Great movie!  My son and I saw the movie over the weekend with a large group of parents and other teenage boys.  Everyone loved it- the movie had action, explosions, special effects, characters that were actually multi-dimensional, and a real story line.  Craft a good movie, and people will go to the movie theater to see it.

I will be seeing it this weekend with my teenaged children.

I am probably dating myself, but I was genuinely disappointed to discover that the film was not a remake of the outstanding 1960s TV program with Patrick McNee and Diana Rigg.

Same here at first, #2. I loved that show. But Downey’s Iron Man was good, and Evans’s Capt America, so looking forward to this one.

I’m dating myself as well - my wife asked me if this movie was based on the old British TV show with Diana Rigg.  Sadly, there was a movie based on the tv show that came in the late 90’s with Uma Thurman and Ralph Fiennes that was really bad.

Yeah, maybe the whole world should pretend that that 90s movie never happened, and then Ridley Scott or some other top British director would take another stab at it.

Here is my issue with this movie (as it is with ALL Joss Whedon movies)

**SPOILERS**

Why you gotta kill Coulson, Joss?  You always kill someone in your movies!  Stop it!!

However, I did love the movie.  I went to the Ultimate Marvel Movie Marathon on the Thursday it opened.  6 movies (3 in 3-D for $40).  Long day, but worth it.

Yuh - I too was disappointed to find this wasn’t about elegant Brits with sang froid and a Bentley, but instead about excitable American superheroes leaping about all over the place.

The Avengers were something special.  I spent several months in Switzerland in 1968 and was delighted that I could watch them there in French.  I remember the classic line translated as “Madame Peel - On a besoin de nous!”.  It reminded me somewhat of “Asterix chez les Bretons” with its delightful anglicized french, “Je dis, vieil homme!”

I agree, Kendall, it was the most enjoyable movie I’ve seen for a very long time.

And Brian from T19, I feel your pain, but that is a permanent feature of Whedon’s approach. Sooner or later he has to kill someone you care about, or at a minimum (as in Toy Story) find an analogy for the fear of death for his protaganists. For Whedon, ‘getting’ our mortality is fundamental to ‘get’ the nature of human life, it permeates all his works, and nothing brings it home as much as getting you to like a character and then killing them sympathetically.

It’s like Loki’s little rant about humans being made to serve. Whedon has to have a highly unsympathetic character stand in for God (who Whedon has called “the sky bully”) and mouth some twisted version of a Christian view of God. Because he also thinks it’s basic to ‘getting’ the nature of human life to ‘get’ that God is both evil and non-existent.

Clever scripts, multidimensional characters, funny lines, something about friends forming a family, someone lovable dying, and someone despicable showing us how terrible and how illusionary God is, that’s been the Whedon package fairly consistently for years now.