The average person runs away from danger - a few watch from coffee shop windows - it takes a special breed to run to the danger.
I agree that overall our armed forced could have handled the foot soldiers - once on site - we have no idea what was coming thru next.
It could have been evil-superman! Only he has nukes for arms!
I’m not going to invent terrifying badies for the movie. If the creators wanted the alien army to be anything but fragile eye-candy, it’s on them to tell the story.
He ended it that way for the same reason Jackson ended LotR the way he did: it worked, cinematically. He could have spent another 30 minutes of the movie chasing down the remnants of the invaders, but the movie was over. Books have the luxury of dwelling on things that happen “after.” Movies don’t.
And Loki totally expected the attack to make everybody bow to him in fear. He doesn’t know humans as well as he thinks.
I’m going to assume you’re referring to Jackson’s omission of The Scouring of the Shire, rather than the 20-part fake ending extravaganza (which was true to the book but was also somewhat awkward, cinematically).
But that’s the thing: something only works cinematically if it doesn’t wrench the viewer out of the movie in disbelief. Jackson’s take on the LotR ending was fine because the part he cut came out cleanly, and he even tossed in a throwaway shot of them coming back to the Shire and getting glared at by that one old hobbit. It was a simple indication that the Shire was fine and the scouring wasn’t happening. A movie doesn’t need to dwell on something like that; a single throwaway line or shot is fine.
If there had been a line where Captain America said “Alright, we’ve taken out the brunt of them and the National Guard is cleaning up the rest. With the portal closed, they’ll have an easy time of it.” Something like that would have been just as easy and wouldn’t have been as silly as what we got.
Sure, but given the number of people in New York and the number of firearms, it would only have taken a small percentage taking pot shots from cover to take a terrible toll on the invaders. They were just cannon fodder, and as such not very dramatic. Which could have been avoided if their armour was shown to be proof (or largely proof) against bullets. Wheldon wanted to show all the Avengers fighting together to emphasize the teamwork arc. There were other ways to do this than have Black Widow swatting them like flies. The snake things were far more impressive.
I’m being picky here, but just for once I’d like to see the minions do something clever, rather than just mill about and be mown down.
But that’s what minions do. It’s in the job description. 
owh - I agree. A throw-away line or two could have saved the ending from a lot of problems. Or even a shot in the ending news montage of mooks getting taken out by a street gang.
Now THAT would have been awesome.
The one thing I wondered about that nobody mentioned (though they did touch on it a little bit in the short film included on the Avengers DVD) is that with all the aliens and eel things down/dead, the military is now in possession of what looks like several thousand tons of some pretty badass alien metal (or whatever their armor is made of). I wonder what they plan to do with it…cleanup will be bad enough, but you don’t just let an opportunity like that go by.
Or even just show the skrulls surrendering, recognizing the futility of fighting once the portal was closed and escape/supply/reinforcements are gone.
I think some are overvaluing the military’s abilities here. Soldiers aren’t superheros, with a few exceptions. Watch the film, do you think you could even hit one of those skiffs with a rifle? What does the average solider carry, 200 rounds?
Then there is getting the soldiers into the theater, they have to come on roads. One of those skiffs could shred an entire convoy without slowing down.
Yeah, the individual aliens are vulnerable, but they are physically stronger and more resistant to damage than a human solider, so even person to person they have an advantage. Couple that with a military that’s slow and plodding enough to not be able to deliver water to an American city for weeks, and I’m not holding out a lot of hope for a frontal assault against superior numbers.
Also, the Air Force has 6000 aircraft and the Navy has around 4000, how many of those are ready to fly and on the east coast? Say each aircraft could take out ten skiffs, then what? They would be out of fuel and ammo after a day. If the aliens had truly overwhelming numbers it would suck.
The dropping dead when the ship is destroyed is convenient, but for all we know the Chatauri are animated corpses and need mystic energy from the control vessel to operate.
It was the shadowy international council, not the U.S. government, that made the decision to nuke NYC. This was a factor in the Pentagon saying “Thanks, but no thanks” to helping the studio during filming: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/05/avengers-military/
Yes, but because of the Law of Conservation of Ninjitsu, the more aliens that get taken down, the tougher the remaining aliens get. By the time they are down to one last remaining alien, he’d be so tough he could break the Hulk’s legs off and pick his teeth with them.
I basically think the answer to most of this is ‘they’re Skrulls.’ Seriously. They’re Skrulls, they’re weaker than humans, cowardly as hell, backstabbers. You can’t trust them. Their own leadership can’t trust them. Which is, by the way, why the broadcast power for the ships makes perfect sense.
If you don’t know what a Skrull is, imagine an entire race made up of shapeshifters with the personality of Starscream from the Transformers.
Wait a minute, Nick Fury is not part of the US government?! HUH?
The US is going to let a shadowy international cabal run experiments on a mystical cube on US soil, fly a weaponized flying carrier over US soil, and nuke NYC?
…yea thats even less plausible than the superheroes.
I’m assuming that Loki had a way to get out of Dodge before the nuke hit. He still had the Tesseract, after all, which is how Thor takes Loki back to Asgard for his trial - presumably, he could have used it to get himself back to Floaty Rock World to hand it over to Thanos. Or, some other world, where he’d keep it for himself. Loki’s not the most trustworthy guy, after all.
Of course, this part of his plan hinged on him not getting beaten to a pulp by the Hulk, so he never had a chance to execute it.
No, he says that having them do six hours of clean up work after defeating the main force would have blunted the emotional arc of the film’s climax.
I don’t know if that’s a good reason - I can think up a couple ways he could have got around it. But then, I’ve never written or directed a movie before, so my actual ideas about what would and would not work in a film are untested, at best. He got enough about this movie just right that I’m inclined to believe him when he says he couldn’t think of a better way around that problem.
Who actually calls the shots for SHIELD had been ambiguous long before this movie:
There’s not Skrulls. There’s basically nothing whatsoever Skrull-like about them. They’re almost anti-Skrulls.
The DVD has something kinda-sorta related to this, as an extra.
Random citizens find and are able to operate one of the Skrulls’ weapons, and go on a crime spree.
Not only did Loki have the Tesseract, he also had access to his own, secret, ways of traveling between worlds. Think of all those times in Thor where he just appeared and disappeared, without the Bifrost light-show.
Another random fun fact for the Whedonites out there, gleaned from the commentary track: The alien who delivers the “To attack Earth is to court death line,” was played by Alexis Denisof.