Entry 12: RE: "Avengers" - Round 12

Posted by: Bradley Redder

This is likely to be the last word on The Avengers, and there is still so much to address, and quite a bit in your last entry to respond to as well, so this will be all over the place.

First I'd like to wrap up a few things that our lone commenter thus far and you seem to be taking away from my last few entries. I chose Spider-Man 2 as a point of comparison simply because it was another Marvel superhero movie, and the one that you mentioned specifically in that text to me. The comparison could have been made to Terminator, or The Matrix, or Die Hard, or any other great action film. And the comparison isn't meant to be a direct criticism of The Avengers, but merely a way to point out how a great action film is constructed. You, our commenter, and the majority of people I've spoken with or whose comments I've read on the Internet all basically argue that this movie is all about fun. Nobody has offered anything more than that. Just fun. And that's fine. I like fun movies as much as the next guy. But I know when a movie is just fun, and I know that just doesn't make a movie great. There has to be something more, whether it's meaning or character or social relevance or simply great plot construction. Whatever it may be, The Avengers doesn't have it.

Suspension of disbelief is also a great thing to bring up, because I think it's essentially what I've been talking about all along with these Spider-Man comparisons. You seem to be accusing me of not being willing to suspend my disbelief, like I'm some cranky old bastard that doesn't like to have fun, but suspension of disbelief isn't the sole responsibility of the audience; it starts with the film. The film has to build up some credit in order for me to want to suspend my disbelief. It's not a switch that I have sticking out of my head that I flick when I feel like enjoying a movie. No. The movie has to already be doing something for me in order for me to let the little things, or sometimes even the big things, slide by without much criticism, and The Avengers just doesn't grab me from the opening, with that cheap car chase in which Hawkeye, the master marksman, can't hit the somehow indestructible Cobie Smulders character from some twelve feet away. It just wasn't fun, nor was the second action spectacle, in which Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America fight each other in the moonlit woods, throwing each other through trees like Jacob and the other one from Twilight. Not only is it not fun, but it's boring, and when I get bored my mind starts to wander off and inspect the cracks in the surface of the film, like the Galaga bit.

The last point that I've been patiently waiting all week to argue is Agent Phil Coulson's death. Given that this is already much longer than I intended, I'll try to do it in broad strokes. I loathed this sequence. The build-up to it was good, very good actually: Loki tricks Thor into the jail cell and is about to hit the button to drop him from the ship, when Coulson steps in with a strange gun and tells Loki to back away. He mentions the gun was developed with Tesseract technology and says, "I don't even know what it does," a great line. Loki ends up stabbing him somehow but Coulson still shoots him after dropping to the floor. A Whedon comedian to the end, his almost dying words are, "Oh, so that's what it does." Coulson is a pretty minor character, and you could maybe get away with making a joke of his death, but then Whedon uses this as the rallying point for all of the heroes. A minor character's death, a guy that at least Captain America, had just met the day before. And somehow him dying is enough for the whole crew of the ship to stop and look sad and for the heroes, who have been bickering and fighting each other during a world crisis, to band together. This is annoying for the aforementioned reason that he is so minor, and is cynical because how many other S.H.I.E.L.D. agents died in that attack! That ship was almost destroyed. It was huge. So many must have died, but due to laziness Whedon makes the characters give a shit about someone they barely know simply because the audience is familiar with him, after seeing him in what are essentially cameos in the films leading to this one.

It ties into the Galaga point of what is a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent? It should be a very important person with a very specific skill set to be let into such a top-secret military operation, yet all of these agents are treated as dumb and expendable. They play Galaga and Nick Fury could care less if they die. It also ties into my point about these heroes not standing for anything and not being defined by anything more than their respective superpower. Should it really take the death of a new acquaintance to make a hero wake up and realize he should save the world, if only because he himself is living on it?

Other scattered complaints:

I wish they had cast Scarlett Johansson for more than her chest and, given that there was no other reason, I wish they had actually shown more of it by dressing her in something other than a one-piece thick spandex suit.

