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The recent Avengers vs. X-men story line (thus far) am I the only one who thinks Cyclops' position is the least stupid? (Note I said LEAST Stupid, ergo it's still dumb.) Breaking it down:
Cyclops wants to control the Phoenix: It's pretty lofty to say the phoenix can be controlled but it's not unheard of nor impossible.
Captain America and the Avengers want to stop the Phoenix: Pretty vain if you ask me. This is an extremely powerful cosmic entity. Not something you can just "stop" any more than you can stop Galactus (the Phoenix is stronger than even him).
Wolverine wants to stop the Phoenix by killing it's projected host: Yeah, kill the host of an entity that can come back to life (and is pretty tough in her own right no less).
Defeating impossibly powerful enemies that cannot be defeated is the entire reason the Avengers exist. This is what they do, no different from any other impossible threat to the Earth. Sure, stopping the Phoenix is as impossible as stopping Galactus, but remember one very critical thing: Galactus has been stopped before. Hell, Galactus has been overpowered and chained up to the power source of a doomsday device before. Additionally, the away team have already proven that the Phoenix can be hurt and, potentially, killed or contained, which means that defeating it is entirely within the realm of possibility. Again: this is what the Avengers do. They face down the impossible, and they win. Scott's plan can more or less be summarized as classic supervillainy, having completed his descent into becoming Magneto: a man trying to harness and control forces far beyond his control for his own personal gain, ultimately oblivious to the fact that his attempts will ultimately mean the doom of everything, including himself. It's a classic supervillain ploy, and whining about oppression of his people every time people try to talk sense into him doesn't change that. Scott fell in love with the race card a long time ago, but screaming, "Stop oppressing me, you nazis!" when people try to tell him that Evil Is Not a Toy only makes him a particularly whiny supervillain.
So it would seem that it's not Cyclops' plan that bad so much as it's coming from Cyclops. Yeah the "Avengers face the impossible" but even if they are "successful" the Phoenix will return, especially considering it specializes in resurrection. So you'd just get a cycle of the phoenix returning and there being a "close call" each time the killing/containing process goes forward. Or some kind of cosmic balance event will require them to release it anyways. With Cyclops' position you accept the Phoenix is coming and you let the chips fall as they may. The Avengers are prolonging the inevitable and Wolverine is just an idiot.
No, the problem is Cyclops's position. You might as well say the same for everything else that's ever threatened the Earth: should Ultron be permitted to wipe out humanity because, after all, if you defeat him, he'll probably just come back eventually? How about next time Galactus thinks Earth is starting to look a bit appetizing? Should everyone just "let the chips fall as they may" there? Sure, if the Phoenix is defeated, it may just come back some day. The same is true of Galactus, the Skrulls, the Beyonder, Thanos, the Phalanx, and every other celestial/cosmic entity that has ever threatened the Earth in the history of its existence. What makes the Phoenix so special, that the Avengers should just roll over and die for it?
Ultron was created by humans (an Avenger no less) they are responsible for his/its actions. The Skrulls aren't a Cosmic entity, Galactus and the Beyonder can be reasoned with. Not to mention the Phoenix is on a level that exceeds Galactus in terms of its unlimited power source. That's what makes the phoenix force so special. If nothing else it could be argued that killing the Phoenix force would likely have negative reprocussions in the 616 universe. If they were to contain the Phoenix they probably should allow it to take it's host instead of removing her from it.
You know what else exceeds Galactus in terms of its unlimited power source? The Infinity Gems. Six gemstones of absolute cosmic power that, when brought together, make one God. The fabric of the universe itself bends in submission to the Gems. The wielder of the Infinity Gems will dwarf the Phoenix in both power and scale; even a single gem is enough to make a person into a living avatar of a fundamental element of the universe. Likewise, there is no reasoning with Thanos. He desires nothing more than the absolute death of the universe, as a gift to woo his beloved Death. If the Avengers wouldn't roll over and die for Thanos or anyone else who has ever possessed the Infinity Gems, again I ask, what makes the Phoenix so special that they should? It brings the same promise as Thanos: absolute death of everything. There is no reason to believe that it will not simply purge the Earth of life, like it does to every other planet it visits. What they are doing now is a play for time; take Hope offworld and play a game of cosmic Keep Away with the Phoenix's host until a solution can be found. There has already been progress towards finding that solution, all they need is more time. It's not perfect, but it's certainly a better plan than "Let the Phoenix do what it wants, and hope it doesn't want genocide, despite the fact that genocide is the only thing it does."
Oh the infinity Gems, you mean the things that Namor, Mr. Fantastic, Iron Man, Professor X, Doctor Strange, and Captain America all have in their possession? If they are so much more powerful than the Phoenix why are they using other (uncertain) means of trying to stop it? Why are Tony and Beast making special devices to contain/kill the phoenix respectively? If they haven't thought to use the infinity gems maybe it's because it wouldn't work.
Dear god, why would they use the Infinity Gems against the Phoenix? That's like defending yourself from a tiger by blowing up the universe. The Infinity Gems are infinitely powerful and extremely attractive and making their location known with something as flashy and public as destroying the Phoenix with them would tell everyone in the universe who's looking for them, "Hey, the Gems are here, come take them and become God Incarnate." The point was not that the Gems should be used against the Phoenix, because they absolutely should not be used for anything ever again and should remain hidden where no one will ever find them. The point was that the assumption that the Phoenix operates on a scale above anything the Avengers can face is a faulty assumption. The Avengers regularly handle things like the Infinity Gems. To the X-Men, sure, the Phoenix is an ungodly cosmic force the likes of which cannot ever be confronted or defeated, but to the Avengers, it's just another day at the office.
First you say this: The wielder of the Infinity Gems will dwarf the Phoenix in both power and scale; even a single gem is enough to make a person into a living avatar of a fundamental element of the universe.
Then you say this: Dear god, why would they use the Infinity Gems against the Phoenix? That's like defending yourself from a tiger by blowing up the universe. You made the implication that the gems would be enough, not me. Also if this is "just another day at the office" the Avengers seem a bit uncertain in their ability to stop it. Saying that Thor and the Secret Avengers are on a "suicide mission".
Sorry misunderstood what you said, (basically the infinity gems would be overkill). Even so, the Avengers are acting uncertain about their ability to stop the Phoenix. Not to mention in the most recent issue Tony said they need to essentially use the power of the Big Bang to stop it. Adding the fact that they said the secret Avengers are on a suicide mission. Maybe they should use the infinity gems (if they are strong enough). Really all they'd need is the mind gem, the reality gem, the space gem, and MAYBE the soul gem. The reality gem could solo and the space gem could by some time. IF the gems are really above the phoenix in power. Otherwise you can't say this is just another day's work for the Avengers.
In an issue of Avengers: The Initiative, the leaders of Camp Hammond basically give up on The Boulder because he's incapable of losing weight or gaining muscle because he can't be worn out thanks to his powers. Thus, his invulnerability keeps him in the body of a slow, overweight weakling. However, in an earlier issue, technology that is capable of shutting off superpowers makes a prominent appearance. Why is it, then, that not one of the people on the base once considered using the ability to turn off superpowers to make Boulder no longer invincible long enough that they could get him into shape and then give him back his superpowers so that he'd be both invincible AND be in shape?
Because the administrators at Camp Hammond are morons.
Or he could be invulnerable regarding that too.
If that was so, it would have taken only two or three lines of dialogue, and one panel, to tell us this. The writer can thus be legitimately faulted for not addressing it.
Or better yet, just give him a gun. I have this same gripe with Mr. Invincible of the Great Lakes Avengers. Why does he insist on being utterly useless in a battle?
First of all, that's Mr. Immortal. Second of all, he did once use a gun. He shot himself in the foot.*** It was Skrull Pym who decided to keep the invulnerable guy out of the camp before it was invaded by Skrulls.** While the Initiative did have read access to power-nullifying SPIN technology, the change is permanent and they'd never be able to break his skin anyway. That aside, none of the staff members knew someone who nullified powers or could find one reasonably soon (hell, the only one I can think of is Leech, and I know none of the Initiative staff would be familiar with the Morlocks since none of them were X-Men).
And for that matter hunting down a power nullifier and spending what would probably be years and thousands of dollars training him would be a grossly poor allocation of resources considering the wealth of incoming recruits. They aren't going to be any worse for the wear if they're missing one guy.
And consider what Yellowjacket told Butterball/Boulder, that he has a bright future ahead of him in any one of dozens of dangerous professions (like search and rescue). The Initiative doesn't have too pressing a need for his talents, but some people do.
Butterball is in the Avengers Academy now, so I guess they found some way for him to become a superhero.
The power nullifying technology in question costs half a million dollars to produce. They can be forgiven for not wanting to drop half a million dollars on a single cadet, especially when that solution is supposed to be permanent and irreversable, rendering the entire purpose (turning his powers back on after he's trained up) pointless.
Related to the power nullifier tech and Initiative. Armory was an early character who controlled an obscenely powerful alien Arm Cannon called the Tactigon. After a training accident, she's depowered and kept under watch while the Initiative tries to connect the tactigon to other test subjects. Despite the fact that every other person either cannot activate it or goes insane, nobody seems to consider reconnecting Armory to the device, even after World War Hulk and Secret Invasion, two situations where a weapon rated just below Thor's Hammer would have been damn useful.
It was probably considered at one point or another, but the entire point of the Initiative and the SHRA was accountability for superheroes; it would render the whole thing meaningless to bring her back. That, and when they accidentally kill people on their first day, you're only inviting Stamford 2.0 by keeping them around.
The only problem with that is that it was more the training staffs fault in that instance, since they clearly had no clue what Trauma's power was, but they forced Armory to stand next to him so he could use it. They never brought her back because that would be admitting they made a mistake.
Why do the Avengers just sit back and let members enter the worst possible marriages. We've had Mantis & the Cotati so she could become an intergalactic brood mare. There was Ms. Marvel & Marcus, which was actually lampshaded. Lastly, they had no problem with Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne getting married, despite the fact that he'd just suffered a nervous breakdown and that she had no problem marrying him when he didn't know who he was (but she did).
They only work together for the good of Humanity - personally,they all hate each others' guts, so they let each other get into horrible relationships purely for the schadenfreude.
Why the hell did the New Avengers recruit Wolverine (aside from the obvious, that is)? I mean, the excuse given in the story was that they needed someone who'll kill people. But at the time the team included Captain America and Iron Man - both of whom have killed when they deemed it absolutely necessary - as well as Spider-Woman, who an issue or so before had been boasting to Maria Hill about having a license to kill (which presumably you don't get given if you're not prepared to use it). What, exactly, does a guy notable for slaughtering anyone who even pisses him off mildly add to a supposedly iconic hero team?
I'll see your question and raise you one: why was Ares picked for the Mighty Avengers? He isn't just the god of War, he's the god of mindless slaughter; the god of people who actually enjoy waging a war; (for strategy and basic sanity, take a detour towards Athena). Wolverine could still be handwaved as a basically decent person who became a victim of circumstances twenty million different brainwashings and schemes, but for Ares, there is no in-story excuse I can think of.
This was a bit of a change from the typical Marvel depiction of Ares, particularly as he was seen in his own miniseries, all told. The issue with Wolverine is that he had always, always been depicted previously as pretty much wanting to kill Spider-Man for his sanctimonious goody-two-shoes attitude, and Spidey has hated him right back every step of the way. And Spider-Man is a notoriously poor team player to begin with. The entire team's make-up was extremely ill-advised; the real reason it happened is because Brian Michael Bendis had this idea since he was in sixth grade and nobody was going to tell him he couldn't write it.
"He's like a Wolverine AND a Thor". Or, to try better reasoning (not that it's hard) they wanted Hercules, but they couldn't get him due to his Anti Reg deally, so they got the next best thing in the field of Greco Roman gods who get hammered after work and beat dudes up.
Objection! Ares has as good strategy and tactic skills as Athena, with thousands years of first-hand experience.
There are times when killing someone is not absolutely necessary in the moment, but is likely to become absolutely necessary in the future. To put it another way: it's easy to kill Hitler. It's harder to see a tiny little baby crawl across the carpet, struggle to climb up onto its pudgy little feet, take its first unsure steps towards its mommy, and give her a kiss; and then be told that that baby will grow up to be Hitler and it's your job to kill it. Wolverine can kill baby Hitler.
Except the super-heroic solution to that is to kidnap the baby and bring it up to be a good person. They actually did that as a plot in Exiles (and as it turned out, it didn't work. So they killed teenage Hitler. But they did it very deliberately and in full knowledge, not with Wolverine-style casual stabbity).
In the end, Wolverine doesn't LIKE killing. He tries to avoid it.
Except in his own comic, where Depending on the Writer he'll often slaughter every mook in an enemy base, just to get them out of the way. Hells, a couple of years back there was a run of stories which were basically: Wolverine meets some ordinary, human, could-be-dealt-with-by-the-police, nasty criminals. Wolverine kills the nasty criminals. The End.
Do the Avengers ever actually do any Avenging? Most of the plot relating to the present-day characters in Avengers/Invaders lampshades this—the New Avengers can't do any superhero work because every other fucking superhero team is trying to capture them, and the Mighty Avengers can't do any superhero work because they're one of the fucking teams.
And when they did try to do actual Avenging (killing the villain that killed billions of Kree) half the team went and tried to smack down the other half.
The name was chosen just for the sake of sounding cool. Their name never had anything to do with who they were.
You're using too narrow a definition. From Merriam-Webster: "to exact satisfaction for (a wrong) by punishing the wrongdoer." Are the Avengers bringing down wrong-doers? Then they're avenging.
The movie brings this up: Coulson's implied to be saying "they needed something to (avenge)", the bracketed part implied as he's Killed Mid-Sentence. Iron Man later brings him up before shooting Loki with a repulsor.
Hank Pym, period. There comes a point in time when you have to say, 'Sorry, Buddy, we just can't rely on you'.
To be fair, his track record for going insane/evil and having experiments do the same is about on par with several of his other teammates. He just gets it brought up a lot more often because the writers think he makes a good chew toy.
Which other teammates? And are these teammates continually invited back into the lineup again and again, or are they people who eventually got the 'Don't call us, we'll call you'?
Iron Man, Hulk, Scarlet Witch, The Vision, Quicksilver, to name a few. Also, in the early years, the Swordsman, who kept been called to the Avengers despite his criminal career which he only gave up to be killed.
Yes on both counts, because it apparently either takes multiple accounts of doing stupid and/or amoral things before the Avengers finally give up on anyone, especially when insanity and/or mind control come into the picture, or a massive rewrite of reality (like in Scarlet Witch's case in Disassembled, and even then, the Avengers were the ones arguing for leniency, compared to some of the X-Men's insistence that she just be killed).
Hank Pym is responsible for Ultron, one the most dangerous Marvel villains - and is a wife beater with multiple personality disorder. In Marvel Universe, Peter Sanderson describes him as "...Reed Richards without the foils for his personality, a dry, unemotional scientist with little audience appeal." He should have been kicked out long ago.
