Avengers

Avengers

Marvel scaled the comic-book world very fast with one weapon: a willingness to introduce new characters without end. In fact, there are so many Marvel universes that some of these super heroes don’t exist in each other’s worlds, which helps keep traffic flowing. They do share time and space, though or at least they did in this weekend’s universe sweeping epic. I assume the unemployed Avengers watch the employed ones on CNN.

“The Avengers” is much anticipated by fans of Marvel comics. The film features Iron Man (Robert Downey), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson). This is like an all-star game, or the chef’s tasting menu at a fancy restaurant; what always strikes me is how different their superpowers are. Until he’s wearing his super-suit, Iron Man is just an ordinary guy.

When he gets angry, the mild-mannered Hulk expands into a leaping green muscle man who can rip apart pretty much anything; Thor swings a mighty hammer; Hawkeye wields a bow with arrows so powerful they can bring down alien spacecraft; Captain America has a powerful and versatile shield; Natasha, aka the Black Widow well, after seeing this movie with critics from Brazil and India, I’m not sure what her superpowers are supposed to be.

After seeing “The Avengers,” we decided maybe she and Hawkeye aren’t technically superheroes they’re just friends with them.

I think of the Westminster Dog Show when I see these six together: You have breeds that seem completely different from one another poodles, Labradors, Dalmatians but they’re all champions.

They’re brought together here because Loki (Tom Hiddleston) has returned to Earth through a wormhole, bringing the Tesseract (a pulsing cube of energy) with him. The Tesseract opens a gateway to the universe, and through it Loki plans to attack Earth with his fleet of reptile-looking monster-machines.

Where he now resides, how these dragon-machines are manufactured it goes unexplained. Both Loki and Thor are obscurely related to the gods of Norse mythology, as we learned in last year’s “Thor,” but let’s not drift into theology.

Nick Fury sends out a call to the Avengers to team up and meet this threat because well, I’m not sure why he does that either. He runs SHIELD (the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division; that’s all I know about it). He’s headquartered on a gigantic aircraft carrier that’s also umm a hovercraft? That can turn invisible?

By bringing them together, of course, he reopens ancient rivalries (“my hammer can beat your shield”) until they learn the benefits of Teamwork, which is discussed in speeches of noble banality for another hour or so.

So you see this is sort of an educational film: It teaches the Avengers to do what was so highly valued on my first-grade report card Work Well With Others.

These films are pretty much the same, and “The Avengers” is a lot more of that. There has to be a threat. The heroes must be assembled. The villain must be unveiled. Some character defects are investigated. And then there’s about an hour of noisy special effects in which gigantic mechanical objects bash each other to pieces, spewing out so many incandescent fireballs that another world war could be fought with them.

Most of this battle takes place in midtown Manhattan, where the neatest part, for my money, involves Loki’s ginormous silvery snake-lizard-dragon machine, which rattles and undulates in a way that would make Freud levitate and is backed up by countless snakelike flying things shooting down exploding human cars. At one point oh, never mind.

“Comic-Con nerds will have multiple orgasms,” predicts critic David Edelstein in New York magazine, confirming something I had vaguely suspected about nerds and their value to the gene pool. If he is correct, it’s time for movies to start making love, not war.

“The Avengers” is done well by Joss Whedon, with style and energy. It provides its fans with exactly what they desire. Whether it is exactly what they deserve is arguable.

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