Marvel's The Avengers film and the MCU 10 years later

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