No foil? What does he think the flighty, romantic Wasp was?
To be fair, Hank Pym was insane when he hit Jan and that was the only time he ever did it. Hank Pym is just a neurotic jerkass in the mainline-616 universe. Not a wifebeater.
Ah. They covered this. This may take a while... It's all based on low self esteem, exacerbated by a dead ex-wife and brain-envy of Reed Richards, Tony Stark and Ultron. And the guilt of building Ultron, causing him to get his first major bout of costumed crazy. His girlfriend took advantage of this to get him to marry her. This led to low self-esteem, which led to him hitting his wife, which led to more low self-esteem, which led to near suicide, which led to him retiring to the post of Mission Control for the West Coast spinoff team, which led to a stint with the main team again. Then his powers went wonky and he split into two people ("Yellowjacket", the fun-loving side who doesn't plan ahead and acts spontaneously... and hits wives, and "Goliath" who is, well, a dry, unemotional scientist), then he had the world's weirdest therapy session, in which his wife pointed out that he was basing his life around her and that's not cool. So he wised up, re-integrated himself into one person, gave his spot to someone else, and left for a bit. His current bout of low self-esteem is because he got replaced by an imposter who was actually better at his job than he was. He seems to be responding to this by taking his dead wife's costume and getting a new improved super-scientist MO.
Oh, for God's sake, now you're just demonstrating exactly why he's the image boy for Never Live It Down.
It is truly unforgivable for Hank Pym to be exactly as much of a wife-beater as Peter Parker and Reed Richards
Hank Pym is on the Avengers so they can keep an eye on him. If they kicked him out, he'd be even more dangerous, with far fewer restraints on his behavior, and no one looking over his shoulder when things go bad.
Jarvis IS completely awesome, but in the end he's still human. Having an entire mansion where all the background chores is done only by one person is a bit cuckoo-bananas. Justice League of America has many stories showing the heroes doing general maintenance. I was going to suggest 'Have a staff with powers' but then the question of 'Why not bring them with when aliens invade Florida' arises. So I'm lost.
He was able to do all the work because he was a Skrull. Well probably not but Skrulls are the new/old/new again "Superboy-Prime Punched Time".
The Avengers Mansion has a staff. They appear on several occasions. Though Jarvis is also known to put whomever happens to be around at the moment to work, like the Guardians of the Galaxy during one of the Infinity crossovers.
Grabby tentacles and stun lasers in the lawn as a security system? Weak.
Well, anything strong enough to stand a chance of stopping high-powered supervillains by itself could easily kill a normal human who sets it off for whatever reason (possibly by accident). Or used against your own team if a villain does manage to infiltrate your base or the computer goes berserk (or both). There are good reasons not to go overboard, especially when you're a card-carrying superhero with actual superpowers in your own right already...
Someone PLEASE explain to me why both Avengers have Hawkeye, Wolverine, and Spider-man. I can kind of see why wolverine can be on both teams (since he's so used to being on EVERY TEAM EVER), but how can Hawkeye juggle Avenging, New Avenging, and mockingbird's counterterrorism group all at once? And how does Spider-man juggle both avengers and all the shit in his life?
Maybe Spiderman got cloned again.
Well, they answered your question, at least in regards to Hawkeye. He's NOT on the New Avengers team, just the main one and his team with Mockingbird. He was just hanging around with the New Avengers the first couple of issues of the new volume for old time's sake.
While it is a bit silly for people to be on multiple Avengers teams (why not just have one really big team if half the lineup of both teams is the same?) it doesn't necessarily require that much juggling. Bear in mind that each books comes out monthly, and a given issue often continues the story of the previous issue. Sometimes six months of real world time will cover only a few hours of comic book time. Since they rarely tell us how much time passes between issues that aren't part of the same storyline, it's entirely possible any given super team only has one or two missions per month.
The Secret Avengers team line-up is just plain crazy. You not only have the most famous human on Earth in your "secret" team (Steve Rogers), you also have one of the, if not THE, most famous mutants on the planet (Beast) and the most famous human in the ENTIRE UNIVERSE (Nova). One of the other members (Valkyrie) refuses to actually do any infiltration and can only speak shakespearese. War Machine is easily recognisable, hardly stealthy and has become very famous in his last appearance before secret avengers: Making international news for several days as a war criminal. This leaves Black Widow, the most famous spy in the world, and Eric O'grady as the remaining members, which begs the question of a team of 'secret' avengers only containing two members fitting the description.
True. This lineup looks like a standard Avengers lineup, not a super secret spy team. Guys like Wolverine and Spider-Man would fit better, oddly enough.
Because each member brings something necessary to the team. Steve Rogers has excellent leadership abilities and is supremely skilled in combat; Beast is a genius at damn nigh everything and also a doctor, so he can treat injuries; Nova (though not in the is powerful and serves for interstellar missions; Valkyrie is basically the muscle, she's there to kick ass; War Machine is highly skilled in technological stuff and useful in long-range combat; Black Widow is a highly skilled spy and fighter. As for Eric O' Grady, well, your guess is as good as mine.
You forgot to list Moon Knight! On the other hand, so did the writers. It is, in general, one of the worst new mainstream series. Nova was removed from the team in issue ONE, Moon Knight has shown up in under one panel per issue since the start of the second arc, Eric O'Grady regularly disappears, War Machine shows up when it's convenient, and Valkyrie just makes no sense whatsoever. On the other hand, considering how horribly inept the writers are, this is almost a good thing (seriously. If one could Butcher Moon Knight any harder...)
The Red Zone Series, about two years before Disassembled. The Big Bad is revealed to be The Red Skull who is posing as the U.S. Secretary Of Defense. The process in the US for getting a cabinet-level position is not a simple one. This isn't a guard position in a warehouse. The press, the opposition party, and the President's own party members in Congress can make the candidate's life a living hell for any number of reasons, and the scrutiny will be unrelenting. A Big Bad's usual methods, say murdering a nosey reporter or stubborn member of Congress, really only the Senate for confirmation can only slow the process down. Such candidates have been opposed historically on the most ridiculous basis imaginable. In short, the Big Bad's hiding place was not one you could sneak into, even with an astounding amount of people at your beck and call, especially when the RL Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was a known if controversial figure, whereas the text in Red Zone says no one knows much about Dell Rusk, the Skull's false name. Geoff JohnsDid Not Do the Research.
In an issue of The Initiative, one of the members was Crusader, a skrull. There was actually some backstory about his arrival on Earth and how he wanted to be a hero. He even defeated a really powerful villain in order to save his friends and home. And what does he get in reward? 3-D Man, one of the heroes, shoots him. There's absolutely no justification beyond the fact that he was a skrull. Nobody even seems upset over this. I know that the Marvel Universe really hates skrulls, but he was on the good side. What the hell?
It was shown shortly afterwards that several of the Initiative recruits were pissed off at 3-D Man for having shot Crusader like that, because they were open-minded enough to realize Crusader was one of the good guys despite being a skrull, since, you know, he just freaking saved them all. 3-D Man, of course, could not have given less of a crap and was basically a dick all throughout.
Also, it was in the middle of battle, during a skrull invasion where they tried to destroy most of the US. 3-D man never saw the crusader do his heroic thing IIRC, and thought he was just another infiltrator.
Why hasn't the Punisher ever been on the Avengers?
. . .because he's a homicidal vigilante wanted by the police?
If you want to get technical, he was on Cap's team during Civil War, and I'm fairly sure that team is considered an incarnation of the Secret Avengers.
And during this time, it didn't go well between the Punisher and Captain America. Cap threw him out of the team not long after he came in.
For Thor being a hotblooded warrior prince he was pretty underused in the final battle. Considering how extreme he was in the fight against the frost giants in his namesake film, Thor should have had more scenes fighting along side the Hulk. I don't mean he "needed more screen time", actually his lack of it up until the action scene at the end could be interpreted as fridge brilliance. He knows how to work on a team and he already learned his humility lesson, therefore he doesn't require the same character development as the others. The issue is his relative (to his own film) poor showing in the battle scene, which could be interpreted as a violation of Show, Don't Tell, an example of Character Derailment and/or maybe a bit of Conservation of Ninjutsu.
What "poor showing"? When he single-handedly demolishes several leviathans and dozens of fliers within a few seconds with that giant column of lightning right at the start? When he takes down a Leviathan? When he's never shown to be as tired or wounded as the other Avengers, even after the Hulk punches him? How did he have a poor showing?
"As tired as the other Avengers", is the issue. Comparing the Frost Giant battle and the Chitari battle Thor seemed to be a bit lacking in the final battle IIRC. Granted I've only seen the film once so my memory might be failing me.
Responding to the below post, I'll go see the movie again and I'll specify. Considering how far and fast Thor can propel himself with his hammer the drop shouldn't have been that big of a deal.
"Not that big of a deal"? Seriously? The drop is actually a brilliant deathtrap, and surviving it was a feat worthy of Golden Age Superman. Look at everything that's going on there: a) The cage was built to withstand the Hulk. At the very least, it withstood a solid, standing strike with Mjolnir with barely a crack. Thor had to launch himself with his entire body to break out of it. b) The cage is tumbling. This makes it impossible to orient yourself, much less anchor yourself to try to break through a wall. And at the speed it's dropping, it's essentially zero-G in there, making it even HARDER to hold onto a surface and break it. c) The drop itself. The cage is launched down from many, many thousands of feet in the air to smash into the ground below. It was dropped from a high enough altitude that it most certainly reached terminal velocity. That sort of impact would have liquefied anything in it (we'd have to speculate what it would have done to its intended resident.) Thor escaped with fractions of a second to spare, which means he had built up the same momentum as the cage itself, and was being pulled into the ground at that same speed. He can't arrest his fall —the best he could hope for was breaking out of the cage at a perfectly opposite trajectory; and even then, even if his relative speed made him "shoot out" of the cage, his absolute speed would barely change (basically, he'd just slow down his fall a little. It's basic Physics.) So put all three things together: he DID manage to, in a fraction of a second, find his footing and smash out of a Hulk-grade cage with no way of telling which direction he was headed. And he didn't emerge directly upwards, but at an angle, carrying enough momentum to crash into solid ground and leave a crater. Hulk survived a similar fall, with a difference of only a hundred feet or so, because he's the Hulk, and he was still knocked out. Either Thor has similar endurance, or the drop hurt like all kinds of hell and it's basically a Crowning Moment of Awesome that he survived.
I just said he wasn't nearly as tired as the other Avengers, or even wounded from what I recall. The Frost Giant battle in Thor was nowhere near the scale or duration of the battle with the Chitauri. And the battle with the Chitauri came immediately after Thor was dropped 30,000 feet and then skipped across the countryside like a stone. And he still pulled off things like annihilating several of their strongest units at once with his opening salvo.
I really just don't see how you're seeing this as a "poor showing."
Caps utility belt... what do you think he keeps in there?
Breath mints and Dodgers cards.
Why does the movie even happen? The Bigger Bad's goal of the whole endeavour, made clear from the very beginning, is to retrieve the tesseract. Loki accomplishes this in the first five minutes of his arrival on Earth with zero trouble and it is established that cross-universe travel is relatively easy with the tesseract in hand. Seems to me any Elite Mook could have been sent to do the same job and be back home in about fifteen minutes, and not risk a bungle in some unimportant "conquer the Earth while you're at it" personal vendetta.
Loki's deal was to get an army in exchange for the tesseract - wouldn't you want to get the army first before you give the tesseract away if you were in Loki's place?
The mooks available aren't nearly so durable as Loki. He was still ambulatory after being slammed around by the Hulk six or seven times. The Chitauri soldiers were...not. Loki was sent to retrieve the Tesseract, yes, but in return he asked for Earth to rule. His bosses agreed to this on the logic that Earth would fall almost instantly at the display of Loki's power, so no skin off their noses if it takes a couple extra days to get it to satisfy Loki and make him that much more cooperative later than if you'd just bullied him into it.
Plus, recall that it took quite a while for Loki to actually build the one portal he did, and he needed the Tesseract to do it with. It might simply not have been that simple to make a return trip.
Loki had the Tesseract in hand within the first five minutes, yes. Thanos, however, did not. Opening a portal to bring the Tesseract back to Thanos would have required the Tesseract as a power source, and as such the Tesseract itself would not be able to move through the portal; it's busy maintaining the portal. Thus, the only way to obtain the Tesseract would have been to either a) have another Tesseract on hand to open another portal which, if they had one, would have rendered the entire point of coming to get the Tesseract moot, b) bring it back the long way, or c) whatever plan you have for using the Tesseract, just start it on Earth, where the Tesseract is now. Thus we arrive at the plot of the movie: Thanos intends to do X with the Tesseract, the Tesseract is on Earth, the Tesseract cannot be moved from Earth without great amounts of resources, Earth has no reason to be excluded from X that Thanos intends to do with the Tesseract, so why not just start doing X with Earth and then move outward from there?
Except that at the end of the movie, Thor uses the Tesseract to take himself, Loki, and the Tesseract back to Asgard, so it can clearly transport itself. There's ways to fill that Plot Hole, though: maybe it's a one-way trip to Asgard and doesn't work to go to where Thanos is, or maybe this effect is something Thor but not Loki knows about or can do. The visual effects are different in that scene than when the Tesseract is opening portals, too. For the latter theory, it's more likely something that Odin knows and taught Thor so that he'd have a return trip to Asgard, after Odin spent so much power getting him to Earth.
It's possible the little device Thor put the Tesseract in just takes them directly back to Asgard. Possibly Odin gave it to him with a message along the lines of, "Once you've got the cube, stick it in this and you'll be brought right home."
Or both. The device the Tesseract is in when Thor brings Loki and the Tesseract back to Asgard appears to be of Asgardian design, and we have not seen it at any point prior in the movie. The handheld Bifrost may or may not require the Tesseract as a power source (Odin having to use dark energy to send Thor over the first time suggests it does), but there's no evidence Thanos even knows of such a device's existence. Presumably, Thor brought it with him from Asgard. As we never see any such device in Loki's hands, it can't really be accounted for on Loki's end of Thanos's plan; all Loki has to work with is the portal generator that S.H.I.E.L.D. built.
This is minor and essential to move the plot forward, I realize, but it bugs me all the same. Erik Selvig probably knows more about Loki than anyone, thanks to his heritage. He's the first to identify him after the demigod makes his entrance at SHIELD headquarters, and Erik knows damn well how dangerous Loki is thanks to myths and being a first-hand witness to his destruction in Thor. What I want to know is why, after watching TWO PEOPLE get brainwashed, did Erik allow Loki to get close enough to brainwash him in the first place?
Because he's not an action guy. A lot of people who aren't used to being in life-threatening danger simply freeze the hell up when they're put in said danger. Simple as that.
Selvig is an old guy who just watched Loki casually leap around the room and kill half a dozen armed SHIELD agents. He probably realizes that, at best, he might get a few steps before Loki reaches him and kills/brainwashes him.
