Avengers

(The Avengers) Joss Whedon. Starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Tom Hiddleston, Clark Gregg, Cobie Smulders, Stellan Skarsgård, Samuel L. Jackson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Paul Bettany. USA, 2012, dubbed from May 3 ### And now - a party While scientists are trying to decide what to do with the tesseract - an energy cube fished out of the ocean back in The First Avenger - somewhere in a parallel universe, Thor's half-brother Loki (Hiddleston), who was expelled from Asgard a little earlier, receives an order from an evil new boss to steal the cube so that chaos and destruction will come to Earth. The order has been carried out, the tesseract has been stolen, and the population of the board is facing imminent disaster. Only one-eyed Nick Fury (Jackson), the head of the secret organization S.H.I.E.L.D., can save humanity and restore order, and through an effort of will he has assembled a fighting squad of superheroes, consisting of Iron Man (Downey), Hulk (Ruffalo), Captain America (Evans) and Black Widow (Johansson). In addition to everything, Thor (Hemsworth) falls from somewhere out of the sky onto the heroes.

If ten years ago almost no one outside the United States, with the exception of geeks, knew who Thor, Iron Man, Hulk and Captain America were, now

Any preschooler can answer this question: Thor is the guy with the hammer, Hulk is the big green monster, Captain America is the stars and stripes guy with the shield, and Iron Man is the guy with the hangover. Marvel Studios prepared for The Avengers for four years, consistently introducing new heroes and elegantly rhyming storylines with each other so that the general gathering of all these people in one room did not turn out to be something wild and illogical. Joss Whedon, the author of the Marvel comic book series Mission Serenity and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was invited to conduct the orchestra. And as it turned out, not in vain. For the first time in his life, having received a two hundred million dollar budget, he, contrary to fears, does not turn into the late George Lucas, but behaves like a schoolboy who ended up in Disneyland - a lifelong dream has come true, but his life has not changed. “The Avengers” is part parade of US military might, part costume party with nice friends, but so dashingly done that if it were possible to express ourselves in categories like “super movie,” “The Avengers” would turn out to be just that metaphorical “super movie.” Johansson emphatically says, “My name is Natasha Romanoff, and I’m Russian,” and then falls out of his chair.

Downey still wears the jacket that was wrinkled on Friday night better than anyone else in the world. Mark Ruffalo spends the entire film walking around with clenched teeth and quietly fiddling with his computer, and then suddenly turns into a green King Kong: “You asked why I never get angry? Because I’m angry all the time!” Hiddleston squints his eyes sophisticatedly, cardboard heroes with impenetrable faces - Thor and Captain America - are neatly relegated to the background and serve mainly as objects for exercises in wit. Iron lizards are flying, people are being torn apart, heroes of the Scandinavian epic are falling from the sky, the monster who broke the roof is asked to put on his pants, superheroes are arguing in the kitchen, Gwyneth Paltrow is quietly fussing about in the ruins of the celebration. The camera flies around Manhattan as if it were tied to some kind of crazy bird, the characters pronounce texts that you would never expect to hear in a film about a meeting of the gods with armored people on a flying saucer - the mechanism launched by Whedon never loses its rhythm. He doesn’t change the context, but plays with it and, like a professional geek well versed in superhero discourse, gets the best out of it. It doesn't matter that this is a movie in which nothing really happens, the point here is different: The Avengers are a big family, and Whedon is definitely part of it. After all, what makes a costume party successful? Smart people dress stupidly and are happy. A.S.