Well, for one thing, I'm a sappy old bastard.

For me, it was a culmination of decades as a comic fan. The comic medium is amazing and allows for some great things. But what it lacks is the immediacy and immersion of something that's "alive". Animated movies and shows bring some of that aliveness in for sure, but there's always the barrier that it isn't "real"

My first super hero animation experience was Spider-Man and his amazing friends. Then it was super friends. As fun as they were as a kid, not exactly top tier, you dig?

The Superman movies with Christopher Reeves were my first live action superhero experience. But have you ever seen the 70s/80s Marvel stuff? Totally different experience there. Then there was the chain of Batman movies, with varying degrees of success, but no progress on the Marvel side at all.

Until we got Spider-Tobey, and the Bana Hulk. That's when the path to what has become the MCU started. Spider-Man was being done but Sony though, and it had flaws. Bana Hulk was visually solid enough, but was weird as fuck otherwise.

So, enter the baby MCU. Norton Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America, Thor. Those were all amazing. High production values, great scripts, perfect casting, but most important, they stayed true to the spirit of the characters. For the first time in my life, I was seeing not just comic movies done right, but some of my favorite characters being done right.

And they had started building up to the Avengers fairly early in that, showing us old fans that they weren't just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks any more. There was intent, and that brought hype.

Now, it may not seem like a big deal, but at that point in my life, life fucking sucked. I lost everything; the ability to work, a long term partner, and was struggling through a lot of shit.

Enter the Avengers. All that hype, all the decades of disappointment as a marvel fan, and now there's what may be the best super hero movie ever made.

And then there's that scene. It's a moment where all the characters found themselves as a real team for the first time. That scene was the culmination of all of that. It was a payoff. It was a character moment. I might even argue hard it was the real climax of that movie, not the eventual conclusion with Loki.

It was just a camera spin on a technical level, but it was also bringing a comic panel into life. Visually, that spin was taking a fairly common comic scene of the heroes uniting and rallying from static 2d into a dynamic shift towards the kind of reality live action can bring.

I'm a comic geek, and a film geek. And I was a geek that was in the perfect state of being to be totally immersed. That immersion, which was partially built across multiple previous movies, made the scene more than its technical parts.

That's why it worked on an emotional level for me. It was not only a great comic moment, it was a great film moment. And it was hope.

So, one part personal, but also some incredibly deft film making