The movie was really great, better than I would have expected for Avengers. The comedy was prevalent and well-timed and the action scenes were all marvelous. That said it never hit the highs to become the truly great movie some claim it is. On top of that a few things did bother me:

Why why why? What can they possibly do with Batman now? At least the new Spider-Man failboot is going for one of his alternate mythologies, which might make up for the 99% bad idea part. If they try to keep in line with the 'dark' and 'menacing' Batman then people will just say "turns out Nolan". Just, really, no no no.

Zach Snyder will fare better with Superman, although why he hasn't used Tom Welling is beyond me.

That was a very funny line as it made me smile when I read it. Using Tom Welling would be the equivalent of using Jennifer Aniston as Lois Lane.Yikes. Henry Cavill is an excellent choice for Superman as well as a good actor.Zack Snyder on the other hand with Watchmen(dull) and Sucker Punch(really bad) maybe not up for the job and may give us another Green Lantern.He is more or less a journeyman director without much nuance or subtlety.I had high hopes for the movie till his name was attached.

Actually I was deadly serious, I thought Welling was excellent in Smallville. Well, as Clark Kent anyway!

We really do disagree on Snyder. Watchmen was overly long, but I find little fault otherwise. Sucker Punch... was my movie of the year.

I doubt it'd be Green Lantern, I'm thinking more like Incredible Hulk without the unintentional hilarity of Tim Roth!

Actually fuck it, I don't really see why I should be diplomatic about this.

I've never disliked a movie that Snyder has directed (although I've never seen Dawn of the Dead). In addition, the first movie he hasn't adapted (Sucker Punch) is also my favourite bit of his work.

People have said that Joss Wheadon did well with Avengers because he 'gets' his target audience. Snyder also does, in spades. Could any other contemporary director have done as good a job bringing Watchmen to the screen? Could any other director in history? Possibly except Wheadon himself (that's me giving him credit now since he finally did something I've seen more than once!). Has anybody ever made a movie quite like Sucker Punch (for better or worse)?

The guy has multiple original bones throughout his entire body and at the very least, his treatment of Super Man will be unique and original to say the least.

Haters, to the left please.

The difference between Watchmen and Avengers is that Watchmen is made only for the target audience of the comic die-hards, the rest of the audience be damned. The joy of Avengers is that it manages to service the die-hards while remaining incredibly entertaining and complete as simply a movie. I did Like Watchmen, but more as an illustration of the book than as a stand-alone movie.

I am looking forward to Snyder's Superman.

Yeah it's one of the biggest issues people have with Watchmen. I'd never heard of it prior to the film but still loved it. I eventually got around to reading the graphic novel and I do think that certain parts (the 'how Dr Manhattan sees time' part for example) weren't quite grasped in the adaptation but other than that I much prefer the movie. I also prefer the newer ending...

Totally looking forward to Man Of Steel.

Still not sure what anyone can possibly do with Batman now. Fancy having the shadow of Nolan's boner looming over your entire production?

Snyder got the look and feel right, but it was all window dressing, as he seemed to miss the underlying themes. Keep in mind, however, that I'm an Alan Moore purist, so I think that most adaptations of his works to film have been garbage with the slight exception of From Hell.


Am I the only one who thought that Singer's Superman Returns was not that bad a film at all? Not that I mind seeing Snyder do a take on it, but I thought that Singer did a pretty good job.

No, I also thought it was great! Kevin Spacey was just brilliant as Lex, leading the audience to almost like him as a character (sort of) but then despise him when he ruins Superman's day.

My attitude is sort of comparable to the evolution of Batman between Burton and Nolan. I really liked what Burton did with the character and his world and if Nolan hadn't bothered, the Burton movies would have remained my favourite. Perhaps Snyder will do with Superman what Nolan did with Batman, and finally put the foot down on how it should be done.

So no theories about the future of Batman?

