Avengers: Extended Edition, The

I watched this with a friend who is a very big MCU-fan, much bigger than I am. We came to the following conclusions together...

The new opening/closing structure is excellent; it makes the SHIELD element of the story, in particular Maria Hill, a much for valuable part of the overall experience. This will probably be the best version to watch if you intend to then get into Captain America II, for example.

There were a couple of bits that felt a bit out of place, most notably the cop who - during the New York battle - gets into the fighting with an alien gun. It starts well, but then ends rather suddenly and seems to go nowhere. I can see what the idea was here...but this late in the film it doesn't seem strictly necessary. The waitress, on the other hand, plays out very strongly in this edit.

Deleted scenes were occasionally noticeable by a dip in visual quality - this was most apparent when Bruce Banner wakes up in a crushed warehouse...here he has an extended discussion with a security guard that takes place in front of a very rough backdrop of New York. Again, the idea is solid, but this might be one to leave out.

Audio editing was top-notch, I didn't notice any errors.
Enjoyment was very solid - I never found myself bored, and the flow was maintained excellently even with a full 11-minutes extra. Sometimes an extended cut can drag a bit, but this played very well.

Would highly recommend that this replace anyone's go-to screening copy.

While I really liked the beginning of the edit with Hill at first, I kind of missed the original intro, and felt like this compromised the ending a bit, which in my opinion wasn't really seamless, especially when compared to the original.

Some of the added scenes were pretty great and IMO necessary additions, but some of them weren't really as great: The Hulk scene with the security guard would be great if not for the fact that it spoiled where Loki was going to open the portal to the audience, and I think finding it out with Stark really works wonderfully. Some of the added stuff in the battle is good too, but at the same time compromises the pace, like the bits with the guard and the chitauri gun (the audio and video of this part is also somewhat jarring). The additions with the waitress were great, though.

All in all I still preferred the original cut of the movie when putting the pros and cons of this edit. But that's just me. It's still a pretty good extended version of the movie.