It's such a good exchange from a character perspective - but then I thought the whole script was excellent. The action sequence at the end is a beautiful example of how to do a team fight without skewing the balance towards one character's experience. When they announced the first Iron Man movie, I was extremely skeptical of Robert Downey Jnr's ability to play Tony Stark, but I had to eat my words. ^_^ He's just been wonderful.

I don't know if Whedon's X-Men script is available, but if anyone is curious as to how he might have handled them, take a look at his writing run on Astonishing X-Men #1 to #24. Charming, witty and touching. You can probably find all the issues in a trade paperback at your fave comic book shop. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astonishing_X-Men PS. If anyone out there has a copy of Whedon's SUSPENSION script, I would be very curious to read it. Thanks in advance! I am at inconsolablecat (at) hotmail (dot) com.

You're not the only one who'd like a look at SUSPENSION. If I remember rightly, that was his first sale, and I'd like to see how my favourite writer broke into the business... Anyway, I was stuck on a train earlier, and was thinking about how good the dialogue is in The Avengers. Joss Whedon has a distinctive dialogue style, but within that, he gives every character an individual voice... Thor is obvious: "Shakespeare In The Park". Stark is snarky, but focuses his mockery outwards and has only praise for himself; Banner, the anti-Stark, mocks himself rather than others, to undercut the seriousness of his problems. Rogers is honest, emotional, says what he feels, and while he rarely cracks jokes, is often funny without realising it ("I understood that reference."). Barton is the doubter, always asking questions and unsure of everything ("You and I remember Budapest very differently."). And Romanov never says anything directly - it's always a carefully phrased manipulation, a metaphor, a half-truth. Okay, yes, I've seen this movie far too many times and I was very bored on that train... :)