So it’s truly gladdening to listen to actors like Downey, Johansson, Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury), Gwyneth Paltrow (Iron Man’s lady-love and lifeline, Pepper Potts), Mark Ruffalo (Dr. David Banner/the Hulk), and Clark Gregg (S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Phil Coulson) speak the banter and asides in Joss Whedon’s script, which is tight and – by the measure of what tends to occur in a Marvel Comics title – perfectly logical. But it’s the craftspeople you want to hug. The reason we keep going to these movies is to experience what I’ve always called the Saturday-afternoon high of taking in a comic book. You don’t read them, per se. You savor them – the succession of bright, handsome frames, the simmering pace of the plot, the ideas. The great comic books made you want to be inside them. The great comic books were better than the movies. They could do what the technician couldn’t.

What we’ve seen since Richard Donner’s original “Superman” from 1978 is the steady closing of that gap. “The Avengers” is state-of-the-art, in that sense. At some point in this movie, the Hulk grabs a character by his leg and whips him into the floor like he’s beating the dust out of a mat. This happens all the time in a comic – the defiance of physics. When it happens here it brings down the house – the movies can really do this now. This movie, which Whedon also directed, is full of these sorts of OMG set pieces. You don’t need to be a “comic-book person” to find the set pieces exhilarating. But if you are such a person, or a fan of the movies that comic books turn into, “The Avengers” feels like the moment you’ve been waiting for.