Needless to say none of us had high expectations for this movie: the name, the trailer and the actors all looked as if it’s going to be yet another typical horror film. You know, the one where main actors are being ruthlessly butchered by unstoppable ugly redneck zombies. In a forest. With a bunch of scientists overseeing the whole picture. No? Anyway, it wasn’t the case.

You get the feeling of the movie right from the opening title. It comes as a complete surprise, filling the whole screen and dripping blood. That’s when you realize you’re up for a treat.

The movie is a weird mix of The Hunger Games and The Shining. Quite a few times during the movie I caught myself expecting something conventional to happen: “Oh, I know that! A wolf is gonna turn alive and bit her face off!”, “That girl is about to chop off his head”, “That dude is dead”, etc. Yet, most of the time it wasn’t the case. It felt as if the directors and screenwriters were playing tricks with me, as if wanting to prove that the Hollywood is still capable of producing good horror movies. “You think you know the story”, just as the small letters on the poster say.

Watching the scientists cold-heartedly luring poor fellows into traps and then cheering to their deaths, casually making bets as to the way they are going to die and so on, adds some sick flavor to the movie, showing the darkest sides of human nature in the most despicable way.

My favorite part was when the cellar door violently bursts open, followed by a casual remark from one of the guys: “The wind must’ve blown it open”, to which another one says: “And that makes what kind of sense?” Pure brilliant.

The culmination of the movie happens at the very end, when the luck finally decides to turn its sides, bringing in lots of violent cinematic fights, mixed with the blackest humor I’ve seen lately.

And when you think that nothing is going to surprise you anymore, you’re being hit again, and this time it’s no one else but Sigourney Weaver herself! Achievement unlocked.

All-in-all, it is an incredibly entertaining, smart and even sometimes scary movie. I’m 100% certain I am going to buy a DVD or a BluRay disk just to have it available. And so should you!

“Guess who’s writing this week’s review”, that’s what I heard as we gathered outside the cinema right after we saw The Avengers. Now I was still getting re-acclimated to reality after a wild movie experience and I thought Adam was just blurting out random stuff as he was trying to do the same. It turns out he meant it. Apparently after last week’s Haywire, which was my first SMEx movie, I was now experienced enough to write my first review.

Let’s start with expectations. When I heard that we were going to see The Avengers I must admit I had mixed feelings. I mean those comic book superhero movies can be very entertaining and they offer plenty of action but I feel that there has been a bit of an overkill of them in the last decade or so. But I guess as long as they’re making a gazillion dollars Hollywood will keep spitting them out. And when you think about it, The Avengers is just a logical step in the process. I imagine some Hollywood suits sitting around a table struggling for new ideas for movies realizing that they are running out of superheroes to use. In the end they just decide on the most Hollywood solution: bigger is better, more is more! Let’s put a bunchl of them together in one mega movie, we’ll call it The Avengers!

On to the movie. This week we had the big movie dome which made last week’s room look like a mere hallway closet. It was huge. Now I can’t be sure of this since I didn’t have time to double-check before I sat down, but I’m pretty sure I counted a million (that’s right, a million!) people in that room watching the same movie. In 3D! Great start.
What I loved about the movie is its simplicity. It starts off with a good dose of action and after a good 5 minutes the general outline has already emerged: bad guy steals something from good guy, wants to use it to destroy planet, good guy can’t get it back by himself, gets together team of superheroes who can. It’s simple, no sense in wasting time telling complicated stories when you have all of these superheroes lined up right?
Now I only saw the Iron Man movies so I knew him and Black Widow. The rest of the heroes (Captain America, The Hulk, and Thor) were introduced proficient enough for me to get to know them without wasting too much time on their stories.
Then there’s the action. The action’s good. The only thing I did not like about the action was that whole bad guy invasion at the end which kind of comes out of nowhere: you haven’t seen those guys before so you don’t really know them, you don’t know what they want or what they can do, they just start tearing shit up. And why was The Hulk suddenly with the good guys at the end when 10 minutes earlier he was trying to kill those same guys? Ah I guess I should just stop whining about those small points and think about the entertainment it has brought me.

Conclusion: Great visuals + (surprisingly)good humor + 3D action + medium story + Great venue = 8