Carl the Critic: Reviews "The Avengers" [Caution: Contains Semi-Spoilers About What Happens After the Credits]

Ladies and gentleman...

This is it...

The big one...

One of the biggest nerdgasmic films of 2012...

I was initially going to review "The Raven", because I was in a mood that made me want to review a bad movie, but after a bunch of friends convinced me to watch "The Avengers" I couldn't refuse.

So enough back story, let's get to the synopsis.

Our story starts with Nick Fury getting off his helicopter to investigate why the Tesseract (a cube full of Smurf Sperm) is opening up a portal to another world. Suddenly a mysterious figure named Loki appears, kills a bunch of people, and controls the minds of Clint Barton (aka Hawkeye) and Dr. Erik Selvig to do his bidding. He also steals the Tesseract cube and this leads to Fury to call upon the superheros for help:

• Agent Natasha Romanoff (aka Black Widow) a Russian assassin with an American accent, who has the special powers of kicking ass.
• Dr. Bruce Banner (aka The Jolly Green Giant, aka Hulk) a scientist who was struck with gamma radiation, and turns green and gets larger whenever he gets angry.
• Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) basically Marvel's version of Batman, except not as tortured, has no heart, and is ego centric.
• Steve Rogers (aka Captain America) Chris Evans! That's all!
• The only one who isn't really called to help, but comes anyway is Thor (aka... Thor) the Norse god of thunder and war, who is Loki's brother... sort of

I am only mentioning this about the superheros because there are some people who are not familiar with these comic book characters probably because they have been living under rocks for the past 73 years.

Anyway, it's the goal of our heroes to stop Loki, retrieve the Tesseract cube, save the world, and blah blah blah.

If you are a 15 boy year old, please wipe the drool off your face right now. It is really grossing me out.

Okay good, let's move on!

This is a film that is made for a particular audience; One that has watched all of the Marvel movies in theaters, waited until the very end, and became really hyped about the idea of seeing almost all of them together. Aka NERDS!

Though to be fair, "The Avengers" doesn't entirely limit its audience. There are many gags in the film that can be enjoyed by almost everyone. However it does help to watch the previous Marvel movies since "Iron Man" to get properly hyped up and introduced to the characters.

The biggest problem the film has in my opinion is its lack of focus. You see "The Avengers" has the main plot that I mentioned above, but there is also many other subplots including:

• a subplot of the avengers working as a team
• relations between the characters
• getting Hawkeye and Dr. Selvig out of Loki's mind control
• prevent Bruce Banner from getting angry

This isn't really that big of an issue, and it's hard to get angry at an action film when you see scenes like when Hulk confronts Loki, and Loki gives an emotional speech of how he is a god, only to be picked up mid-sentence and smashed against the ground repeatedly like a cg rag doll. Although 0.01% of the special effects were cheesy, 99.99% of the time they were very well rendered! Cinematography was weird in this film; The majority of the time the camera would be either looking up from beneath a character, tilted at an angle, or both, and it was distracting for me, however it wasn't as bad as say "Battlefield Earth" where every shot was tilted at an angle for no reason. The only other big issue I can think of was that the film felt like it was 3 hours long (it's actually 143 minutes), but again this isn't a big deal because if I know you, you will be enjoying the movie too much to care about the time.

Despite its shortcomings, I enjoyed "The Avengers". It was funny, action packed, and is one of the best films of the year (so far).

I give "The Avengers" 9.5 out of 10.

Some people may have left right after the movie was over and may have missed the two post-credit scenes. So in case you did, here they are.

• We are introduced to a new threat at the end of the film, and although many people say that the villain in the end credits is "Super Skrull", others say it is "Thanos". I'm not entirely sure myself, but the character at the end credits looked more like Thanos than Super Skrull. All I know is that the character looked like this:

Super Skrull looks like this:

and Thanos looks like this

Feel free to leave me your insightful comments below to debate who it is.

• At the very, very end after the credits, the Avengers are at a shawarma restaurant that Tony Stark mentioned earlier, eating in dead silence.

This article was written and edited by Carl the Critic © 2012 HubPages.com