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Created May 07, 2012 10:46PM PST • Edited May 05, 2019 09:27AM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Really Great 4.5

   The Avengers do more than avenge. They dominate – the box office and Disney’s financial performance.

   More personally, they fulfill the hopes of fanboys everywhere, including older generations who don’t even know they are fanboys. Ever love a Marvel comic? Prepare to be fulfilled, fanboy.

   We’re talking the biggest opening weekend ever, a fitting achievement for the culmination of five huge prequels, each the cinematic distillation of half a century’s comik brilliance. Literature even.

   It shows on screen through a six pack of Marvel heroes, each with a deep backstory, personal problems and relationship issues with one another. Their differing force profiles elegantly come together in Stan Lee & Gene Kirby’s Marvel Universal Reality Field. Amazingly elegant and accomplished storytelling, this.

   There must be 50 close-ups in The Avengers, with perhaps a couple dozen actors each getting theirs. Robert Downey, Jr. gets the most, of course. It’s still not enough.

   Chris Hemsworth’s Thor and Chris Evans’ Captain America come in second. Both are worthy. Evans ably fills out the suit and the role, while perfect heman Hemsworth is the new heavyweight ideal. Dude must of weighed in at least at 250. Guns? Howitzers.

   Mark Ruffalo is perhaps the best Bruce Banner yet, twitchy and judgmental. It also helps that The Avengers’ Incredible Hulk is the best CG image yet of the big green id.

   Joss Wheedon seems to have heeded the advice he was bound to get from Exec Producers Stan Lee, Jon Favreau and Avi Arad. Of course, with a Board like that and a star like Downey, it would have been on him if the movie was less than Really Great. Really Great it is, which is bodaciously plenty and one hell of an accomplishment given the dramatic, thematic, cinematic and egotistic complexity the project entailed.

   We mortals assembled by the hundreds of millions to witness The Avengers assemble. Good choice us.

4. Acting

   Great 4.0

   There are a lot of big roles in this movie. Pity there aren’t enough great stars to fill them. There are several however.

   Robert Downey Jr. is sure as hell a majorly great star. Hall of Fame great. His Tony Stark / Iron Man long since went into Tinseltown Immortality. His performance in The Avengers gilds the lily at the same elevated level we’ve come to expect. “Better clench up.” Just saying.

   The rest of the large cast will have to await another day to be recognized here.

5. Male Stars Perfect 5.0

   Downey’s Stark, Samuel L’s Fury, Hemsworth’s Thor, Evans’ Captain America

6. Female Stars Very Good 3.5

7. Female Costars Great 4.0

   Cobie Smulders and Gwyneth Paltrow

8. Male Costars Very Good 3.5

10. Film

    Really Great 4.5

    Joss Wheedon harnesses a humungous crew and story without losing touch with its regular human moments. To keep one’s head when all others are losing theirs, that’s something. Many directors would be overwhelmed with a thousand person production. Wheedon keeps it personal. Wowza.

    Exec Producers include Jon Favreau and Stan Lee. Hard to go wrong with those two guys pointing the way, and Avi Arad sitting behind them.

11. Direction Really Great 4.5

12. Play Perfect 5.0

    Continually on, with nary a wasted line, lots of truly funny punch lines, several poignant moments and a complicated yet coherent plot consummately essayed. Bravo!

13. Music Really Great 4.5

14. Visuals Perfect 5.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Risqué 2.1

    PG-13 perfection. Risqué enough that pre-teens will know they’re seeing something kinda naughty but most parents will laugh along with.

17. Sex Titillating 1.6

18. Violence Brutal 2.6

19. Rudeness Salty 2.2

21. Reality

    Fantasy 4.1

    The 250 visual artists are perhaps 5% of the total production crew, which must number in the thousands.

    Marvel’s magic is to present a world that is circumstantially surreal, which is to say recognizable, yet is complete fantasy in physical and biological terms.

22. Circumstantial Surreal 2.3

23. Biological Fantasy 5.0

24. Physical Fantasy 5.0

    Conservation of Energy gets no respect in the Marvel world.