Isn't Loki ridiculously out-of-character in this movie? Murdering people at the start of the movie, and smiling while he does it; making sadistic comments; uncalled-for insults to other characters; smirking/grinning when he senses chaos and destruction happening.
In Thor's solo movie, Loki never showed any of those personality traits, except towards Thor himself, and in that case, it's arguable that Loki was just "pushed" into having that attitude and he would probably regret it after achieving his goal. He mostly treated his enemies (Laufey and Thor) with respect while still being their enemy. The only person he killed (without being asked to) was an enemy of his father's. And even though he planned to destroy an entire planet, he was not doing it "cuz it's fun". He was never shown to be taking pleasure in the death/destruction that he caused in Thor's solo movie. He didn't even kill Heimdall, so I assumed he was planning to just put some kind of spell on Heimdall after his plan was complete instead of killing him. In Thor's movie, Loki was a Knight Templar / Well-Intentioned Extremist who was confused about his destiny and believed that what he was doing would be considered noble...I didn't get any of that from Avengers Loki. He was cruel/sadistic to everyone in Avengers, but he should've only been like that to Thor alone.
Before the movie came out, Hiddleston implied that Loki was going to be just as sympathetic as he was in Thor, that he was going to be a character who we would feel sorry for because he's just looking for his rightful place in the universe. But that's not what I got from Loki's portrayal in this movie at all, only a Complete Monster.
It's not very hard to believe that Loki's simply changed after everything that happened to him. In Thor, Loki was just starting down The Slippery Slope. By The Avengers, he's doing cartwheels at the bottom. Not to mention that he did try destroying an entire realm in Thor, just because he thought I'd please his father...
Loki is out of character in this movie—Word Of God is that his trip through that wormhole at the end of Thor did bad, bad things to his psyche.
Apparently, they cut 2 hours of material from the movie, so maybe there were scenes making Loki more sympathetic that were cut. I also thought he wasn't particularly like they set up Loki's character in Thor. I don't even think it comes down to the killing he does, because killing people is part of the culture he grew up in, but he doesn't get enough screen time for us to understand what's going on in his mind and obviously he doesn't have any real plan at all and there is not even one scene where he uses his "silver tongue" against anyone. I do like Loki very much as a character, so the movie kind of disappointed on this note. I still enjoyed it, but it could have been so much better if they had given their villain more time.
There is actually a rather interesting theory on Loki's out of character-ness. It is thought by many fans that perhaps Loki was being at least partially brainwashed by Thanos. It is implied in the movie that the stone in Loki's staff helps perhaps increase the emotions felt by the Avengers when they start arguing and seems to be at least partially responsible for that argument in some way. If the stone did that to the Avengers, it has to be wondered what it could be doing to Loki. If it is the case that the stone is helping to increase negative emotions, Loki's out of character-ness is completely justified. Also, it is shown that the brainwashing seems to be reversed by blows to the head and after Loki was smashed around by the Hulk, he seemed to change back into who he was before.
I am very curious if this explanation will become canon in the next Thor movie.
In addition to the point about the sceptre, there's an easily overlooked moment when we see Loki making his bargain with the Chitauri, in which The Other tells him that if he fails, Thanos will make him wish for something as merciful as pain, and gives him a sample thereof. Loki takes it without resistance. We don't know how long Loki has been with the Chitauri. We do know that he didn't really have a plan, so much as he had an order from his superior with a request for himself. He calls himself an ally, but his motivations are purely in subservience to the Chitauri; his "plan" consists of after the Chitauri rule the Earth, they may be so merciful as to allow him to rule it if he is a good servant to them. And for the cruelty he shows the humans, when made to suffer for prolonged periods of time, some people who have never been cruel before, develop it as a coping mechanism. He's monstrous towards his enemies because it allows HIM to make them suffer the way he did. It makes him feel powerful when he's been made to feel weak. All of Loki's behavior, from his subservient motivation, to the acceptance of pain from his masters, to the cruelty he displays and his enjoyment of that cruelty, suggests that Loki isn't really brainwashed, so much as he is broken by Thanos.
One thing that should probably be understood, is that Thor serves as Character Development for Loki just as much as it does for Thor. It's just that with Loki it's about his descent into madness. He spends most of that movie being somewhat rational, until the end when he begins to unravel, especially when it comes to his fight with Thor. In the end, he's: been bested by his older brother once again, he now knows that he isn't Odin's real son, and there's no feasible way he can return to Asgard, not even to the way things were before he took the throne. Then we have confirmation by Word Of God that falling down the wormhole did things to Loki's mind. The next time you watch this movie, watch him carefully. The scene in which he steals the man's eye for Hawkeye, especially. He could have had any lower level mook do that, but he does it himself, and the look on his face as people run away screaming is one of pure joy. Finally, he has people's attention. Tony isn't far off when he calls Loki a diva, it's just that there's more to it than that. The end of Thor has all of Loki's plans to finally outshine his brother thwarted by that very same brother, so he wants earth to spite Thor, but also to get everyone's attention, and that's exactly what he does. It's funny, because he accuses Fury of being desperate, but Loki is pretty desperate himself.
Listen when Loki is talking with Thor the first time. He all but outright says that yes, he's gone crazy. He goes on about having been "exposed to truths" and such. So yes, the movie acknowledges that Loki is indeed acting quite weird and he's lost a few marbles, backed up when Banner mentions that he's "a bag of cats". After getting the hell smacked out of him by the Hulk, he seems to relax a little bit and the Loki from the first Thor movie starts to reappear.
In addition to all the points already made about the side effects of the trip down the wormhole, Loki also had a serious Villainous Breakdown at the end of Thor - he basically tried to kill himself after Odin says "no Loki" which he apparently took as rejection, after all, and even that didn't work. Thor's solo movie established pretty well that Loki deals with issues with violence and manipulation - and now he's got even more issues, so yeah, of course he was more villainous this time around.
Loki was noticeably sick looking during his first appearance in the film; he's sweating heavily, is very pale and has discoloring under his eyes. Those are the same severe physical symptoms that Clint had before Natasha knocked him out. Loki's symptoms lessen a bit, but he keeps the paleness throughout most of the film. His skin color is back to normal after you-know-who slams his butt you-know-when. Just putting this out there.
And note when they're leaving the Tesseract room at the very start of the film. Loki is bent over and appears to be limping, and Random Shield Agent rests a hand on his back and seems to be helping him walk and/or inquiring about his health.
When the Avengers start getting annoyed with each other, why does no one think the staff of Loki (Trickster god) might be messing with them? One of them is meant to be a god, one a super soldier and two people with genius intellects.
Because the staff may not have been doing that much - we're talking about two giant egos in the room (Stark and Thor), a massive case of Values Dissonance (Rogers and Stark), the paranoid fears of Banner who is justifiedly suspicious of the government and its interest in him (knowing Thunderbolt Ross so well) and is afraid to be around anyone for long and with damn good reason, all compounded by a general air of mistrust in the room due to SHIELD's shady activities which Fury hid from everyone.
Because they're too busy being angry. They aren't annoyed with each other, they're furious to the point of Cap and Tony nearly coming to an all-out fistfight and Banner threatening to Hulk out and murder everyone. Nobody is in the right mind to stop and think things through until Banner picks up the Sceptre.
So, the Chitauri shooting at seemingly random civilians instead of trying to take out tactical targets. Are they just wasteful assholes or are they trying to be scary?
They work for Thanos, who is the galactic grand champion at 'sacrificing zillions of minions inefficiently because he just doesn't care' and 'as long as lots of people are dying, I don't care about anything else'. Perfectly IC.
A force tasked with invading an area and securing it before advancing outward will have a flexible or even nonexistent set of rules of engagement, permitting them to open fire on anything that moves. Plus those guys were in Kill 'Em All mode. Not to mention that, well, what "tactical targets" are there in the middle of NYC? I don't see any missile launchers, radar stations, or fortified bunkers there.
By "Tactical Targets" I mean Police units, Military forces, potential communications systems, etc. They seem to spend all of their time just rampaging around instead of actually trying to secure the area. It looked like the only advantage they had over our "puny" human infantry was surprise and those damn Space Whales. And that first advantage doesn't last forever.
They were shooting at police. Military didn't arrive for an hour, and then we didn't see much action between the two. As for "communications systems", they can't exactly destroy every cell phone, radio, and phone line while fighting the Avengers. They initially began firing on civilian targets indiscriminately, but the Avengers got their attention before they could become more organized and spread outwards, and at that point the Avengers were the primary tactical target to destroy before they could do anything else.
They weren't shooting at police, at least not as a tactical action. They were merely randomly shooting at the populace and there just happened to be police officers among them. By communications, I assume the above poster refers to significant installations, such as rooftop-based antenna arrays, radio towers, et al, things that an enemy force would require to coordinate a counteroffensive (you don't see modern military shooting walkie-talkies out of soldiers' hands when there's a radio truck nearby, do you?) A tactically-savvy, intelligent invasion force would first need to establish a beachhead, mount defensive lines (such as semi-fixed artillery emplacements on rooftops) to prevent local resistance from pushing them back, and spread outwards systematically while securing territory bit by bit. At no point in the assault did the Chitauri act like they had any semblance of strategy other than "fly around randomly and shoot at anything that moves."
We don't see much else of what they're doing besides fighting the Avengers, so if they were attacking the police we won't see it. There were only a couple of scenes with police, one with the group that were getting blasted as the Chitauri were strafing the streets and the large group of police that Cap rallies. The Chitauri did attack that latter group, as they were flying overhead and firing, and a group tried to attack on foot before they met a bad case of Captain America. Most of the police and military were establishing an outer perimeter and the Avengers were deliberately drawing the Chitauri into the area around Stark Tower to keep them from expanding outward. (that's Iron Man's entire job in the battle, after all) As for communications equipment, again what communications equipment would they target that would have any reasonable effect on the battle? TV antennae only broadcast out, cell towers are redundant, radio towers are redundant, and personal communications equipment is ubiquitous. The Chitauri could blow up every antennae in the city and personal radios and cell phones would keep working just fine. The only people who would need large-scale,d edicated communications equipment would be the military, and that only when they start setting up a an actual military base that needs to serve as a communications hub, which they don't at that point in the film. (realistically, you're not going to look at any kind of "antennae farm" unless you have a standing military facility; prior to this, and in the field, battalion commanders and down will have dedicated radiomen with radio packs who would be hard to discern in the chaos) And the Chitauri were trying to establish a beachhead, but they had the inherent problem of the entire area around their entry point into the city being bottlenecked by a demigod, an archer who can kill them without looking at them, a flying suit of powered armor with destructive energy beams that keeps shooting down anything leaving the immediate area, a giant green rage monster smashing everything it can reach, and Captain America and Black Widow tearing up infantry on the ground, all keeping them from setting up anything coherent. They can't establish their beachhead or set up positions on rooftops in that area until the Avengers are dealt with. If the Avengers weren't present, their infantry could form some sort of beachhead, but until the highly-mobile superhumans are dealt with, they can't.
The problem is, they're really not doing much to "deal with" the highly-mobile superhumans. If they considered the Avengers a tactical objective, or even an obstacle at any point, they would've swarmed all of them the same way they did Hulk: a concerted attack with a bunch of sleds, out of range, peppering them with energy bolts. But for the most part, the ground combat was limited to Cap, Thor, and Tony fighting disorganized groups in melee combat, and a few soldiers climbing up to Hawkeye's perch. Considering the amount of troops pouring out of the portal, then no, dealing with any Avenger other than Hulk was a very minor thing, so what was the rest of them so busy with elsewhere?
There's a problem with "swarming" the Avengers: They're the Avengers. Three of whom are incredibly mobile and impossible to pin down. They can't "swarm" the Avengers because everytime they try, the Avengers smash them to shit. The Hulk is rampaging around ripping apart their formations, Hawkeye is a single person on a rooftop who is hard to spot and using a silenced weapon (as any infantryman whose ever had to deal with a sniper in urban terrain as to just how much of a pain it is to locate and deal with one), Black Widow is only on the ground for the start of the fight and takes to the air before the Chitauri can really get focused on the Avengers, and Captain America is highly mobile on foot. Thor and Iron Man can fly and easily destroy Chitauri air units. Furthermore, as shown in The Oner, the Avengers aren't just six people fighting on their own: they're a coordinated force rampaging around through the Chitauri and supporting one another, with Hawkeye picking out concentrated enemy forces and directing one of the heavy-hitters to stomp it. The Chitauri aren't some hive-minded force with perfect coordination, and simply fighting the Avengers is an extremely difficult prospect, let alone coordinating anything against a force whose least-mobile member is hard to find, and the rest of whom are constantly moving about the battlefield and shattering any attempt at a counterattack while shattering attempts to attack them directly. And as the battle progresses, the Chitauri do coordinate and eventually begin to get the upper hand over the Avengers. They swarm Hawkeye's position and blow up his rooftop perch, they swarm the Hulk after he bashes Loki, they surround Iron Man after he crashes, and the only reason Cap isn't getting overrun is because Thor is right beside him with Mjolnir.
Exactly. Eventually. Because by then, they HAD realized the threat. But before that? Random strafing of random civilians and an inexplicable attempt to blow up a bunch of them in a bank (tactically pointless and a waste of resources and time,) where no one could see them (so it's useless for intimidation.) The Avengers were doing a good job at keeping them contained, but the Chitauri didn't really coordinate until the team's threat made itself noticeable. It was only after suffering heavy losses, because they DIDN'T coordinate, that they started focusing on the Avengers. But even that was inefficient. You say that they're impossible to pin down, but consider this: they swarmed Hulk. The unbelievably agile, swat-sleds-out-of-the-air-with-a-finger Hulk. He couldn't escape their onslaught, at least not for the few seconds it was shown on-screen. They gave Hulk a nosebleed. That kind of power would've liquefied Thor or the Iron Man armor, and Cap's shield can only defend from one direction. And Cap can't outrace a sled, while Thor needs windup time to get off the ground, so only Tony can fly off on his own —and without Hulk's strength and nigh-invincibility, he can be brought down relatively easily. So why didn't they do the exact same thing they did to Hulk to everyone else —the much less agile, much less strong, much less resilient, but just as dangerous everyone else? Even Tony had trouble shaking off one trooper, imagine if they had really made an effort and dogpiled him en masse or called for air support while he was on the ground. The Chitauri were Zerg Rushing, plain and simple. Nothing wrong with that.
Because by then, they HAD realized the threat. But before that? Random strafing of random civilians and an inexplicable attempt to blow up a bunch of them in a bank (tactically pointless and a waste of resources and time,) where no one could see them (so it's useless for intimidation.) I was under the impression that said group of Chitauri were some kind of death-squad whose job was to kill as many civilians as possible while the rest of the army secured the area around the gate. Only four soldiers were assigned to that task, so it obviously wasn't a large expenditure of resources. (another possibility is that they targeted the civilians deliberately to pull Avengers off fighting the rest of the force, but that's iffy)
Why send out death squads if your intention is to enslave the planet? Dead people tend to make terrible slaves. (Unless Loki asks Hela to give him the dead civilians back and promises her a pony for her birthday or something.)
