duced with just the right amount of infor­ma­tion for first com­ers to under­stand it and for long-time fans to not find it too repetitive.

It started off with the usual cheesy “galac­tic scene” where aliens are putting earth­lings down but cooler, with the pres­ence of an immor­tal who is also a super vil­lain with rav­ish­ing looks– Loki (Tom Hiddleston).

Planning to retrieve their pow­er­ful glow­ing cube known as tesser­act from Earth, Loki paid a visit to S.H.I.E.L.D with a grand entrance nonethe­less. That was where every­thing started to hap­pen really quickly after the cau­tiously cal­cu­la­tive Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) called for the AVENGERS to be assem­bled in the nick of time (no pun intended) to save the world together.

Another rea­son why I loved this movie is because Director Joss Wheden clev­erly addressed each and every sin­gle superhero’s ego and per­son­al­ity into the film using spe­cific scenes of them fight­ing each other. Among them was the long awaited fight between Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) and Captain America (Chris Evans). The lines were gen­uinely epic and the cast did a fan­tas­tic job in their por­trayal of their roles. The flow of the film was per­fect, the sequences were great and there was almost no dead time through­out the whole film.

Bringing your atten­tion back to our fab­u­lous cast, a char­ac­ter you need to look out for would be the Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo). This is prob­a­bly one of the best on-screen Hulk per­for­mance and I really liked how Joss Wheden man­aged to divert our focus from one char­ac­ter to another, espe­cially with the pres­ence of a char­ac­ter that have always been in the spot­light through­out the whole film, like Hulk. I was never once a Hulk fan but I’d have to admit that Bruce Banner stole the show with his green bum, no wait, it’s Mark Ruffalo’s notice­able chem­istry with Robert Downey Jr. in their comedic scenes. This just might be your only chance to catch the sexy green giant with ‘anger man­age­ment issues’ work­ing as part of an amaz­ing team.

Another char­ac­ter to look out for would be the noble but bossy Captain America, who also hap­pened to be ridicu­lously cute in his old-fashioned way. Being awak­ened from a nap too long, the cap­tain was still as brave and upright as he was before he was genet­i­cally mod­i­fied. It was no sur­prise for the stub­born and prac­ti­cal cap­tain to be in bad terms with the snarky and snob­bish owner of Stark Industries. Remember when I told you their lines were gen­uinely funny? Check this scene out!

Iron Man told Captain America, “No offense, but I don’t play well with others”

And so the cap­tain posed him a ques­tion,“ Big man and a suit armour, take that away, what are you?”

Being witty and self-obsessed as usual, Tony replied “ Uh… Genius, bil­lion­aire, play­boy, philanthropist?”

Two insanely adorable and pow­er­ful super­heroes bat­tling it out with their words of wis­dom was just too much to resist! My advice? Take note when­ever the self-proclaimed phil­an­thropist (Iron Man) is around, it’s either going to be some cool kick-ass scenes or super duper hilar­i­ous lines com­ing up! Need we say more about the man whom most of us are so famil­iar and in love with?

Of course, we can­not for­get about the almighty Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and his super vil­lain brother, Loki, who pretty much con­tin­ued from where they left off in their last Thor movie. I must say that the duo made a heav­enly cou­ple, look­ing so per­fect as immor­tal broth­ers but sadly, Loki had to play the role of the adopted younger brother who has lived through dis­ap­point­ment in his brother’s shadow. Hiddleston looked more like a high-fashion model than an actor with his exclu­sive super vil­lain out­fit while Hemsworth looked like he could eas­ily close an adver­tise­ment deal for a hair prod­uct with his lus­ciously golden locks.

Bringing a whole team of extra­or­di­nary super heroes could be tough but we could leave it to Nicky Fury to make them set­tle all their dif­fer­ences or should I say, put all their crap away and join forces to kick some ass, in this case, alien asses. It could not have been done with­out the sac­ri­fice of one of his beloved S.H.I.E.L.D Agent, Coulson (played by Clark Gregg), who turned out to be Captain America’s num­ber one fan, or should I say, a HARDCORE FAN OF CAPTAIN AMERICA!!! Who knew Clark Gregg would make such a cute fan boy?!

I per­son­ally felt that Agent Maria Hill (played by How-I-Met-Your-Mother star Cobie Smulders) did not leave much of an impres­sion on me, per­haps because she did not appear much in the movie. Another famous actor who had too lit­tle screen time in the film would be Hawkeye (played by Mission Impossible 5 star Jeremy Renner).

Did I men­tion how Hawkeye and Black Widow’s (Scarlett Johansson) romance was just right for the block­buster movie? It was not too lovey-dovey but there were enough sparks to see their pas­sion for each other in a pro­fes­sional man­ner as top-notch S.H.I.E.L.D agents. In this very much male-dominated team cast, Scarlett Johansson some­how man­aged to cap­ture our atten­tion with her smart and slick fight­ing tech­niques. Apart from her strik­ing resem­blance with the comic book char­ac­ter, Johansson also showed that the Black Widow is not some­one you can mess with.



Despite the absence of my favourite MARVEL charc­ter Wolverine, the movie sur­passed my expec­ta­tions with­out a doubt. Discard the overused unsteady shots from the scene where aliens were tak­ing over Manhattan city plus the overly cheesy open­ing sequence and this movie would be a per­fect ten!

Be sure to catch the AVENGERS in cin­e­mas before it’s too late! It is not every­day that you see a movie receive a 93% rat­ing from Rotten Tomatoes and that is really how MARVEL-lous the film was! On a last note, remem­ber to stay through the credits!