Greg D. Smith reaches the end of Phase 1 of his runthrough the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Earth’s mightiest heroes assemble to try to stave off a threat of world-threatening proportions in a task only marginally more intimidating than that facing director Joss Whedon – getting six heroes, three of whom had starred in their own movies and one of whom had been recast, into a sensible(ish) running time of a movie and allowing each to shine without Robert Downey Jnr stealing  the whole show.

And so we come to the movie that arguably cemented the MCU as a successful commercial entity, without which we may not be standing where we are today. For years, the idea of this sort of team up film had been kicked around by studios (Justice League also being considered many times, including George Miller’s ill-fated venture in 2008 which never saw the light of day). The issue was a logistical one – how could it be possible to cram so many big characters into one movie? Spider-Man 3 had suffered in 2007 with a lack of focus born of too many villains – wouldn’t that problem just be multiplied with a plethora of heroes fighting for screen time? And how exactly would you prevent Tony Stark stealing every scene he was in?

The answer – to that last question at least – was that you couldn’t. Downey Jnr’s Stark was by that time by far the most established of the cast (two solo films to Hulk, Thor and Cap’s one and Black Widow and Hawkeye’s relative cameo appearances) and the actor himself fizzed with an energy and snark that audiences couldn’t help but love. The answer that the studio hit upon was hiring one Joseph Hill Whedon, he of Buffy and Firefly fame. If anyone could deal with an ensemble cast in a fantastical universe and ensure everyone got assigned equal snark, surely it was he?

And therein lies what – for me – is one of the slight weaknesses of Avengers Assemble (for clarity sake’s we’ll use the UK title) as a movie. We had five movies prior to this which had constructed different characters from wildly different backgrounds and origins and each of whom had been realised by the vision of a separate – and quite different director. Whedon chose the easiest way out of bringing those differing elements together by simply making them broadly the same as (what he saw as) the strongest component. Put bluntly, everyone got a dose of Stark Snark.

Don’t misunderstand me – I enjoyed this movie, I still enjoy re-watching it now, and adore Downey Jnr’s performance as Stark. However, it cannot be missed that different tones had applied elsewhere – Banner was a jittery, principled man of science, reason and pacifism. Thor was a headstrong, immature warrior king just starting on the path to unlocking his true potential and ultimate destiny, and Steve Rogers was a no-nonsense, straight up and down man of rock hard principle and unshakeable faith in standing up for what was right. Having all of them keep up with Tony by giving each their own zingers, nods to camera, sly jokes etc may have been an effective way of linking up the team, but it did lose some of the character each had carved to that point (in one case almost fatally as I shall cover in a later piece).

Still, Joss had his plan, and broadly speaking it worked. What looked from trailers in danger of becoming ‘Iron Man brings some friends to play’ actually coalesced into a coherent ensemble piece in which pretty much everyone gets their screen time and their moment to shine. All that was needed was a strong villain or threat to tie the gang together, a common foe to unite them. Herein, lies the second problem.

Now, obviously with hindsight we can see that the MCU wanted to build towards Thanos as a villain – but at that point in 2012, many cinema-going fans who didn’t read comics (myself included) had little idea who the Mad Titan even was. That said, did we really need to bring Loki back? I’ll posit a quick question: Thanos’ ultimate plan, as subsequent films have made painfully obvious, is to obtain the various Infinity Stones in order to fit them all in his big golden glove and destroy half the galaxy. Why then, with one in his possession (the Mind Stone) did he place that stone in a staff and gift it to Loki to invade the Earth? If your answer is ‘to get the Tesseract, which is itself an Infinity Stone’, I ask this – why is he also not trying to get the Eye of Agamotto (which he must also know is on Earth – blimey, we are a positive museum of the damned things!), and more importantly when Loki has the Tesseract (which is literally right at the beginning of the movie – he arrives via a portal it creates) why does he not just immediately return it to Thanos? Loki’s need to dominate the Earth, this burning desire to prove himself after the devastating defeat he suffered at the end of Thor is all understandable and checks out, but why Thanos indulges this when all he really wants is the Infinity Stones is – to me – a complete mystery.

But it’s not just the nonsensical nature of Thanos’/Loki’s plan that irritates, but the presence of Loki at all. Once again, the idea seems to have been to grab a charismatic lead who could sneer and quip at the same pace at Stark. Loki’s very plan – to get the Avengers in one place in order to break them, to deliberately provoke Banner into becoming the Hulk, a creature contemptuously easily capable of overpowering him, makes no sense. Again, he has the Tesseract. He has no need of provoking the Avengers, getting captured, any of it.

It’s an unfortunate repetition (one of many) of the Joker’s plan in The Dark Knight – a convoluted set of events strung together which the audience is asked to believe were all precisely and carefully planned out by the villain to occur in an order that required dozens of individuals to react in a precisely predicted way to work. The reason Nolan got away with it was that his Joker was so unhinged, so chaotic, that it was perfectly reasonable to assume that in actual fact he had a dozen plans, each more skewed than the last, and that the eventual sequence of events that transpired could easily be a hybrid of a dozen or more of them. Subsequent movie villains who have tried the same trope have failed because they lack that element. Though Banner describes Loki as a ‘bag of cats, you can smell crazy on him’, Loki himself is actually presented as an in control, Machiavellian character, and his plan therefore just doesn’t cut it in the validity stakes.

