"All hail the warrior king of this dizzying, dazzling 3D action epic (...) Whedon is not afraid to slow down to let feelings sink in. Fanboy heresy, perhaps, but the key to the film's supersmart, supercool triumph. In the final third, when Whedon lets it rip and turns the battle intensity up to 11, all your senses will be blown. I have one word for The Avengers: Wowza!"
by Peter Travers in Rolling Stone
"But from a logistical point of view alone, he imposes a grip on the material that feels like that of a benevolent general, marshaling myriad technical resources (including an excellent use of 3D) while, even more impressively, juggling eight major characters, giving them all cool and important things to do (...) It's clamorous, the save-the-world story is one everyone's seen time and again, and the characters have been around for more than half a century in 500 comic book issues. But Whedon and his cohorts have managed to stir all the personalities and ingredients together so that the resulting dish, however familiar, is irresistibly tasty again."
by Todd McCarthy in The Hollywood Reporter
"In terms of storytelling, The Avengers is for the most part a highly functional, banged-together vehicle that runs on synthetic franchise fuel. Yet the grand finale of CGI action, set in the streets of New York, is — in every sense — smashing. True, it wouldn't be out of place in a Michael Bay movie, but no Transformer was ever as transfixing as this leaping, flying, pummeling superteam. It makes you eager to see what they'll do next, now that they've defeated a threat even bigger than their egos."
by Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly
"And with director and co-writer Joss Whedon, they couldn’t be in better hands. He’s pulled off the tricky feat of juggling a large ensemble cast and giving everyone a chance to shine, of balancing splashy set pieces with substantive ideology. Stuff gets blowed up real good in beautifully detailed 3-D in “The Avengers” — the area in and around Grand Central Terminal, for example, gets obliterated beyond recognition in an exhausting, climactic battle — but the film as a whole is never a mess from a narrative perspective. Whedon keeps a tight rein on some potentially unwieldy material, and the result is a film that simultaneously should please purists (one of which he is) as well as those who aren’t necessarily comic-book aficionados. He also stays true to the characters while establishing a tone that’s very much his own."
by Christy Lemire in Associated Press
OSCAR POTENTIAL CATEGORIES:
- Best Director (Joss Whedon)
- Best Adapted Screenplay
- Best Visual Effects
- Best Sound Editing
- Best Sound Mixing
BUT...
The AMPAS tends to snub (the great X-Men frachise, is an obvious example) or to don't recognize Marvel movies more than just in a few technicall categories, no matter how great they are.
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