The Avengers were doing a good job at keeping them contained, but the Chitauri didn't really coordinate until the team's threat made itself noticeable. It was only after suffering heavy losses, because they DIDN'T coordinate, that they started focusing on the Avengers. Yes, because that's what always happens when a force makes contact with an unexpected threat. The Chitauri weren't expecting the Avengers, and they had to go through their OODA loop to respond to it, which they did pretty quickly considering how badly the Avengers were hurting them at the time. Compare the Chitauri's reaction speed to real-life situations like, say, the clusterfuck involving Task Force Tawara during OIF in '03 (it took coalition troops days to properly respond to an inferior force whose heaviest weapons were man-portable mortars).
You say that they're impossible to pin down, but consider this: they swarmed Hulk. The unbelievably agile, swat-sleds-out-of-the-air-with-a-finger Hulk. He couldn't escape their onslaught, at least not for the few seconds it was shown on-screen. And it did nothing to really stop him beyond pissing him off a little bit more, at which point he got clear. Furthermore, the Hulk had stopped briefly on that rooftop, giving an organized force the window to pin him down, however briefly. The other mobile Avengers couldn't be pinned down early on for the simple reason that early on the Chitauri were still reacting.
As I recall Black Widow and Captain America were on that same bridge with none of the heavyweights there to protect them for a good 20 minutes only about ten of which were before the Hulk showed up and demonstrated that yes this planet can offer meaningful resistance. A half dozen of those space sleds could have turned both of them into crispy swiss cheese before any of the other avengers could have reacted properly.(Hawkeye wouldn't have noticed before it was too late because they were swarming all over the damn place anyway.) That would have killed their leadership and fucked the Avengers coordination to hell for at least a few minutes. They didn't do that though because what passes for an officer corps amongst the Chitauri is loaded with morons.
Did you forget that Captain America's whole thing is based around having an utterly and completely impenetrable shield he can hide behind? That probably would've made it difficult for them to turn him into "crispy swiss cheese".
No more difficult than one sled flying around him while he's busy defending from the front, and turning his all-American tuckus into cinders. The shield can only stop attacks from one direction, after all, and no matter how much Cap spins around to defend himself, he can always be surrounded... that is, if the Chitauri didn't have the tactical acumen of Philadelphia Cream Cheese.
So why didn't they do the exact same thing they did to Hulk to everyone else —the much less agile, much less strong, much less resilient, but just as dangerous everyone else? Even Tony had trouble shaking off one trooper, imagine if they had really made an effort and dogpiled him en masse or called for air support while he was on the ground. Actually quite simple: force concentration and limited resources. Look at when Iron Man, Cap, and Thor are fighting on the ground: they're only tackling infantry. This is because the sleds were concentrating on the Hulk and Hawkeye. You can't concentrate force at one point without leaving yourself strapped for manpower at another point. In concentrating firepower on the Hulk, they were pulling firepower away from the rest of the Avengers. After the Chitauri had finished dealing with Hulk and Hawkeye, they would have shifted toward the other Avengers. That's why they didn't simply "swarm" them with everything they had once they got organized. The Chitauri directed their limited resources in a concentrated strike at the two largest threats at the moment: Hulk, due to raw power, and Hawkeye, who was the observation asset who kept the rest of the team coordinated against the Chitauri and therefore served as the largest force multiplier. And even though the Chitauri were only able to direct infantry against Iron Man, Cap, and Thor, they were still able to direct enough force against them that they were pretty badly pressed until Thor smashed them with a car and Iron Man had to completely disengage and retreat. The Chitauri were winning toward the end. Bringing things back to the original point of this entire argument: the Chitauri were securing the area immediately around the gate, by killing or driving out civilians and apparently sending death squads to massacre civilians. There were no "tactical" targets in the area that they could meaningfully assault, so they focused on causing chaos and delaying response times by forcing the police onto the defensive until they could bring more troops in through the gate. Then they encounter the Avengers, who are powerful enough that they can inflict severe damage to the Chitauri troops trying to drive everyone out of the area, and it was only after the Chitauri realized the extent of the threat that they finally began coordinating against them. Once they had identified the threat, they concentrated their aerial assets against the two biggest threats/force multipliers: the Hulk and Hawkeye, while infantry kept the other Avengers busy until those aerial assets could finish with the previous targets and shift to the less threatening ones. An overall reasonable scenario considering they didn't expect to fight the Avengers in the first place and had to adapt their previous apparent strategem of "cause chaos and kill as many humans as possible" on the fly to such a powerful enemy.
They are, in fact, trying to be scary. The Chitauri were led to believe that the humans would put up no real resistance; that the combined armed forces of Earth were no match for them, so they didn't need to fight strategically. Loki was convinced, and had convinced his army in turn, that humans just needed a push to go to their knees and stay there. So they came through and started shooting indiscriminately because they thought there wasn't any reason not to. The plan was "be as scary as possible, we win."
The biggest problem with this line of thought is that it relies on what we know. The Chitauri did not have any intelligence on what they were coming into. It would be the equivalent of knowing that you have to go through an energy rift that opened in front of you. You know it goes somewhere, but you don't really know what kind of environment is on the other side or what the situation will be. Also, we don't know what kind of society the Chitauri have. If they are a warrior race where everyone is a combatant, they assume Earth is as well. We also don't know exactly how their technology works. Loki would only really be familiar with Asgardian tech, so we don't even know if the Chitauri can detect radio waves. And, since they have gone in blind, detecting radio waves as a means of determining communications targets means most of the planet is covered in targets.
It's still a little strange for Thor to declare that there is a higher form of war out there where having laser muskets apparently makes your grunts and their immediate commanders seem to have no idea how to actually launch an invasion.
Why do the Chitauri all just drop dead when the mothership goes boom? Were those infantry actually some kind of techno-organic remote drone? And if so, why did that one that fumbled with the grenade look so scared as it was fumbling with aforementioned grenade?
Most likely, the Chitauri soldiers were implanted with some sort of kill-switch as a failsafe in the event of a betrayal by Loki. If Loki had decided to close the portal and keep the army for himself (since the Mooks would have no way of knowing he'd betrayed their masters), the army drops dead and leaves Loki with nothing.
I assumed that they were biomechanical and there was some kind of killswitch (as the above poster mentioned) or some sort of other psychic link to what was on the other side of the portal.
Not really a big issue, but what the hell was the rest of the horde of heroes that base themselves out of NY doing during the alien invasion? That is, the in-universe reason the invasion even manage to damage the city so much, considering how much the hero community in the Marvel universe seem to love Manhattan? Sure, on a meta level, they didn't because it's an Avengers movie, and they are going to show the Avengers, not the dozen other heroes that live nearby, but it'd be good to see some in-universe explanation why the major heroes based out of the Big Apple don't help.
Most likely because the Avengers seem to live in a different universe to Spider-Man, the X-Men and other heroes, even though they exist in the same comics universe. After all, there is no mention of human mutants existing in any of the previous films.
Yep, if we're gonna get all Doylist, there's the Marvel Cinematic Universe (which is made up of films Marvel oversaw themselves) and the rest, who are at other film-companies (X-Men and Fantastic Four at Fox, Spider-Man at Sony.) The latter won't be entering the former until they stop making money for their respective companies. Until.
Also, keep in mind that the invasion was only taking place in Midtown Manhattan, and only lasted a few hours, tops. It's entirely believable that the Fantastic Four and X-Men could have been somewhere else. And characters like Spidey, Daredevil, the Punisher, the Heroes for Hire, etc. are more street-level crimefighters, who may well be fighting the Chitauri, but aren't caught in the spotlight of the moment. So even if they do exist in the same universe, it isn't all that surprising that they aren't seen.
Now, what about War Machine? He's a military officer of the country getting invaded by aliens, after all. I know it's a long movie, but a short cameo could've explained his absence.
The bulk of the film takes place over a day or two, and the invasion is only a few hours. If Rhodey's off somewhere, he would not have time to return, and would be told to stay back like apparently everyone but the National Guard was. Rhodey presumably doesn't have clearance for SHIELD, though Tony doubtless told him anyway.
In addition, it's possible Rhodey is still in California.
Why didn't the World Security Council fire the nuke into the portal rather than at Manhattan, again?
They weren't aware of what was behind the portal. They wouldn't know the alien mothership was right behind the portal, nor that the army was a Keystone Army with the ship being the keystone.
They may also not have been able to lock the missile onto a target as small as the portal to fly through it. If that's not enough, insert whatever energy disruption technobabble you like to explain it.
Nuclear missiles, by their very nature, are not designed to hit small targets. They're designed to hit rather...large targets. The nuke can't be targeted at the portal because nukes aren't designed to pass through fifty-meter-wide openings.
How did Loki get back to Earth?
When Fury asks for an explanation of how the Tesseract is suddenly activating on its own, Hawkeye theorizes that since its intended function is to open doorways to other places, someone might be opening said doorway from the other side. No sooner are the words out of his mouth than the portal opens and Loki comes through.
In other words, he figured out how to mess with the Cosmic Cube remotely. Maybe Thanos taught him how to do it, or maybe he just figured it out himself.
Who earns the Merch rights for Hulk Hands? Cap merch is presumably still owned by the Department of Defense, and Iron Man by Stark, but did someone just start churning out Hulk hands? What, did Tony start making them and slipping Banner a cut of the profi—wait, hang on, I have to go work that into my fanfic. (EDIT: Thisone.)
I would assume that after New York was saved, since the Avengers are now known public heroes, Tony probably approved merchandising based on his fellow heroes (with their permission, of course), and he probably asked Bruce about using Hulk's likeness for any merch.
Also, considering the Hulk Hands is basically two human hands made large and green, without any special pattern on it, any enterprising sales man would have produced some merchandise and sold it, with or without Bruce's permission.
The ending scene. Yes, I know they were sore about losing the cosmic cube. But I wonder why any of the World Security Council argued about keeping Loki on Earth. If they actually read the Norse myths and knew what Asgardian Justice means? Execution is downright merciful compared to snake poison to the eye every day.
Which in itself could be a reason to argue to keep Loki. After all, most Western nations do have laws against handing prisoners over to regimes which would torture them.
Technically those are human rights laws. Loki's not human. And after the SHIELD helicarrier's experience, they may have just decided that there wasn't a prison on earth that could reliably hold him.
Law enforcement, whether it be on the international level or the local level, is notorious for its territorial behavior. The WSC wanted to keep Loki because, as they mentioned, he's a war criminal. He's committed crimes against the Earth and as far as they're concerned, he should face justice as decided and administered by the Earth. Granted, he's arguably done worse to Asgard and the frost giant world, the name of which escapes me right now (Jotunheim, which quite literally means "Giant Home" - a helpful troper), but they don't know and likely don't care about that. Thing is, and I'm kind of surprised Fury didn't mention this; they can't exactly compel Thor to let them keep him.
Ironman and Thor were fighting on close enough to equal terms that a world that has Warmachine (and presumably the means to make more if they wanted) could have at least done a decent job of trying to stop Thor. It may or may not have worked but Fury didn't try and didn't try on purpose.
Iron Man and Thor were not fighting on equal terms. Iron Man was getting his ass kicked by Thor very slowly. Notice that everything Tony does to Thor barely phases him, where as Thor inflicts serious damage on the Iron Man armor. The plan also requires Tony following the order to try and stop Thor, and we all know how good Tony is at following orders, and bringing Rhodey out in time to actually try, which, given how quickly they leave(a day, two, tops) might not have been viable as they probably didn't have notice until an hour before when Thor said "Whelp, been fun. Gonna be taking Loki and the cube back home now." Least that's how I imagine the conversation went.
Fury did mention that, with some understated snark:
WSC: That wasn't your call to make.
Fury: I didn't make it. I just didn't argue with the god who did.
Well, the snake poisoning punishment was not for messing with mortals, but for insulting all the aesir at one of their banquets and killing Baldur, so chances are pretty good Loki will not face this punishment.
The Norse myths aren't necessarily accurate. They really can't be sure what will happen to Loki in Asgard.
Loki's trade off between Chitauri: He gets Earth. They get the universe. The universe pretty much includes Earth. Was he aware that his actions, even if successful, would have made him a slave to the Chitauri?
I think "the rest of the universe" was implied.
Also, Loki really didn't think his cunning plan quite through.
From the scene earlier on where Loki is communing with the Chitauri, it definitely felt like they already had a leash on Loki, and giving him Earth was just throwing him a bone.
What makes you think Earth is so important, anyway? It has no intergalactic travel, no natural resources that couldn't easily be found elsewhere in the universe. It's sort of like taking over the country and giving the guy who helped you do it Utah; not something you're going to miss on the grand scale. The Earth was only important to Loki (who wanted to conquer it to spite his brother) and because it happened to have the Cosmic Cube at the time (which the Chitauri needed to rule the rest of the universe).
Which would make sense, given that The Other didn't expect Earth to put up much of a fight - let alone involving superpowered beings - like they did against his Chitauri forces, thus his line to Thanos about "courting death".
What we're forgetting here is who the chitauri were working for. Loki isn't afraid of the Other, he's afraid of Thanos. And he's right to be. If Earth is the bone Thanos is willing to throw you, you take it and thank him for it.
There might be another reason. In Thor, there was a throwaway line that Fandral said that Thor himself in the past went to Earth to show off his powers and have foolish humans worship him as a God. Perhaps Loki also secretly did the same and remembered it and hoped to expand that, as it were.
Why didn't Stark just stop right before the portal when guiding the nuke? He clearly had it guided well enough. Sure it made it more dramatic but it didn't make a whole lot of sense when the nuke guided itself to the mothership without his aid. What reason did he have for going through as well?
Since he was in space when he went through the portal, the nuke might not have made it to the mothership without continued propulsion.
In space, in the absence of friction, and object with a given speed will continue in that speed forever until it hits something. There is no propulsion needed once the desired speed has been reached, the object will just keep on going. Basic high-school physics. Guidance on the other hand might have posed a problem, since the nuke wasn't guided to hit the mothership in the first place — although it should have exploded on its own once it was over Manhattan anyway; nukes are set to explode while in air, not when they hit the ground.
It is possible the reason the missile didn't hit the ground was due to this particular model firing based off a timing system with it calculated based on current location and velocity. Iron Man's out of power seems to imply he never cut off overclocking his jets despite catching up to the missile. So by increasing the missile's velocity it could travel farther before detonating. In line with the rules of narrativity, the timer just happened to go off near the alien spaceship.
So at the climax of the film (obvious heavy spoilers) the Mysterious World Council Of Mysteriousness fire a nuclear weapon at Manhattan. Seriously; a nuke? The battle was going quite poorly, true, but the invasion had only just started and took the US by complete surprise, so naturally the battle is in the Chitauri's favor. But the MWCM goes straight for the nuclear option. Are you serious? Nukes are last resort weapons. There are hundreds of different tactics and weapons that can be deployed that are less extreme than a freaking nuke. Even if the MWCM ordered a fleet of bombers to carpet-bomb the city, that would still be a more reasonable response than just going - "The 30-minute battle is going badly, so fuck it, nuke everything." Did these assholes even remember the Cold War?