If it sounds like I dislike this movie I reiterate that I don’t. It’s an extremely enjoyable action flick, but for me it is necessarily one of the less deep entries in the franchise. Juggling so many characters, keeping the balance between all of them, was a herculean challenge. It was inevitable that something must be sacrificed and it was narrative depth and coherency.

But the characters do get to have fun. Whether it’s Tony’s quoted-to-death ‘Billionaire playboy philanthropist’ line, Thor’s ‘He’s adopted’ delivered as a half-question, half-excuse response or Steve’s quiet handover of a twenty dollar bill to Nick Fury, the movie brims with fast-paced humour and wit. It sings off the screen because of that humour, all trademark Whedon with snappy, back and forth dialogue, tensions within the team as egos collide and then the satisfaction of everyone realising that they’re stronger as a team, working towards the common goal of defeating an evil, but notably charming and well-spoken villain. It works because it’s a well-trodden formula, and Whedon gets the budget and FX suite to back it up.

And what FX we get – let’s not beat around the bush, when it released in 2012 this was easily one of the prettiest big-budget action movies yet seen. Prior to Man of Steel, audiences still weren’t squeamish about collateral damage and cities being levelled in celluloid, and so the destruction of downtown New York was hailed as a cinematic gem and a masterclass in special effects and stunt work. There’s genuine heft and weight to the gigantic creatures floating impossibly over the city, and the impact of them smashing buildings aside is every bit as real to the audience as the incredible power of the Hulk as he literally faces one down and stops it with one mighty punch.

But it’s not just the final scene that’s gorgeous. Who can forget the first appearance of the Helicarrier as it launched ponderously into the air? Or how about the explosive confrontation between Thor, Iron Man and Captain America as they meet for the first time? It’s a movie that handles its set pieces as well as it scripts its perfectly crafted zingers (often at the same time) and as an example of Whedon’s undoubted talent to match the two to one another.

There’s heart here too. The issue is that it too often gets quickly washed over by the need for another zing or explosion. The scene in Berlin, where Loki stands before a kneeling crowd delivering a monologue and is opposed by one brave old German gentleman who replies to Loki’s ‘There are no men like me’ with a weary ‘There are always men like you’ as moving, beautiful music plays in the background. It’s a chilling, perfect moment, dripping with real-world resonance as much as in-universe importance, but Captain America has to arrive in a somersault to deflect Loki’s blast. Then, Steve has a shot at delivering a powerful speech about a man getting people to kneel last time he was in Berlin, and them not getting on (technically not true, but stick with it) and then Tony arrives, blasting out AC/DC through the overridden PA systems of the quinjet, and zingers start to fly. There’s a sense that every time the movie might settle down into something a little serious, the director gets nervous that we might get bored, and feels the need to lob more stuff at the screen to keep us occupied. It makes for a pacy movie, but one that can at times feel lacking in depth.

This then undermines the most serious emotional beat of the movie – the death of Coulson. Supposedly traumatised by the death of a man who was regarded, respectively, as an annoyance (by Tony), and as a slightly creepy oddball with a hero-worship issue and no sense of boundaries (by Cap) and ignoring the deaths of everyone else who surely died in the attack on the Helicarrier, Iron Man and Steve elect to nip off to New York to save the day as the team they couldn’t possibly be while Coulson lived and breathed, with Black Widow and Hawkeye in tow. How Thor and Hulk came to be drawn back when neither was on board for Coulson’s death and couldn’t have known about it is anyone’s guess, but by the time they arrive again, the movie is throwing more explosions and one-liners at you so that you don’t notice.

The finale is, unfortunately, as empty a spectacle as the rest. For all that it’s gorgeous to watch and filled with yet more one-liners and droll observations, it lacks as much narrative structure and fidelity as the rest. Why did Selvig, under the influence of Loki, bother to build in a ‘back door’ to the portal device so that the portal could be closed? Why do all the Chitauri neatly fall over, a la the Droid Army in Phantom Menace when their mothership is destroyed (they’re living creatures, not droids with a control ship, I have yet to see any convincing explanation for this phenomenon). Why does Loki suddenly and meekly surrender to the Avengers? Why do Nick Fury’s bosses decide to nuke New York after very little time, and not immediately relieve Fury of command when he defies them by shooting down a plane? There are so many elements of plot that don’t stand up to even the briefest scrutiny, but you won’t mind because the visuals are so beautiful, the one-liners so well-crafted and the laughs so plentiful. It’s a movie that almost wills you not to stop and think too long about any of it, afraid that even a moment’s contemplation will make you see just how few clothes the Emperor wears.

Much as I like it, it is not a strong entry in the MCU canon in hindsight. Where many assure themselves that the MCU was built by Joss Whedon, and couldn’t have succeeded without him, I am rather amazed that the strong body of work we have seen grew from it. Stronger, better crafted ‘individual’ films have emerged since, and with most of them, they have ignored, or at least borrowed only lightly from the events of this. In reality, though people often bemoan that the Avengers didn’t show up for Malekith’s attempt to destroy the world, or HYDRA’s emergence from SHIELD, or Iron Man’s fight against the Mandarin, in reality it was for the best. Avengers Assemble, in light of the MCU as it stands, is best seen as a sort of festive holiday special – a collaborative party piece that is fun enough on its own but doesn’t really bear too much impact on the body of work it sits within. Or if you prefer, a Marvel heroes-themed adventure park ride – fun while it lasts, as stuff happens in your face, but of no particular long term narrative impact.