Like Burt Ward I had to slam my fist into my palm thinking "Holy Ed Wood, Batman" when I saw that.I think your really on an island with that one. It was Snyder's pet project that he produced,wrote and directed and it showed he can't do any of the above in this single case.The domestic BO of 36 million has to be considered a huge flop against a 100 mil budget almost John Carter status.

The worst thing he could do is just make an average Superman movie.He has to literally match the Avengers & Batman for critical and commercial success to be considered a good movie.Heck of a benchmark.This is the whole reason for the reboot in that Bryan Singers movie did not light the world on fire so was considered a failure.All the normal moviegoers I know who are not into comics hated Superman Returns as boring and humorless.I can't remember as I fell asleep through most of it.

Does anyone else feel that Roger Ebert's review of this film is kind of underwhelming? Of course, Mr. Ebert is one of my favorite film critics, and I always respect his opinion, but his review reads more like a plot summary followed by a quick sentence briefly explaining what he thought of the experience. I really thought he was going to give "The Avengers" at least three and a half stars out of four, but it just seems as if he really didn't have all that much fun. Oh, well.

Mr. Berardinelli summed up my thoughts on this movie perfectly. Best wide release of the year so far, along with "Haywire", "Chronicle", "The Secret World of Arrietty", "The Hunger Games", "The Cabin in the Woods", and "The Pirates! Band of Misfits".

I had a lot of issues with Watchmen. I thought it had many brilliant sections. The opening fight scene, leading into the opening credits were masterful. But I feel that parts of the film were very tonally inconsistent. Often the uses of extreme gore were very jarring, in ways that felt incongruent to what was happening in the scene. A lot of the soundtrack was awkwardly integrated into the film as well. The Sound of Silence just didn't fit the tone of the funeral scene, and the use of Halleluiah in the sex scene came across as corny and laughably bad. Richard Nixon's appearance (especially the fake nose) was simply distracting. And I felt a lot of the film spent too much time trying to look 'cool' or 'edgy' (especially the speed ramping in the fight scenes) which diminished the emotional effect of the film. Watchmen is fundamentally a human story, about real people trying to be superheroes (with the exception of Dr. Manhattan), and I felt that the overly stylish depiction robbed the humane aspect of the characters, depicting them more as traditional superheroes, which ran contrary to the themes of the story.

Now many of these points are indeed nitpicks, but they do all accumulate over the course of the film, and ultimately gives an impression of a film-maker who's made so many tonal and stylistic mistakes, that it almost ruins the film. I don't feel that a master filmmaker would have such an issue handling the tone of their movie. Don't get me wrong, when Snyder gets it right, things work marvelously, but he needs to be more consistent in the future if he every wants to rise above a mere technically efficient film maker.

One thing I will say about Whedon with The Avengers, and that's that he absolutely nails the tone.

It was alright. Surprised by how good it was since it was made by Joss Whedon, and also I never really liked any of the Marvel made movies (I am not a comic book reader though). The Avengers was certainly the best of a bunch of average films except maybe Ang Lee's Hulk. Although Whedon does at times do a bad job of the action scenes. Like with the fight between Thor and Loki, so many cuts and close-ups it was hard really to tell what was going on.

But I can see how this movie probably won't stand up to repeat viewings when watched on TV. It relies on too much spectacle. But I did enjoyed my time.

Pretty much in agreement that there may not be much left to do without a totally new story. I wouldn't mind seeing a sort of reverse Avengers. All the bad guys and gals team up and whip Batman at the beginning of the film and leave him bound and gagged like Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction, and then fight over all the spoils for the rest of the movie while the citizen of Gothem form a fighting force. I wonder if it would be possible to make a successful super villain movie where no standout hero steps in and saves the day, but perhaps still with hope for the future?

Haven't seen The Avengers yet. Being the father of an 8 year old boy, I'm obligated to take him soon and am looking forward to it even though I'm not very knowledgeable about the characters.