Being fair, it was an alien invasion, not just a couple superhumans brawling. That is kind of serious. . . especially since it was an invasion through a portal, with an indeterminately large amount of forces coming through right now. Nuking the site in a last ditch attempt to close the portal isn't that unreasonable, since if the aliens managed to get a foothold in Manhattan, it would cost as least as many casualties fighting them back off conventionally, if such is even possible. The WSC underestimated the capability of the Avengers, but only that.
Every second that portal was open was one second where any number of Chitauri could come through. The World Security Council knows that there is an alien army of indeterminate size on the other side of that portal, an army with technology that makes most of Earth's weapons look like a joke. There are six people there to stop the invasion - the brother of the invasion's leader, a borderline alcoholic narcissist, a former assassin-for-hire, a man who hasn't seen any action since the 40's, the rage monster that wrecked up Harlem (and Culver University and the SHIELD Helicarrier), and a spy with a bow & arrow who was recently under the thrall of the lead invader. If they bet on the Avengers and bet wrong, there's a large scale alien invasion that maybe one organization and a few individuals (namely SHIELD, War Machine, and The Abomination) are going to be able to deal with, risking billions of casualties and the freedom of Earth. If they bet against The Avengers, there's a few million casualties but the Earth is safe. From their perspective, it really wasn't much of a choice.
Yeah, about that 'makes most of Earth's weapons look like a joke' thing: Which exactly? They footsoldiers were only somewhat superior to earth soldiers, their hoverbikes more maneuverable but no better armed than attack helicopters and their Leviathans, while impressive, were not invulnerable and didn't have much in the way of weapons except more mooks. And Loki had already said 'send in the rest', and the road to the flagship once Ironman was in the portal seemed clear enough, which makes a Zerg Rush unlikely. SHIELD could've done some mayor damage to the force if they'd just launched their fighters without nukes. Possibly it wasn't done because Fury was engineering a victory by just the Avengers. But without the Avengers, the Chitauri would probably have taken/destroyed New York thanks to the element of surprise, but it's not exactly clear how they were going to take the rest of the world with it. And since Rule Of Cool didn't leave them with any weapons with decent beyond line-of-sight capability, they could've just ICBM-ed New York at a later date if it proved neccesary.
I wouldn't even say that their footsoldiers were better than average Earth infantry- their energy rifles and plasma cannons looked impressive and were probably pretty powerful (we saw the plasma cannons blowing holes in buildings), but they were semiautomatic and fired somewhat slow moving projectiles, whereas the average American soldier has an automatic assault rifle effective past several hundred yards. We saw a guy with a bow and arrow kill a over a dozen footsoldiers, I'm pretty sure well trained squads of American soldiers with assault rifles could outclass the alien forces. Not to mention that the aliens don't use cover much, and like to run to get close in combat, which does not work against enemies with automatic weapons.
Those hoverbikes flew almost as well as Iron Man — who can, when he's not hemmed in by skyscrapers, easily outfly F-22 fighter planes. We can reasonably presume that given some open sky they'd be very formidable opponents.
Formidable? We saw half a dozen get killed by a single SHEILD harrier jet piloted by Hawkeye using only its nose cannon, and several more were taken out by the same guy using only a bow and arrow. Modern fighter jets and helicopters could've taken them down easily, given the amount of More Dakka the Army, Airforce, and Navy likes to put on those things.
Again, you miss the important phrase in there: "piloted by Hawkeye." So, the guy with preternatural aim can shoot down a bunch of them. This is not indicative of what other, vastly less skilled people can do. Also, the leviathans didn't need weapons, they had enough strength to just fly through skyscrapers. And the only thing we ever saw damage them were Thor, Hulk, and Iron Man, and even they needed to put an effort into taking the things down. I'm comfortable saying the leviathans would shrug off almost all conventional ordinance.
The problem with that is we never saw Hawkeye demonstrate improbable aiming skills while flying that thing- he floated around a bit and fired the cannon at passing Chitauri flyers. It didn't look like he aimed much at all, and even if he did we saw the Chitauri flyers move slow enough that realistically conventional human aircraft can shoot them down just fine. It seems like a case of Show, Don't Tell, since we're never given the impression that the same aircraft piloted by different people couldn't shoot down the Chitauri, just as we are never given the impression that squads of soldiers with automatic weapons couldn't take out infantry who have no sense of cover more efficiently than one guy with a melee weapon, one girl with a pistol, and another guy with a bow and arrow. Also, Iron Man killed the leviathans with conventional explosives in the form of the missiles launched from his shoulders, and some human weaponry can dish a hell of a lot more kinetic force than one of Hulk's punches (if not as fast); they could go down if conventional aircraft shot them enough times. Not to mention that we never even saw the military try to fight the Chitauri before ordering the nuke, even though the forces we saw didn't seem all that impressive and there are several places where they could've done something so as to not shatter the viewers suspension of disbelief while still putting the central role on the heroes.
The Leviathan was shown flying through buildings with no issue, but was stopped dead in its tracks when it ran into Hulk's fist at full speed. This lead to the shell cracking which allowed Iron Man to strike it's weakpoint for massive damage. While a missle could provide some concussive force, it wouldn't have the same type of continual stopping power that came from the Hulk standing in place with his punch. The only other time Iron Man was shown taking out a Leviathan was from inside, which a traditional fighter jet would lack the manuverability (and likely durability) to survive. The final Leviathan that was taken down required the combined effort of the Hulk and Thor, with Hulk piercing the creature with its own armor and Thor driving it in with a strike from Mjolnir. Considering that a Mjolnir strike was able to take Hulk off his feet earlier in the film, it's not hard to imagine what kind of force was needed to drive the armor shard deep enough into the Leviathan to bring it down.
No, you wouldn't launch a nuke at the initial infantry troops and a swarm of hovercraft; you'd launch a nuke at the rest of the vast enemy army that would be coming right behind the initial invasion force. That was what the WSC believed they would be facing.
Nobody on the good guys' side was anywhere close to within earshot when Loki ordered in "the rest." As far as any of them knew, it was a functionally-unlimited number of hostiles coming through that hole indefinitely.
And god help us all if we have to rely on the Abomination to save us.
We wouldn't really need to- there were not that many aliens, and the forces we saw were easily manageable without even resorting to large amounts of armor or artillery. Just some helicopters and infantry, maybe supported by jets and IFVs.
Everyone arguing the Chitauri's capabilities and our ability to handle them is missing the point. This wasn't a conventional bomb that would turn Midtown into a big crater for the tourists to visit and leave flowers. This was a nuke. There might be a few survivors, but between the blast and the radiation, New York is effectively sterilized. According to the 2010 census, that's 8,244,910 people. Aw, too bad, if you'd tried a just a liiittle harder, you could have beat the Holocaust by a full 50%! Then comes the fallout. Which way is the wind blowing? East, to Long Island (between Nassau and Suffolk counties, approx. 3 million)? West or South to Jersey? Maybe you'll get lucky and it'll blow North, where it'll only wipe out Westchester County (just under 1 million)! Of course, regardless of wind, this is New York. Without thousands of humans working constantly to maintain, it'll flood in short order. Whoops your radioactive material in the Atlantic currents! 3% of the total population of the United States dead, the environment poisoned, and let's not even talk about the collapse of the world economy thanks to the annihilation of one of the world's great financial centers or the destruction of countless irreplaceable artifacts. That's kinda petty in comparison. Could it have been avoided? Could all those people have been saved? Could the aliens have been defeated some other way? Never know now, will you? Of course the WSC had no idea of the Chitauri's numbers or capabilities. That's the whole reason you save the nukes for later. Fury was right. It was a stupid-ass decision.
It makes you wonder if the WSC was also brainwashed by Thanos.
The denouement is kind of... weird. So they have Loki pinned down and surrounded by very angry heroes, and the Tesseract is back under their control. So they take the time to... wash up, dress nicely in civvies and drive out to Central Park, just casually strolling to a sunny plaza, in plain view of the public, to send Loki and Thor back home? (And as hilarious as the second stinger is, that means that they cuffed and gagged Loki, stored him somewhere, had lunch, and then did the above.) Isn't that a rather carefree attitude to dealing with the insane genocidal overlord?
Loki had just been Hulk Smashed. Perhaps it took him an hour or two to be able to stand up without falling over - so they went and got something to eat while he recovered
The Shawarma stinger gets even funnier if you picture Loki shackled and muzzled just off-screen, staring enviously at the Shawarma and trying not to fall asleep like everyone else. It doesn't make it any less silly, but Rule of Funny.
But seriously, they handed him over to SHIELD, then they went out for Schwarma, then went to their respective home bases and got cleaned up. Then they retrieved him and took him to a good spot to say their farewells. The danger of Loki was over, three of them have enough power unarmed to give him a serious hard time, it's not that big of a deal.
The scene where everybody rides off into the sunset may not have even been on the same day as the final battle. They very well could have detained Loki and spent a day or two tying up loose ends before going their separate ways.
How did Fury survive being shot? Bulletproof vest?
Yes. He even pauses for a second to remove the flattened bullet and show it to the camera.
The portal: How was Loki's scepter the way to stop it, and how the hell did that scientist guy get un-brainwashed?
The scepter stopped it because the shield around it was pure Tesseract entry, and the scientist put a backdoor in - it can't defend against its own power, so the scepter can penetrate the shield and disrupt the portal. He was probably not totally brainwashed to begin with and then managed to snap completely out of it.
Also, when they first attacked Loki atop the tower, the scientist was thrown back fairly violently; if percussive maintenance can work to snap Clint out of it, there's no reason it couldn't work on the scientist too.
And hell, it seemed like even Loki "snapped out" of his state when the Hulk beat the holy fudge out of him.
Including a shut off switch seems like exactly the kind of thing a responsible scientist like Selvig would do when designing a device that could fail disastrously, brainwashed or not.
I forget what hit him, but he got hit. They even foreshadowed it when Black Widow freed Hawkeye. Apparently Loki's brain washing fades away if you get knocked out.
How come for Hulk's second appearance he seemed somewhat more in control?
The very end of the Hulk movie implied that Banner had learned to control the Hulk.
Plus, his "I'm always angry" line probably supports this. He's learned to, at least, control his anger to a point where he can use the Hulk as a means to stop whomever or whatever's angering him.
He didn't fight it. Notice that the second transformation went by apparently painlessly and took seconds whereas the first one took a while and was not a pleasant experience. Treating The Hulk like a separate entity leads it to act that way, accepting it leads to more control. This was hinted at in The Incredible Hulk. when he fought The Abomination.
How was Black Widow able to trick Loki into revealing his plan to use the Hulk? It seemed to me like she just guessed.
She's a really good spy and good at gathering information, Loki is really arrogant. He mentioned Banner more than once, and Black Widow realized Banner was the key to the plan - he's already a big risk, due to the fact that he's one frustrated rage away from destroying half the carrier, so it's not too big a stretch.
OP here. No, I mean, I remember that scene, and I don't remember him mentioning Banner.
When Black Widow refers to Loki as a monster, he replies that she was the one who brought the real monster. That could only be a reference to the Hulk.
It's hard to say who played who in that scene. It immediately appears as though the Black Widow was able to pump Loki for information by manipulating him, but that information almost immediately resulted in the Hulk getting free and Loki getting what he wanted.
Just my opinion, but it seemed to me that they both got to each other in different ways, so it was more a draw than anything. I think Loki was counting on tipping Widow off on the fact that the Hulk was the card up his sleeve while also causing her to run out of the room crying. Loki gets played, however, because he underestimates the shit out of her, because she's a human woman who he sees as weak. He has a look of genuine surprise on his face after she looks up, completely composed. In the end he does get what he wants, but he doesn't get there as flawlessly as he'd hoped.
I'll admit, I'm not a huge comic book nerd, and when I saw the movie I didn't know who Thanos was, But is it really such a stretch to assume that the Bigger Bad actually was Red Skull from Captain America: The First Avenger? I believe the page for that movie speculated that he had been Put on a Bus rather than killed.
Even if the lighting in the scene makes it difficult to discern red from purple, the chin is all wrong and the Skull's prominent cheekbones are missing. Thanos' face is flat and wide instead of angular and sunken.
Yes, yes it is a stretch. A very big one. Just compare a picture of Thanos from Wikipedia and the shot of the Bigger Bad's face. Also, Kevin Feige confirmed it was Thanos.
I actually thought this for a split second, then I noticed the chin and the line about "courting death" clicked. But honestly, it would have annoyed the hell out of me if that had been the case; I can see Loki being a pawn for Thanos. I cannot see Loki being a pawn for Red Skull.
Could it be that in this continuity, Red Skull was transformed into Thanos? If just a little Asgard magic could turn a man into Red Skull, a buttload might have altered him even further into Thanos. He'd have 70 years to complete his transformation into what we saw.
This seems unlikely. Though Marvel made a Composite Character in Iron Man 2 from two b-list villains (Crimson Dynamo and Whiplash), combining two very different a-listers like Thanos and Red Skull just doesn't feel right. Also, Schmidt's... condition was caused by unfinished Super Soldier serum having a bad reaction with his pre-existing psychosis and god complex- Asgardian magitek had nothing to do with it.
You're missing the entire point of this being Thanos. He's way worse than anything we've seen before in the MCU. Having him be Red Skull/related to Red Skull in some way would make literally no sense, and have very little purpose, beyond some tenuous connection to Cap, which is simply unneeded at this point.
Well, Red Skull at his worst is someone who can give Thanos a run for his money, in the comics if not the MCU- he's definitely more evil than him in many ways. [There are rumours that the Other is actually the Skull, transformed somehow- if true, then he probably knew that Earth would repel Loki's invasion and has been manipulating both Loki and Thanos all along, though it would be a case of Did You Just Scam Cthulu at best as Thanos is obviously a lot more powerful and the Other might go the way of Mephisto in the Infinity Gauntlet by the end.
Yeah...just gonna come right and say that rumor's pretty stupid sounding, and reeks of wishful thinking WMG at the absolute best, that doesn't make any logical sense except for someone's odd need to make everything connected to everything else.
Why was Pepper barefoot in both of her scenes in Stark Tower?
To show how comfortable and intimate she and Tony are at this point in their relationship, since the Stark Tower penthouse is probably their home in NYC.
Still, at the end of the movie they're overseeing the rebuilding of the tower after it got wrecked in the invasion. Not exactly a private moment, since there's construction workers behind them fixing up the place.
When Clint asks Natasha why she's so eager to fight Loki, she says, "I've been compromised. I've got red in my ledger, and I want to wipe it out." What does she mean? She only broke down in front of Loki to trick him. Even if her distress was genuine on some level, that doesn't seem like being compromised. Is she talking about what happened to Clint?
