When my college friends planned an outing to watch the midnight release of The Avengers at a theater near school, I agreed without knowing much about the movie. I hadn’t even seen the trailer, normally a prerequisite if I was going to pay downtown Los Angeles theater prices. But after a rough week of pulling all-nighters to work on finals papers, a midnight movie sounded just right.

At that point, I had seen and liked a handful of superhero movies, but I wasn’t really a fan. I hadn’t followed the release news and speculation, and I definitely wasn’t watching each movie diligently as it came out. That all changed with The Avengers.

The Avengers movie felt ambitious because it was a hero movie that focused on relationships, trauma, and how people exist alongside their trauma.

With a decade’s worth of hindsight, I can recognize now that the movie is unevenly paced with a bulky beginning and a fairly cheap ending, but I can also see what appealed to me so much. At the time, I don’t think I would have been able to put into words what I had seen in it. Now, I can say that what stood out to me with The Avengers was that it felt ambitious and new. Not necessarily in cost, though it was an expensive movie, and it wasn't impressive to me that these five characters got together onscreen (because I hadn't particularly cared about them before). The Avengers movie felt ambitious because it was a hero movie that focused on relationships, trauma, and how people exist alongside their trauma.

Most of the Avengers were dealing with some sort of PTSD, and every member of the Avengers had a reason to not be there. They had no idea why they should be working together in the first place, but they did begin to work together, to trust each other, despite everything. The Avengers was a movie about heroes and heroics, sure, but it was also a movie about living on the other side of tragedy. I was going through some tragedy of my own (my dad was severely ill and would die seven months later), so maybe that resonated with me more than if I had seen it at some other time.

There was also this delicious moral ambiguity to the whole situation. Though The Avengers has been labelled as light fare compared to later MCU movies like Captain America: Winter Soldier and Captain America: Civil War, I'd argue that The Avengers that had a more complicated relationship with what is 'right' and 'wrong.' Even the actual "getting together the team" moment of the Avengers was built on a lie! But it wasn't just dark pasts that made the movie interesting (plenty of movies deal with trauma and are still a drag to sit through), it was that and the fun and the action. The movie had an energy to it, one that was contagious.

I left the theater elated, and the next morning, tore out the film ad from the Los Angeles Times, writing “This movie is great” over it in marker and taping it onto outside my dorm room door. I couldn't shut up about it, evangelizing at every turn. During its theatrical run, I dragged different friends and family members to the movie and ended up seeing it 12 times in theaters (many at a local discount place, after the initial run was over). It was exciting each time. I can still get goosebumps when I hear Alan Silvestri’s Avengers theme.

I was so looking forward to the next iteration. I spent the time in-between reading fanfiction and comics that told stories about the Avengers being a team, about them learning to love each other and be a family. I was so excited to see how these characters would develop their relationships, challenge each other, and rise to the occasion.

My buzz was only heightened because I happened to attend USC, where many of the filmmakers who made The Avengers also attended. We had the costumes and props on display in the film school building, and the film's editors gave a talk on their work on the film. I got to watch Avengers: Age of Ultron early, and Marvel Studios' president Kevin Feige came in afterwards to answer questions.

That was just about the time when I started to realize that I wasn’t going to get the follow-up movies that I had hoped for, and it wasn't just because Avengers: Age of Ultron was a disappointment. The other films had started to lack luster too, and even when they picked up in energy, they were somehow too slick, too shiny. Most of them were good, and I enjoyed them (many were arguably 'better' than The Avengers). Still, I haven’t had the same electric experience in another MCU movie, an issue that ironically may be due to the success of The Avengers.

Why fix the problems of a movie that was successful? Why try something new? Why not just try to do the same thing over again, if we know people like it? So many of the following MCU crossover movies seemed ambitious in the wrong ways, reaching for drama that hadn’t been built up yet and stakes that felt unrealistic. Instead of developing the characters that were introduced in the earlier movies, they simply added more of them. Instead of making the villains scarier, they just made the armies bigger, assuming that a battle could be made more dramatic by adding more people and/or aliens and/or robots into the mix.

As much as I wanted to feel the pain between the Iron Man and Captain America split in Captain America: Civil War, their conflict, in many ways, felt empty and unearned. The characters hadn’t ever really clicked before they started fighting. The big battle felt like a kid dumping all the toys they owned into a sandbox. Now, with the new Spider-Man movie doing so well at the box office, I’m more than a little worried about the future of the superhero movie (which, to be fair, I was already worried about).

Sure, I am susceptible to the joys of seeing Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire reappear on the screen, and Spider-Man: Far from Home did manage to bring a tear to my eye. But the success of the movie makes me worried that those who make decisions regarding these sorts of things will focus on the fact that there’s money to be made in looking to the past, into circling back into dramas that moved us last year and the year before. This use of drama isn’t quite empty, but it is a shortcut, and a future cannot be built on shortcuts.

It has become fashionable to complain about superhero movies, and on many levels, I understand the instinct. I also would like to be able to enjoy a non-superhero blockbuster movie here and there. But the reason superheroes have been cemented into each year's blockbuster schedule is the same reason so many of these MCU movies feel the same. It is easier to copy what has worked before than to try and build something new. Why not capitalize on the goodwill of the past? The goodwill is already there, just waiting to be exploited. But the last thing we want is a Jurassic World situation, where each movie is a dense illogical slog to sit through until we get to the moment T-rex roars as a banner falls.

What I really want is for the MCU movies to live up to the potential that I saw in The Avengers in 2012, to build on what they had, instead of trying to recapture the magic. Of course, I understand how ironic it is for me to be looking back at a movie from ten years ago and ask why the newer movies don’t look towards the future, but art (and life) is full of contradictions, and I am exhausted of movies trying to out-'big' each other. It was never scale that made The Avengers good, it was the humanity.