"The Avengers. It's what we call ourselves, sort of like a team. 'Earth's Mighiest Heroes' type thing. "

It is difficult to call The Avengers a super-hero movie.  It is a super super-hero movie.  It is super-sized, super cast, and features amazing super effects.  The scale is grand and it is an early climactic moment (of which there promise to be many more) in the Marvel long-term plan as shepherded by Kevin Feige.  Whether your captivated (as my wife is) by Iron Man’s sense of humor, appreciative of Thor’s gravitas (the way I am–he carries himself the way we’d like an intergalactic God to, accent and all) or simply enjoy Hulk’s monosyllabic battle strategy (as my six-year old son does), the movie is large enough to entertain all movie goers.

The Tesseract–the object of the film’s attention–is a bit oblique at times.  The word also seems a bit too much fun for the writers to write and the actors to say as it appears repeatedly and at times unnecessarily.  But it is basically an energy source too dangerous to harness, which is why Loki harnesses it and uses it create an inter-dimensional portal to lead an attack on the Earth. This all comes to the battle of New York, which is epic and heroic and not at all ghastly and gross the way the latest Superman movie Man of Steel destroyed New York.  There’s certainly enough destruction in The Avengers to be a nightmare for the insurance industry, but it isn’t gratuitous.

In fact, the film itself with all of its possibility for excess is quite restrained. With its budget and expected revenue, which it made good on, it could have been become insincere and cynical, but Whedon, its Director keeps a clear vision and marshals an excellent and high-powered cast.

My son tells me that The Avengers earns a 5.  I can’t be sure entirely. Perhaps I was saving our “Genius” rating for some low budget art-house film of great import. The Avengers is everything but that, but I can’t disappoint my six-year-old so 5 it is.