Her being compromised was referring to her Dark and Troubled Past before being a SHIELD agent.
But the word compromised implies that you were following the rules to begin with, so it doesn't really apply to Natasha's life before she joined SHIELD. Besides, what has that got to do with Loki?
The "red in my ledger" was her debt to Clint. Clint had a new enemy in Loki, and that meant that Natasha has the same enemy. As for being compromised, she's not a fan of owing anyone something so big.
I got a different interpretation from it. Since by this point she's supposed to be "over" her Dark and Troubled Past, I thought she was being metaphorical: "I've got red on my ledger" means that "I harmed someone else again." In this context, it means that she feels responsible for taking Banner out of his steady, peaceful life and putting him in a terrible situation: she brought him into a position where he could find out about SHIELD's conspiracies, she brought him to a position where he could be manipulated by Loki, and she brought him to a position where he ended up losing control of The Other Guy and she nearly died because of it (look at how uncharacteristically ''shaken'' she is after the Hulk slams her into a wall.) So now that she knows firsthand what the Hulk really is, she wants to get back at Loki for her indirectly making Banner's life a mess again. The "I've been compromised" part refers to how this amazing, collected, efficient super-spy was reduced to a cowering mess for a few minutes, and she deeply resents that.
Loki really did get to her, thus she felt compromised. She was acting as much when she seemed not fazed by it as she did when it seemed to have totally crushed her. Loki makes it very clear that he knows that the "red in her ledger" is mostly the blood of innocent people. That's not a thing that sits well with a person who's just been teamed up with Captain America. Being attacked by the Hulk is as much a "I hope people don't see me like that because of the things I've done" moment as it is a "I'm totally out of my league" moment.
It may be a bit of both sides. When Natasha says she's been compromised and wants to balance her metaphorical books, she's referring to her debt to Clint and the position that him being captured and brainwashed puts her in as a SHIELD agent. However, she's not motivated only by her debt to Clint; she's also done things prior to joining SHIELD that she feels guilty over. Loki, armed with information he received from Clint, drags the subtext into text and calls her on it, mocking the idea that repaying her percieved debt to Clint would make her feel any better about the things she did before her conversion. This would also be why she uses the line again later on when talking to Clint.
I was sure she was talking about being emotionally compromised. Despite the fact that she got info out of Loki, she really did break down, she just played it for all it was worth to make her reverse interrogation of Loki more convincing. When she's talking to Clint after he wakes up, she looks like she was admitting her breakdown. This made her uncomfortable about her past, since she seems like an atoner.
Why didn't Loki use more of his magical abilities then just the doppelganger illusion trick?. If he'd bothered to use it on someone other then Thor and some frightened citizens he probably would have managed to have avoided be smashed by Hulk and could have possibly made a clean get-away.
Loki is shown to have a big hubris. The fact that his forces were losing the battle pissed him off and he was hoping to reassure himself by talking down the Hulk, calling himself a god.
It would do one well to think about this: Loki sees the entire human race as beneath him. Which means, in his mind, Thor is the only one who is a Worthy Opponent for much of the film, and therefore the only one who he uses his full spectrum of powers on.
They also make a point of demonstrating that Loki's true advantage is his ability to talk his way out of most situations. Something he fails to realize won't work against a giant green rage monster. They further highlight this advantage when he's not only "cuffed", but muzzled when Thor takes him back to Asgard.
Where exactly does he actually talk his way out of a situation? I don't remember a single instance.
More importantly, there's no point where it would really help, save at the very end when he was fighting the Hulk. Every other time, he was under control of the situation and things were going according to plan. And against the Hulk? He was injured, tired, and in the throes of a clear Villainous Breakdown due to the plan going awry.
It's actually kind of subtle, but it's implied that what the scepter does for Loki (besides shooting...power beams, or whatever) is take his power to manipulate people and magnify it tenfold, which is why it allows him to literally control Selvig and Hawkeye. Therefore a great amount of his success early in the movie is due to his ability to be a Manipulative Bastard.
While we're on the subject of Loki's "unused arsenal," whatever happened to the ice casket? From what I remember it was still in his possession by the end of Thor and Loki seems to have the ability to store items in limbo until he has need of them. Wouldn't the ice casket have come in handy at some point (like, with any one of the Avengers)? Then there's also Loki's natural abilities as a Frost Giant (causing severe frostbite with touch alone). He has a "silver tongue" and an enormous ego, true, but how could he possibly forget the other weapons he had at his disposal, especially towards the end?
You're mistaken. Loki left the casket in the Bifrost bridge when he froze it. He didn't have it on hand when he was fighting Thor or when he fell off.
On second thought, he probably still hates his Jötun form and thus would never, ever use these abilities, even if they would be an advantage.
Yeah, it's probably this. He's pretty hellbent on proving himself as an Aesir, an equal to Thor, and using his Jotun powers would negate that and just highlight his status as an outcast once again.
Thor is the superpowered God of Thunder with a hammer of incredible strength and density. Cap was on poor footing and was being struck by this man from a jump with a shield. How in the hell is he alive right now!?
...the shield made out of a metal that can withstand anything?
To elaborate on that; the shield isn't simply made out of an indestructible material. If it was, Cap would have been flattened underneath it from the force of the blow. The shield is made of a material that actually negates all force thrown at it.
They make a subtle point of this in Cap's own movie. Bullets fired at the shield fall straight down at his feet rather than bouncing off.
What specific event was Fury gathering the Avengers for? How many of are there actually on the roster anyway? It bothers me because with Ironman specifically told he wasn't on the team, Banner was so not on the team that he was in hiding, Thor not specifically tapped and worse on another plane of existence I'm not impressed at all by who's left. Captain America, Black Widow and Hawkeye are the only Avengers officially on the team at the start of the movie. They would have been hard pressed to annoy something as "minor" as Hulk's rampages. They would have gone down fighting but that's about it. It's not a very good plan. If on the other hand he had some vague clue as to the nature of the threat they were facing a good plan might have been to explain this to Tony and get to work on getting those military Ironmen from 2 back online and in mass production. Sure they didn't do well against two human piloted Iron Men (who in reality should have gotten spanked fighting a few dozen bots with shared vision. It's amazing the things you can dodge when you almost literally have eyes in the back of your head) but they could probably fight those stone guys rather well.
He probably wasn't gathering them for any specific event, but with all these superheroes showing up lately there was always the chance that someday they would meet some vastly superior foe, the Avengers Initiative was set up to prepare for that day. The prequel comic also explains that the Avengers Initiative was never completed, because the WSC thought it was a waste of resources and wanted SHIELD to focus on studying and weaponising the Cosmic Cube.
This is pretty much confirmed when Fury says the Avengers would be gathered to "fight the battles we never could."
I know this is partially a problem with all comics but why is the US government made out to be the bad guys for trying to develop weapons? If the facts in Iron Man are to be trusted Stark has sucessfully privatised peace. It's a good thing he's on our side since if he wanted to take over there doesn't seem to be much we could do to stop him. Hulk has torn through entire batallions and just a brief encounter with Asgard shows just how weak the Earth is. As Fury says we are hilariously out gunned and it's just dumb luck that none of the other planets that want to invade have any extraordinary groups. We should be learning to stand on our own two feet and defend our planet, not depend on a very small group of people who might turn on us, might die, and might be too few in number. If Loki had been capable of opening multiple portals at multiple locations on Earth things would have turned out very differently.
I don't think they're made out to be particularly bad. In both Iron Man 2 and Avengers Tony is learning how to be a team player, and at least SHIELD now is on good terms with him, so I doubt he won't be willing to help them when he can.
The Avengers point out that building new, stronger weapons does nothing but create an arms race. Because SHIELD was using the Tesseract to build new weapons, they were seen as a bigger threat, and so that actually increases the chance that they'll attract the attention of strong baddies, causing a positive feedback loop. And honestly, it doesn't seem to me like Earth is all that outgunned. One nuke was able to take out the entire enemy battalion. Also, the fact that the super secret council was willing to bomb one of the largest cities in the world without even attempting a smaller, controlled strike shows what a bad idea it is to develop even stronger weapons. When All You Have Is a Hammer, everything starts to look like nails, and so developing super strong weapons means that they're more likely to try to just solve everything with increasingly larger explosions. That's bad for everyone.
And the Avengers is very very wrong on that point. Loki flat out admit that he wasn't attacking because of the Tesseract, he was attacking to spite Thor. Even sans an army Loki could have done a lot of damage. I honestly don't think Ironman and Captain America could have taken him if he wasn't throwing the fight. The Super Secret Council is just a silly story telling device to make it seem like wanting to be on equal footing with say the Frost Giants is inherently evil. Having a hammer doesn't make you evil. What is the moral reasoning behind 300 million (or 6 billion depending on if you want to debate that America isn't the entire world) should be 100% dependent on 5 people for their safety and freedom? I know comics do a terrible job of expressing this since the X-men always come through and the military is at best slightly more effective than sweating on a fire and at worst actively either starting the fire or throwing gasoline on it so it's easy to get in line but still we need to be able to fight back. Also an arms race with whom exactly? All of the alien races we're aware of in Marvel (or DC for that matter) are so far beyond us that unless the Tesseract is a lot more powerful than is displayed they'd be no more threatened by us developing the weapons Hydra developed in WW 2 (how have we failed to recreate that?!) than America would be of Ethiopia developing a battleship.
They pointed out why it is bad. Human society is not advanced enough to be trusted with weapons like that. The Tesseract produces weapons Earth is not ready to have. Thor stated weapons on that level would only attract the attention of other powers that would either want the Tesseract for themselves or view Earth as a threat. Another point is how soon would the weapons designed to defend Earth start to be used to threaten neighboring countries in the name of "national interests." Then you get in the question of preemptive strikes. The World Council panicked and was willing to blow up all of Manhattan to stop an alien invasion that was still containable. How long before Earth found its way to other worlds and decided to nuke Jotunheim due to a past invasion? How long before humans decided to start invading other worlds? The Jotuns proved they cannot be trusted with such power and had it taken away, their world destroyed in the process. The Asgardians have proven their society has advanced enough to be trusted with such power.
^ It's explicitly stated that the Tesseract has enough power to blow up the Earth. And Thanos wants the Tesseract so he can conquer the entire universe. It's really freaking powerful, if you know how to use it properly. If Earth's neighbors discover that humans have the Tesseract and they're actively trying to weaponize it...you can see why they'd get nervous.
Shield is able to reproduce the Hydra weapons. Remember the "Phase 2 Prototypes" Fury mentions? Remember Widow's gauntlets?
Its not "You're bad for making weapons!" Its "You're bad for not telling us everything when you ask for our help." Also keep in mind that, of the six Avengers, four of them have their own reasons for not liking it: Bruce distrusts SHIELD in particular and the government in general, so any secret they keep is bad. Cap has fought enemies with Tesseract-based weapons before, so he's automatically leery of SHIELD's attempt to make the Electric Boogaloo of Hydra's arms program. Tony is automatically leery of advanced weapons development in general because of his experiences, especially when its based on similar principles to the technology he's developed. Thor is leery because he automatically thinks the SHIELD Tesseract weapons were intended to be used against Asgard. Black Widow doesn't care.
Why is everyone saying that Black Widow outsmarted Loki? The plan that he wanted Hulk to come out and destroy the Helicarrier. That, and more, happened. Isn't it possible that Loki, Master of Lies, etc., let the information slip to her on purpose?
Look at Loki's reaction when she thanks him for his "cooperation." It's along the lines of, "Wait, what?" The information might have been too little too late, but she made him think he had really gotten to her, when she was playing him for information without him realizing it, which means she got the better of him.
Loki's low opinion of her is particularly clear when he insults her with a misogynistic slur (degrading her based on her sex as well as her species). It's probably safe to say that he assumed that she, as a human woman, was not capable of outsmarting him.
She did outsmart him, and went to warn everyone about this... the problem is, "everyone" was much more interested in butting heads and insulting one another to listen. As they say, spotting a trap is one thing, staying out of it is quite another....
What advantage would it give him to slip her this information?
What he wanted ultimately was for Bruce to get pissed off and trash the helicarrier. Before he revealed the information, Bruce was pretty much chilling in the lab with Tony. It is only when SHIELD realised that Loki is after the Hulk that they start asking Bruce Banner to get into a secure containment unit, which in turn made Bruce get really agitated. As he said himself, he was one step away from showing his party trick.
But in the movie there was a huge difference between the Hulk being "summoned" by Banner and the Hulk coming out by itself, due to injury and the like. I do believe "showing his party trick" would have been a conscious transformation into the Hulk, rather than the devastating involuntary one.
None of the characters knew the voluntary/involuntary change thing at that point. SHIELD was already on the edge (see how they recruited him and what they build to cage him in) and Loki gave them a push over it.
So when exactly does the post-credits scene in Thor take place? And how Loki apparently was there, influencing Selvig's mind or something while Fury was showing him the Tesseract. So then at what point did he meet the Chitauri, before or after this? And assuming he had found a 'secret path' to Earth, why did he need the Tesseract portal to get back again?
And how exactly does his mind-controlling work anyways? He apparently needs to tap people's chests with his spear. Why did he need to do it to Selvig when he did it without anything in Thor?
The way I understood it, the wormhole he took most likely sent him to the Chitauri world, and from there, he projected himself into Selvig's mind, but he couldn't physically enter Earth at that time.
I take it that the scepter didn't give Loki totally new powers, so much as it augmented his own capacities. Presumably, Loki can already influence minds in various ways; the scepter just allows him to do things like cast his mind across cosmic distances, and inflict lasting domination with a touch that doesn't require continuous concentration.
What did Banner mean by "I'm always angry."
That he's managed to control his anger enough that he can voluntarily transform into the Hulk whenever he needs to. Hence why he smiled at the end of The Incredible Hulk, and why his Hulk transformation during the New York battle was seamless and not as painful as the transformation at the Helicarrier.
Exactly what he said: he is always angry. If you pay attention to his behavior throughout the film, Banner always has an attitude in his voice, his eyes reveal barely-constrained rage, and there are moments like when he screamed at Black Widow when she was first recruiting him that seem like they should have triggered a transformation, but didn't. He's made peace with his rage and incorporated it so thoroughly into his personality that it ceases to be a trigger and becomes a control mechanism.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't missiles detonated internally or remotedly on approach to target rather than on impact? Stark managed to divert the nuke mere meters from the wall of the building, so shouldn't it have exploded?
Air-to-air weapons are proximity-detonated. Nuclear weapons travel a certain distance and explode, unless they impact an object.
Wasn't even a nuclear weapon to begin with. It was an AGM-154 Joint Stand-Off Weapon, a non-nuclear demi-cruise missile used by the US Air Force and the US Navy. Typically loaded with a standard warhead or submunitions. It was a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, but Tony's HUD even identified the weapon by name.
