Loki, the adopted brother of Thor, teams-up with the Chitauri Army and uses the Tesseract's power to travel from Asgard to Midgard to plot the invasion of Earth and become a king. The director of the agency S.H.I.E.L.D., Nick Fury, sets in motion project Avengers, joining Tony Stark a.k.a. the Iron Man; Steve Rogers, a.k.a. Captain America; Bruce Banner, a.k.a. The Hulk; Thor; Natasha Romanoff, a.k.a. Black Widow; and Clint Barton, a.k.a. Hawkeye, to save the world from the powerful Loki and the alien invasion.
Page 2 of 3
The opening interrogation scene where Natasha's chatting away in Russian before flipping the situation on her captors was a bit of a passion project moment for Whedon. He studied Russian language and literature back in college, and this was the first time in his career he actually got to put that degree to use on screen.
During the forest scrap between Thor and Iron Man, the two trade headbutts, and if you catch Stark flying backward and facing the camera afterward you can see a proper dent left in his faceplate from Thor's skull. Small detail that sells just how much force a god actually hits with.
A lot of action movies fudge their countdown clocks to stretch out tension, but the nuke timer in the final battle actually tracks pretty closely to the real runtime of that section of the film. It's a tiny bit of restraint that a lot of viewers never clock because they're too busy watching Stark fly it through the portal.
Keep an eye on Tony's wardrobe in a few scenes and you'll spot him wearing a Black Sabbath shirt. It's a cheeky little nod to the band's 1970 song 'Iron Man', which is basically the unofficial theme song for the character at this point even though the lyrics have nothing to do with Stark himself.
Stark clocks a SHIELD agent slacking off playing Galaga on the Helicarrier and makes fun of him for it. The joke doesn't stop there though - the second Tony walks off, the agent goes right back to playing, and if you pause on the screen his score matches the game's existing high score. He was mid-run on the best game of his life and Stark just had to go and ruin it.
The scene where Loki forces a crowd to kneel in Germany wasn't shot anywhere near Stuttgart. It was filmed at Tower City Complex on Public Square in Cleveland, Ohio, dressed up to look European for the day.
The film opens inside the Joint Dark Energy Mission Facility, a SHIELD and NASA site studying the Tesseract as part of Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S. It seems like throwaway setup at the time, but that exact facility becomes central to Captain Marvel years later, when a young Nick Fury and Carol Danvers head there to dig into Dr Wendy Lawson's research.
When Thor confronts Loki up on the cliffside, two ravens can be seen scattering as the Asgardians land. They're a nod to Huginn and Muninn, Odin's ravens from Norse mythology and the comics, who fly across the world gathering information and reporting back to him - basically Odin's own surveillance system keeping tabs on his sons.
In the post credits scene, an alien warns Thanos that attacking Earth would be to 'court death.' It sounds like a throwaway warning, but comic readers clocked it as a deliberate pun straight away, since Thanos is famously, literally in love with the physical embodiment of Death in the source material.
When Fury mentions Life Model Decoys to explain away Coulson's supposed 'death', it flew right over most audiences' heads back in 2012. It's actually a proper deep cut reference to the comics, where LMDs are robotic doubles built to stand in for real people - Whedon dropped it in years before it would matter to anyone paying attention.
