I don't think the staff was working on Loki.

I think it was a conduit to communication but not controlling him.

The way I saw it, Loki cut a deal with the Chaturi leader, but the leader is stronger than Loki so he keeps threatening Loki. And this also fuels Loki's rage.

In my head the leader of the Chaturi was using Loki as a way to get to Earth, and then when Loki was no longer useful the leader was going to kill/imprison Loki.

What he's doing in The Avengers is a carry over from what happened in Thor

Yes, but Avengers should ideally stand on its own, and my point is that this is pretty much the only place it fails. Iron Man and Cap are explained and demonstrated really well, but Loki is underpainted.

I didn't see Loki say he wanted to enslave humanity. Not in words like that, anyway.

I'm getting that from the "free them from freedom" line.

I've got Thor and Captain America to watch today and then I'lll see Avengers again tomorrow, so maybe I will understand your objections better then. And the rest of the discussion.

He also used the word "humanity" way too freely for an alien. I'm not clear on whether he's espousing a Homo Sapiens need to be a certain way, or it's an everyone thing.

Also when Loki first appears and he's talking at Fury, Fury says something like "it doesn't sound like freedom, it sounds like the other thing." I took "the other thing" to mean slavery.

It's kind of hard for me to separate how much I'm influenced by the back stories from the other movies.

While I know that The Avengers should be understandable to someone who had never seen any of the others, but I don't see it as a standalone movie, but as another in a series. And like any series storylines and motivations carry over from the earlier books/movies.

Apparently in interview Joss has said that Loki became insane while falling through the void which is totally stupid just because there's no pointing to that specifically in the movie. So I hope it's not considered canon.

And apparently he also said that Coulson isn't dead. So there's that.

!

Ok, so I think I preferred this movie when it was called The Yoko Factor.

I had an enormous amount of fun watching this movie, and would happily watch it again, but I've seen Joss tell this story better. Part of the problem is that these characters didn't have any preexisting relationship, so Loki is disrupting...what, exactly? Getting a bunch of people who don't know each other very well or get along to argue...not something it really takes godlike manipulation skills to pull off. I felt like there was a lot of tell instead of show there - I knew I was supposed to think of Loki as the ultimate trickster, but I didn't see it onscreen.

That aside, SO MUCH FUN OMG.

This is the first time I've liked Mark Ruffalo in ANYTHING. Turns out he's much more believable when he's *supposed* to be slightly unnerving all the time.

I'm also pretty sure they destroyed my old office building. Feels very weird to have seen this in Chicago instead of home.

(I also thought the scene in Germany was just dumb. It was an awfully long walk to get to one line of Captain America telling us he fought the Nazis.)

No, that scene also had the cliche standard Holocaust survivor. Except, he'd have been, what two?

I knew I was supposed to think of Loki as the ultimate trickster

This is why I'm trying to remember if he was accepted as that Loki in Thor. Because he's totally not.