Some friends of mine were claiming that Captain America's claim of there "being only one god and that he doesn't dress like that" (like that of Thor and Loki), was him being a Flat Earth Atheist in regard to the possibility of some mythologies and religions having their deities actually exist, and that he was being biased thinking only the Christian God was real. But doesn't the Captain make a good point? I mean how can we conclusively say that these powerful entities are really gods and not Sufficiently Advanced Aliens pretending to be such, there has to be a line drawn where we can call a being powerful enough to be a god. What makes a god in a comic book continuity?
I think your friends lack an understanding of Christianity. A major part of Christianity is that your God is real, and all the other Gods are false. Cap is a Christian who grew up in the 30s. He will definitely be less than pleased to hear someone refer to a planet filled with thousands of these "Gods."
Well, first off, it was more than likely just a joke meant to further point towards Captain America being a Fish Out of Temporal Water. Saying something like that in the 40s would have been a lot more normal than saying it these days. But more to the point, it's outright stated in Thor that humans once worshipped the Asgardians as gods, so it is sort of a hard situation. Anyone who heard about Thor and Loki growing up would have heard about them as gods in myths. So being presented with them as very real beings makes things a little confusing. Furthermore, what Natasha says is that they're "basically gods," not that they are. She probably wouldn't want to fight one-on-one with Thor, or maybe even Loki. The both of them have powers that go well beyond what humans are capable of having. That isn't to say they are always more powerful than humans though, just that, in movie canon, the only way to get a human close to the strength of those two involves either: A. ridiculous amounts of money and genius know-how (Stark), B. some kind of scientific experiementation done on purpose (Rogers), or C. scientific experimentation that goes awry (Banner). Which means even if Thor and Loki aren't gods, the fact that they seemingly have these powers naturally means that they'll probably still be referred to as such by some.
Cap is simply saying that having enormous power is not enough to make you God-with-a-capital-G. You need to have a moral component too that Loki is obviously lacking.
Cap is saying that he's a Christian. This line is being terribly overthought.
Actually as far as the Marvel Comic Book continuity goes Captain America is right, there is only one true all-powerful, all-knowing, ever-present being, God with a capital G, the big guy upstairs, and His name is quite simply The One-Above-All. The Living Tribunal is the most powerful being in the Marvel Universe and whose role is to judge the universe and to prevent it from being destroyed, and when asked by a mortal if he was God the response was that there was someone even greater than The Living Tribunal. The One-Above-All is the Marvel Universe's God, He created it, but they tastefully don't mention which God He is so as not to offend people's religious perspectives only that He is the Supreme and Almighty God.
To clarify further Captain America is not absolutely right. In the MU, Thor and the other Asgardians among the Olympians and what not are classified as gods. Its just there are levels considered beyond godhood. The-One-Above-All would fit the monothestic definition of god, but is generally regarded as beyond gods. It has also never been confirmed to be the same as the Judeo-Christain God. If anything, recent stories have implied the Judeo-Christain God is more in line with someone like Odin than the One-Above-All.
The DC Universe has God under the name of The Presence, and He is heavily implied to be the Judeo-Christain God. The One-Above-All is never given such implications and is simply stated to be God without any explanation as to which God He is supposed to be. Though if these characters had to be any God the Judeo-Christain God would make sense because in our cultural perception that God is viewed as an entity who is all-powerful, all-knowing, present in all of space, and is ultimately immortal and timeless, and who we can relate to on a personal and moral level in that He judges mortals for their crimes against His laws but chooses to love and save them anyway. That God invokes images of the big guy upstairs, the one above all that everyone eventually and ultimately answers to, the Supreme Being of the universe who created everything and whom no one can be likened onto. Every other religion either has multiple gods that can defeat their head god if they worked together or the entity known as God is too impersonal, God in the sense we are talking of is both personal and has no equal so He works better as a character in a fictional story and He is special because we are filled with that religious and superstitious awe when He is mentioned.
It's funny that you mentioned Stan Lee, because God appeared to Spider-Man as an old man in one comic story. It would be funny if Stan Lee was God in the Marvel Movie continuity.
It would explain why he keeps showing up in all the MCU movies as different people.
Why DID Bruce pick up the Scepter, during the argument prior to the attack on the Helicarrier? This is the only thing that boggles me.
I assumed that to be a subtle inclination that Loki was manipulating Banner to bring the Hulk out.
Not just Banner. The way the camera turned the scene upside down with the sceptre in the foreground while everyone screamed at each other in an almost out of character fashion ("You humans are so petty. And tiny!") seemed to imply that the scepter itself was subtly manipulating everyone in the room by heating the already existing tensions to their breaking point. Cap and Tony very nearly came to an all-out fistfight, Thor lost all of his respect for humanity and then immediately regained it after the fight was ended, Banner threatened to turn into the Hulk (subtly threatening to MURDER EVERYONE, etc.) By allowing Black Widow to manipulate him into revealing that the Hulk is the big danger he's planning, Loki set off the chain of events that would result in a confrontation with Banner right there in the room with the sceptre. Banner picking up the sceptre was just an extension of the already homocidal rage he was in (by his own admission, he is always angry), just like Cap goading Tony to "put on the suit" to find out whose dick is bigger.
When the Scepter touches someone's chest, it can almost completely override their brain. It makes comic book sense that it would be able to subtly manipulate people in its immediate vicinity as a secondary effect.
You can see the scepter having an obvious effect on a few of the characters if you look closely. Stark is wiping his face and opening his mouth like he's both exhausted and feeling a hell of a headache. Thor's eyes are squinting when he makes the "puny and tiny" remark. You can also see the moment when Banner grabs the scepter, when he turns his body slightly and his arm moves a bit, right before Fury and Natasha both unclip their sidearms.
Actually, while it looks like the sceptre is influencing them, its not totally clear and it could be that the camera is focusing on it just to emphasize that Loki is using it for something (namely, for his men to lock-on to the Helicarrier). Banner grabbing it might just be a sign that he is on the verge of Hulking-out (which is why everyone around him freaks out...well, another reason they freak out). Given how quickly everyone gets over their issues, and that none of them ever assume that the sceptre had been affecting them....at the very least, its ambiguous enough that it could be either.
Someone mentioned Black Widow's gauntlets as an example of Hydra-based weaponry...what, exactly, do they do? We see them powering up with all these blue lights, but she seems to mainly use firearms or hand-to-hand combat throughout the fight. So what gives? Do they boost her punching power? Tasers?
They're supposed to be tasers that stun opponents when she punches them, giving her Waif-Fu a bit more oomph.
In the comics, Widow's gauntlets also shoot out stun lasers as well, though I don't recall an instance where she used her gauntlets in this manner.
You see her use them twice against the Chitauri, most noticeably on the one she grapples right before she has Cap toss her up onto the hovercraft.
So, where did Fury even get the blood to put on Coulson's trading cards anyways?
Two fairly obvious sources: Whatever blood was being stored in the medical section of the ship, or Coulson's bloody corpse.
Or it's not blood at all. Notice that it never dries and turns brown. That's not the sort of detail that Whedon is likely to overlook.
It can take 4-5 days for blood to turn brown, and they looked fairly dry to me the second time we see the cards. It would be much easier for Fury to take the cards out of Coulson's locker and squirt some blood on them than to go to all the trouble of digging up some fake blood (from where?) and smearing them up with that.
Loki needed the Cosmic Cube and the Chitauri to conquer the Earth...how the hell was he going to keep it when they took the cube and left?
He appeared to have presumed he wouldn't need them. Remember his speech in Stuttgart, where he said it was humanity's "natural inclination" to kneel before the powerful. Once mankind was conquered, he presumes, they'll be beaten and wouldn't rise up again. Not the brightest plan, but he is convinced it would work.
Also, its possible his deal involved keeping the army as his once they'd conquered Earth for him and he had given over the Tesseract. Granted, there would be little reason for Thanos not to just take back his army anyway, if he so chose. . . but then again, there's also the chance Loki was planning on backstabbing Thanos once he had control of Earth.
Minor nitpick, but during the final battle and a few other scenes where the group is split up, how could they all hear each other? I couldn't see any obvious way for anyone besides Fury and Iron Man to communicate without physically being next to a person.... Did I miss really tiny earphones or whatever?
They were all wearing radios. You can see an earpiece in Hawkeye's ear and Cap's ear when his mask is removed. Thor and Hulk don't seem to be communicating much with anyone else at all; they mostly seem to just be running around obliterating things. Black Widow's earpiece is there, but mostly hidden by her hair.
I've only seen the film once, so I might be missing something, but how exactly did Cap land in Stuttgard to deflect the blast from Loki? He jumps in front, without any visible parachute, so to be dropped from the height where that was possible Loki would have had to notice a plane. Did Cap just sneak in behind and hide in the crowd or something, thinking he could blend in?
Dropped over a nearby building from where he Parkoured and did his Big Damn Heroes when shit got real.
^This seems the most likely explanation. Cap might have asked to be dropped off on the roof of a nearby building where he was close enough to survey the whole area but not be seen. That would give him plenty of time to spring into action when it's clear Loki intended to kill the old man.
The most likely explanation is that, yeah, the jet dropped Cap off nearby and he legged it over there, because Loki was in the middle of the crowd and they couldn't go all minigun on him. Cap arrived, got Loki's attention, and then Black Widow could bring the jet around once Cap was close enough to Loki to challenge him and let the crowd run for it.
After Loki drops Thor out of the Helicarrier, why does Thor need to go looking for his hammer? It seems like he temporarily lost the ability to summon it. He tracks it to where it fell, flexes his hand above it, but has to actually bend down and pick it up before he can fly to New York. It almost seemed like Mjolnir was judging him "not worthy" again, at first.
Less that Mjolnir judged him as "not worthy" than Thor judged himself as "not worthy." He was tricked by Loki, Son of Coul died while he could do nothing, and overall he got his ass kicked. Thor's not feeling up to snuff after the incident on the Helicarrier, so he's got to psyche himself back up until he feels he's worthy of taking up Mjolnir again and going back after Loki.
Yeah, it looked less like Mjolnir wasn't cooperating and more like Thor wasn't entirely sure he'd be able to pick it up, and had to work up to it a bit.
Remember the last time Thor lost Mjolnir and he proved unworthy. He seemed so completely traumatized by being unable to pick up the hammer. Any possible suggestion that he was unworthy once again would be enough to make him hesitate to pick it up.
So, Cap and Iron Man "capture" Loki in Germany, Thor shows up and takes Loki away, and Thor, Cap, and Iron Man fight it out for a few minutes. During their fight Loki...just hangs around. He doesn't run or try to escape, he just stays right where Thor left him. And yes, I know getting "captured" by SHIELD was all part of Loki's plan. I'm not an idiot. What I'm wondering is why the heroes didn't immediately go "Hey, this guy had a golden opportunity to escape but didn't take it. He's probably up to something."
They do. Steve points out that it was way too easy, and in a separate conversation Fury says he has a feeling Loki is the only one who wants to be there. They just can't very well let him roam around loose after killing eighty people in two days. They take the best precautions they can by locking him in the Hulk cell, and Natasha goes in to talk to him specifically to (in accordance with her usual method) trick him into dropping a clue about what he's up to. No, it doesn't turn out all that well, but they are visibly making an effort.
Loki can't fly or move at greatly superhuman speed. If he bolts, Thor and Stark, both of whom can fly, will run him down immediately. He knows this. They know it.
He probably could turn invisible, though. This doesn't change that Loki wanted to be caught, and everyone there realized it. But really, what were they going to do? Not take him in?
When Thor is fighting Iron Man and zaps him with lightning, the suit somehow gets charged up to 400% capacity. Whether this was referring to the suit's overall power or just the repulsors, it would have come in handy in the final fight. Thor still very much has control over lightning and could probably easily have given Stark an extra boost, regardless of distance, albeit a little less destructively overall. It seems like a missed opportunity, especially since a) Stark was beginning to lose power by the end, leading to his big hero moment and not-death, and b) even when fighting the Chitauri footsoldiers, a shot like that would have come in handy. Thor obviously probably didn't know about the lightning's effect, but Stark could have directly told him to do it anyway. They do have communicators, after all.
The actual boost given by the blast from Thor's lightning seemed to have little overall effect on the Mark VI's performance. It was either expended too quickly or otherwise not exceedingly useful. Furthermore, it would require Thor standing in place for a few moments and Stark recoiling for a few seconds, neither of which they have time for. They're too busy fighting the legions of Chitauri.
Well, for starters, there's the reliability of this device. Stark himself seemed surprised that the suit absorbed the discharge well enough to feed the power supplies. He even goes "Huh, how about that?" when Jarvis tells him. If the Mark VI had such an unexpected effect that its own designer couldn't account for it, then messing around too much with it might be a risk he's not willing to take.There's a difference between "Hm, I have a brand new suit to replace my battle-damaged one, I'll have to skip testing because we're about to fight a war here" and "Wow, this thing reacted in a way I never saw coming, and I can't tell if it will happen again, yeah, let's use it in the middle of an alien invasion!" Even if the arc reactor could take the overload, what if Mark VII's power conduits couldn't take it? And as a rule of thumb, it's generally not a good idea to overload your power supplies to four times their capacity if you can help it, much less do it repeatedly, much less if you're messing with the power core that powers your armor and, uh, keeps you alive. But beside that, even if they had agreed to exploit this ability, there simply wasn't much of an opportunity to do so. When Stark is a) boosting the missile into the portal, he's probably moving too fast for Thor, who is pretty busy with his own battles, to get a bead on with a bolt of lightning (and if the bolt happens to conduct into the missile it runs the risk of activating its detonator.) And if they were to team up and b) use it to fend off footsoldiers, that would be a huge waste of both combatants' tactical potential, since it would need them to remain within line of sight of each other, while Thor took time every few moments to "recharge" Stark. Since the latter was taking mooks well enough with his regular blasts, why waste his and Thor's time setting up the single-shot supercharged ones?
The bolt of lightning supercharged the Reactor, but the armor isn't built to incorporate anything like that. Tony never seems to take advantage of the supercharge in the fight with Thor because weapons don't work that way; at no point does Tony display any kind of variable "use any amount of power I want" effect with the Repulsors. Every time he fires them, they seem to have the same effect; using a set amount of power. If the armor isn't built with a "drain all the power from the reactor" weapon, then Tony can't really do much beyond continuing to work at maximum efficiency for longer. All other weapons beyond the Repulsors don't appear to use the Reactor, such as his one-off laser weapon that fires from a cartridge, and thus would be completely unaffected by the supercharge. Furthermore, take a look at Tony's chassis after the bolt hits him; being struck by lightning supercharged the Reactor, but it DESTROYED the chassis. Again: this is not a feature incorporated by the armor, and even though it had a mild positive effect on a single part of the armor, it doesn't look like it did anything good to the rest. Maybe with time, Tony might be able to figure out a way to weaponize this effect, but as it stands, the only armor he would have had a chance to build any such weapon into would have been the Mark VI, which he had with him on the Helicarrier, and he isn't wearing that armor in the finale.