I haven't read a comic book in 40 years, and I don't know anything about the Avengers. So I came into this movie with zero expectations. It's OK for a superhero movie, I guess, but that's faint praise indeed.

I actually enjoyed the first part of the movie. The characters were interesting, and they did a good job of fitting each one into the plot. But in the last 30 minutes, it devolved into standard superhero fare. As is usual in these movies, the climax is a CGI-filled extravaganza where the monsters wreak havoc on a Big City (this time, it's New York instead of Tokyo). These set pieces have become boring and predictable. I knew we were in trouble when the evil metal wormy things came out to wreck the city: I had an immediate flashback to the last Transformers movie, and that's not a good feeling.

Not being a reader of the comic books, I had no idea who that dude was with the bow and arrows. Don't remember seeing him in any of the previous movies. Looked to me like his main super power was that he shot about 10,000 arrows from his little pack, even though it held about 12.

I guess I'd rate this about 2.5 stars, although admittedly I'm not the target audience for this movie.

Then I'll happily sit on said island, enjoying a movie whilst the rest of the world clenches over how rubbish the new Spider-man will almost certainly be

To be honest if you can watch anything by Snyder and think "bad director" then... well I have nothing to say to that really, other than "what do you want exactly?" It's no proof of quality to compare the guy's work to the likes of Twilight etc because having cancer is probably more pleasant than watching that horse-shit again but I feel I must point out what ACTUAL horse-shit looks like.

Anyway... Avengers has definitely changed the game, to quote what the cool kids are saying.

Oh I think Snyder is a very strong visualist, but there's much more to directing then having a film look amazing. I often struggle with Snyder's films trying to work out what he's trying to say, how he wants me to feel about what he's showing on screen. I just feel that he doesn't put enough attention to the subtext of what he shows on screen, and the message we're supposed to grasp from them. I'm sure Snyder didn't deliberately make 300 to have the homophobic and xenophobic subtext that many of it's critic proclaim. But there's no denying that some of these complaints have merit. And it comes down to how he plays the tone of these scenes. Of course with that example, much of these issues come down to the source material, but it's the directors responsibility to control the messages behind the images that they present to the audience. Probably not the best example, but I had similar feelings while watching Watchmen, just trying to work out what Snyder was trying to say, and though his visuals were extremely well composed, they often works at odds with what I perceived as the central themes of the film. It's been a while since I watched Watchmen, so I'm having difficulty thinking up specific examples.

Though it's not just Snyder who seems to have difficulty in managing tone, and the subtext that accompanies his visuals. Indeed Fincher has been accused of fetishizing the rape scenes in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and to an extent I can see where these claims are coming from. Also the claims of sexist undertones in the video game Batman: Arkham City, which were rather prominent, but never acknowledged in the game, and resulted in a strange and uncomfortable tone in which was otherwise quite an engaging experience.

It's not that I take issue with films that deal with heavy subject matter, as long as they're handled in the responsible manner that the material required. And I feel that Snyder is not a mature director, and while he's mastered the art of composing a scene, he needs to grow up a bit if he's going to deal with the heavy subjects that he does in many of his films.

Say what? I played through that whole game, and I didn't experience any sexual undertones? Is it 'cos you got to be Catwoman from time to time? Or because the whole city is is full of murderers and rapists, which makes perfect sense given the game's setting? This comment is just weird.

Watchmen was one of the greatest film experiences ever for me. Absolutely riveting. I had read the comic (aka graphic novel), and found the movie even better. Zack Snyder is a genius, when he wants to be. I thought Sucker Punch was just ok (but definitely not shit). Robert Rodriguez, also can clearly nail these comic book adaptions: Sin City was simply incredible.

Didn't really pick up on the homophobia or the xenophobia in 300... my impression was that when you face a certain shit storm from an imperialistic conglomerate, you surely ought to do something about it (as the legend goes anyhow)

This thread has sure spiraled in an odd direction.

I like The Avengers movie...that is all.