The film seemed to suggest that there was a connection between Tony's reactor and the energy put out by Mjolnir and the Tesseract. Not only through the "400%" scene, but also when Loki is unable to brainwash Tony as he did Hawkeye. Tony seemed just as surprised as Loki when that happened. And given that nobody but Tony would have knowledge of the power-surge it'd be on him to make that connection and then act on it. Hence why Thor didn't think to use Mjolnir to revive Tony after he delivered the missle. It's entirely plausible this connection will be further explored as the Iron Man and Avengers films continue.
Loki being unable to brainwash Tony has nothing to do with the arc reactor being compatible with the Tesseract's energy, and everything to do with it being a solid metal plate that was blocking the scepter's path to his heart.
Except there's no reason a metal plate over Tony's heart should make the slightest bit of difference to a Magitech scepter like Loki has. That's a pretty glaring vulnerability for a piece of technology as advanced as this. For that matter, there's no reason why the energy should have to pass through a person's heart in the first place since the heart has nothing to do with thinking. While I wouldn't say the connection between Tony's arc reactor and the tesseract energy is 100% established, there's enough circumstantial evidence that it can't be ruled out right away.
The scepter works by stabbing into a person's chest. If it can't stab into a person's chest (because, say, there's a solid bit of metal in the way), it's not going to work. How is that not clear?
Indeed, it's very clear. The tip of the spear even makes a very noticeable clink when it touches the metal frame of the arc reactor. If the film had intended us to interpret that it was the reactor itself interacting with the tesseract energy, it would have glowed, or shone, or let out a spark, or something to indicate their relationship. It didn't. It just bounced metal off metal.
Well hold on; Loki never pokes anyone in the chest: he pokes their clothing and/or body armor; he never makes spear-to-flesh contact with anyone. And there's no logical reason why a BRAIN-WASHING device would have to connect to a CHEST to work. Since Tony's new Arc reactor is based on Howard Stark's notes on the Tesseract, that would seem to be the reason why Thor AND Loki's powers don't work against him.
Yes, he pokes everyone in the chest. The end of the scepter is pointy. It goes through clothes. But not through metal, at least with the amount of force Loki was putting on it at the time.
Seriously, people, if it had anything to do with the Tesseract's energy, it would have glowed or something. It wouldn't have just been a 'tink' sound.
And to make it clearer: you want to know why he would brainwash people by poking their chest? Because the thorax is the center of mass of the human body. It's easier and instinctive for two human beings standing face to face to poke in the chest than to poke them anywhere else. For instance, when a person is annoyed and pushes someone back, or jabs them with a finger, they do it by pushing or jabbing right in the center of their chest, not their stomach, not their shoulder, not the side of their head. It's a very natural action. Touching someone's head is harder because you need to raise your arm (or in this case, the tool in your hand) higher, which takes longer, and if the person is facing you you need to "aim" (even if just a fraction of a second) because there's all sorts of stuff on the face that you don't want to touch, making the forehead or the skull a more awkward point of contact. And since all the scepter needs is to make physical contact with the person's body, it doesn't matter where it touches —and apparently clothes are not enough of a barrier, or the sharp tip penetrates those clothes, but the metal of the reactor is alien enough to the body ("alien" as in "foreign object") to prevent such contact. Loki could've very well spent the movie poking people in the forehead, but that's a more delicate, deliberate action than just poking them in the chest (and it would have prevented the "Performance Issues" scene later on.) The "poke people in chest, take control of them" plot device has a very simple, natural explanation and we're all being forced to overthink it because of a more convoluted theory (that the arc technology responded to the scepter's energy despite the scene itself showing zero evidence of this.) But hey, maybe if Loki hadn't gone furious over the failure, he would've poked an unprotected part of Tony, like his head (or his back, or his ass) and taken control of him that way!
It didn't just have to be the chest; it had to be the heart. Loki mentions it implicitly when he hijacks Hawkeye at the start of the film. Stark's heart is physically inaccessible.
I'm sorry, but Loki said to Hawkeye "you have heart. I'll need that." In no way did he say that he has to access the heart - which also would make very little sense unless mind control works by pumping mind control stuff into the blood stream. And while the arc reactor doesn't glow when Loki pokes it with his Blowstick of Destiny, there is no evidence that it should glow if it DID prevent. Of course, if it did glow, we could be certain that the technologies were interacting, but at the present time, we have no evidence as to what the exact explanation is. But you can't just dismiss the theory that the Arc Reactor COULD be preventing the mind control shenanigans with technology-protectiveness. After all, the theory makes sense because it works as a Chekov's Gun for further movies. Hey... no one ever said that a Chekov's Gun isn't allowed to be blatantly obvious.
You can't "just dismiss" it, no. But there's no evidence for it. When the arc reactor does stuff of any kind, it glows, or there's a sound, or something to indicate that there's some kind of reaction happening. This is all wild speculation that flies in the face of the very, very simple and obvious explanation that we see in the film. That is the objection. That it turns a quick gag into this needlessly complicated connection that isn't necessary or hinted at.
Also, narrative doesn't work that way. An author's ultimate goal is to get information across to the audience, so the audience can understand the events —whether it is a novel, a film, a play, or even a video game. How do they get information across? By showing or even telling the audience what is happening. The act of show or tell draws attention to an element in the narrative, however minor, however throwaway, however unimportant it may be to the primary plotline. Even if it's there just for worldbuilding or character setting, and even if it's just a throwaway line or interaction for fans to speculate upon, it must be there to begin with. In the first Iron Man movie, Tony is injured in the convoy assault, and he rips his shirt to show a rather impressive vest —pointless in the grand scheme of things, but it was shown because the script wanted us to know he's a cautious man. Was it a Chekhov's Gun? Nope! The movie could've gone through just the same without that scene. In the second one, we find out that the new and improved arc reactor core makes Tony's tongue taste like coconut. Important? No. Funny? Hell yes, and that's why he stated it. Maybe a later movie will say that the coconut taste will have serious repercussions, but so far, it's just a quirky quip. In the Incredible Hulk movie, we find out that the Army has been trying to replicate the Super Soldier serum and tested it on Blonsky. For all the movie cares, they could've just called it Chemical X and nothing would have happened, but they DID make the connection to Captain America because the author specifically intended it in order to build a greater universe. In Thor, we're shown that the Bifrost pathways have a very specific look and effect. During the movie itself? Neat eye candy. Within Captain America: The First Avenger? Flashy eye candy. Between the two movies? Immediate Continuity Nod. Hell, during the latter movie, every single scene involving the Tesseract or a Tesseract-related object shows unusual reactions, cosmic effects, and even an "audible glow" whenever the cube is perfectly idle but out of its container, because they want us to know that, even when it's not doing anything, the thing is power given form. And also in this movie, we're given a shot of Bucky strapped to an experimentation table so we can speculate that something was done to him, even if it's not important for this particular movie. So, see? Everything above, from the tiny and almost pointless detail of the taste of coconut to the huge connection between the Bifrost and the Tesseract, is stated by the narrative, and then people are free to speculate. It doesn't need giant flashing signs saying "Getcher Chekhov's Gun here!" It just needs to be there in the first place. Otherwise, people could be free to speculate about nonexistent things. Maybe Hulk is green and has dark green blood because he's part plant —there's no evidence for it, no, but there's no evidence against it either. Maybe Hawkeye's not that good an archer, and his arrows have tiny little air flaps and engines that guide them to their target, we just don't realize it because the camera never zooms into the other end of the arrow. Maybe, maybe, maybe. And we would never end speculating about things that were never, however vaguely, stated in the story. And that's exactly what, since the term was first coined, the role and purpose of Chekhov's Gun is: to specifically, and explicitly, draw attention to some seemingly unimportant aspect of the plot so that its importance comes to light when it is revisited later. The very item that coined the term shows this: it's a rifle above a mantelpiece shown in the first act, and which must be used by the third act. What you're saying about the arc reactor interacting with the Tesseract energy in the staff is akin to Chekhov showing the rifle in the third act without ever showing it in the first. But again, the scepter failed for a very simple, very concise explanation that also works as a joke. And what did the creators draw attention to, after an entire movie (Captain America's) of showing the specific ways Tesseract energy reveals itself? A metallic clink. Just like a Bible stops a bullet not because of divine intervention, but because it's a hella thick. And until a new movie comes out and retcons it, then yes, we CAN dismiss the theory because there's no evidence to support it, and some evidence that directly contradicts it. Like I said before, this theory is forcing us to overthink everything when the movie just wants us to focus on the concise and witty.
I'm curious about the nature of the experiments SHIELD was conducting with the Tesseract. By the time the movie opens, they have a dedicated lab with complex machinery, and the cube itself is aimed at what looks like a landing platform/gate installation. This platform even has some shielding apparatus and (IIRC) a seat or chair of some kind. It was even a happy coincidence that Loki arrived on the platform when he opened the portal remotely. But nothing in the Captain America film suggests that the Tesseract is anything but a cosmic power supply (the only witness to its teleportation abilities was frozen for 70 years, he probably didn't know what was happening, and the Pegasus lab was already in place and experimenting by the time he was thawed.) So if the installation was indeed a gate platform, when did SHIELD learn that it could be used to create wormholes, and were they already planning to send an expeditionary force through them?
Maybe Nick Fury's a big Stargate fan.
The post-credits scene in Thor implies that Loki is manipulating Selvig's mind. He could have planted the idea in Selvig's head.
Keep in mind that Red Skull saw the Tesseract as nothing more but a power source he could use to crush his enemies, not considering its other usages, and that SHIELD likely did a lot more research upon having the thing in their possession.
It's unlikely the Red Skull saw no other use for the tesseract than a power source. More likely he just didn't have the tech in the 1940s to do anything but extract and store energy from it.
While we're on the topic of the Tesseract, something's been bothering me since the Captain America movie. Ol' Reddie calls it "Odin's crown jewel," and we do know from Thor that the Aesir have been to northern Europe many times before and so Odin probably used a cube in view of the locals. But isn't it odd that Odin would leave such a valuable trinket on Earth, presumably after a Jotun incursion, and forget about it? Now, in the comic books, the Cosmic Containment Units are neither the creation of Asgard, nor exclusive to them. Maybe the same applies to the movies, and maybe the Tesseract is one of many and isn't really Asgardian tech but just a tool the Asgardians are familiar with?
I was under the impression that the people in the church in First Avenger were the descendants of the people Odin saved in Norway. Perhaps Odin left them the Tesseract for some undisclosed reason and it's been protected generation to generation.
He didn't leave it there, he hid it there. Earth was the last place anyone who wanted a tesseract would go hunting for it.
Alternatively, it was stolen and he didn't know where it was.
Bruce Banner has a hairy chest the one time we see him with his shirt off, but the Hulk has no chest hair. Where did it go?
I had the same question watching The Incredible Hulk when Banner had stubble.
Actually, the Hulk does. Watched Avengers for the second time last night, and I distinctly remember noticing that his chest had hair during the fight in New York.
Where and what exactly were the SHIELD security forces doing during the attack on the Helicarrier? Despite visibly present escorting Loki to his cell, and at the beginning grabbing rifles from a weapon rack, for the rest of it they are completly absent, not showing up to defend the bridge from the mercenaries or securing Loki's cell or dealing with the damaged engine or even play helpless bystander to the Hulk rampage.
They were presumably doing damage control and attempting to repel the rest of Loki's minions throughout the ship. Hawkeye's presence would also allow Loki's troops to bypass most of the SHIELD defensive positions through his apparent knowledge of the Helicarrier's inner workings. The troops attacking the bridge didn't need to do much more than keep attention locked on the entryway until Hawkeye could flank them and use his USB arrow. The SHIELD troops are thus likely running around inside the ship trying to find the intruders and thus being completely out of place to repel the attacks on the bridge.
I know it was probably all part of the big plan, but it still baffles me that Loki didn't send a double to be captured in his place when he was watching Iron Man, Thor, and the Cap beat the crap out of each other. Especially since, ahem, Thor falls for that trick all the time.
His doubles are intangible and don't seem to last very long. The whole thing would have fallen apart the moment any of the Avengers tried to touch him—you know, to put cuffs on him, guide him to the ship, etc. There is no good reason at all why he would or should have done so.
I have a headscratcher regarding something about the film in real life. Idk if this is so off topic that its asking to be removed but im going to try anyway because i dont know where else to talk about this: I am one of the few people i know who actually went out of their way to make sure that i saw Iron Man, Iron Man 2, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, And Captian America "Before" seeing the avengers. Now it does not surprise me that there are still plenty of people who did not do that, What does surprise me however is the sheer amount of people who were super excited to see The Avengers, but never and still to this day had or have any intentions or interest in seeing the others five films(or simply some of them). Unless the draw of the film for these people is something other then the heroes themselves, how can you say you are so psyched to see this film but couldn't give a crap about all the others. One would think that the same kind of fans would flock to all six films. Im guessing that Iron Man is only cool when hes a member of a team, but if he fought alone its boring? Not likely, my math would say that you combine four uninteresting heroes, and you get a movie that is four times as boring as any by themselves. Example:if they made a crossover between Star trek, Stargate, Mortal Kombat, and King Kong. i wouldn't care one speck because i dont care about any one of those individually. But for some reason the rest of the world seems to have thrown this logic out the window when it comes to the Avengers. Seriously, what gives?
People will flock to whatever is popular. They're excited for the Avengers because it's a big blockbuster action movie that's gotten high reviews and strong word-of-mouth. I did the same thing to watch all five films and it helped boost my enjoyment of Avengers tremendously, but the average movie goer isn't gonna want to sit down and put in that dedication for the flavor-of-the-month cinema experience. (On a side note, while I found the 2008 Hulk film decent, it's understandable that people wouldn't want to go back and watch that one, since it lacks both Mark Ruffalo and the "fun" style the Avengers is going for. There also isn't a whole lot in it that's relevant to the story of the Avengers, barring the Hulk's origin that most people already knew, and a one-off joke about Harlem.)
People like big fun movies starring a ton of good, attractive actors, especially when it's one of the two biggest event movies of the year. Also, group chemistry counts for a lot in movies, and that's the whole appeal of the Avengers.
When exactly does the end stinger take place? The one where all six heroes are eating in that demolished restaurant. It looks like it must take place immediately after they've captured Loki, but before Thor and him return to Asgard, judging by how everyone's dressed. If that's the case.... where was Loki being held while they were all eating?
Maybe SHIELD came and picked Loki up, and Tony went "Hey guys, shawarma now, let's go."
He went with them for shawarma, but he was in the bathroom in that shot. After being whipped into the floor by the Hulk, all he wanted was to whimper and go crawl under his bed at home, so they took pity on him and let him come along to have lunch with everyone.
A minor one, but in the Captain America movie, it was established that the shield he has absorbs vibration and displaces it, so how on earth did he reflect Iron Man's beam in the huge battle with the chitauri? That was WAY too perfect to be a displacement.
Maybe it reflects because it's a beam, not a solid object or blow.
Well, if the beam was a laser, and lasers are light, then it should work. We know the shield reflects light instead of absorbing it because it's not pitch black.