Hawkeye got a raw deal. The least developed character leading into the film has forty-four seconds of screen time before getting hypnotized into one of Loki's lackeys, leaving a great actor with nothing to contribute to the film.

The whole plot kicks off because Nick Fury is using the Tesseract to develop weapons to defend against an extra-terrestrial attack: "We're severely, hilariously outgunned," he says at one point. But in the end we see Black Widow picking off the alien invasion with a pair of small pistols and Iron Man blows up the entire mother ship with a single missile, which for some reason decommissions the living, breathing, non-robot aliens on Earth in the same instant. Lazy.

Loki, the master of deception, is deceived so easily by Black Widow's non-traditional interrogation. Great scene until it gives way to a silly plot contrivance. Whedon actually allows some tension, even fear and awe, to build as Loki threatens her... "I'll make [Hawkeye] kill you in every way he knows you fear and wake him up just in time to recognize his good work!" I think there was something about her being a "mewling quim," a cool phrase in a great moment, even if I felt like Whedon wrote it with a Thesaurus. This is that tension that I was craving, the moment where I might think the heroes don't have a complete handle on everything, but then it is ruined when she reveals she was tricking the master trickster. Whatever.

To answer your question about whether the nuke heading for NYC being of equal gravity with Ock capturing MJ: No. It does not hold the same weight. Again, we care about MJ, and even if we don't, we care about what she means to Peter. She has been a major influence on the entire film, being a contributing factor in Peter's decision to give up being Spider-Man, a hugely dramatic moment. NYC gets no such treatment in The Avengers. Whedon seems to assume we'll automatically care about, but NYC just gets no play. We never see a dead body (When the body count for this film had to have been in the hundreds (Thousands?)). We never see New Yorkers just living life either. We don't even get the obligatory but enjoyable scene where a construction worker is talking to somebody, saying it's his kid's ninth birthday and he's got tickets to the game tonight, right behind the dugout. If that were the case, I might have some emotional stake in the action, if only because I want that kid to have a nice time at the ball game. Whedon wrote a scene around establishing Coulson's first name being Phil to make his death seem more dramatic... Why not do the same for NYC? Was it even NYC? If so, it's missing shots of the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. New York Action Movie 101. He just doesn't give the city any personality, and the destruction radius in the end is like three blocks.

Scattered praise:

Tom Hiddleston. I mentioned him in my review and you agreed in your first entry, but it's worth mentioning again. He was fabulous. "Does an ant have a quarrel with a boot?" Great line, perfectly delivered. Whedon did a nice job writing this character, though I'll also mention again that he gets a little short-changed in the end.

The effects are pretty fantastic, for the most part. I show mild hesitation there only for the shot which lasts maybe two seconds of Loki riding one of the alien speeder bike thingies while chasing Black Widow. For a brief moment there is a shot that resembles the water skiing shot from Die Another Day.

The shot that you mentioned which connects all of the heroes in action. It's great, even though it is digital. That's okay. It showed the imagination and creativity that weren't present in the other action sequences. My other favorite was the shot of an explosive hitting a taxi, flipping it over, with the camera inside the cab. That was fun.

Rapid fire now:

"I'm always angry."

-"How does Fury look at all of these screens?"
-"He turns his body."
-"That's exhausting." I love how Downey delivers this line almost condescendingly, as though extremely high-tech isn't good enough.

-"Loki is an Asgardian and he is my brother."
-"He killed eighty people in the last two days."
-"...He's adopted."

-"(Something something) like flying monkeys!"
-"I don't understand this refere--"
-"I do! ...I understand that reference."

Realizing that the aircraft carrier is an invisible flying machine, and Cap wordlessly handing Fury a tenspot after take-off.

The Avengers "A" being the last remaining letter on Stark Tower and the last triumphant shot of the movie. Made me wish I had loved the movie as much as "This might be my masterpiece" made me wish I'd loved Inglorious Basturds, or however the fuck that was "cleverly" misspelled.

Black Widow's intro. Lots of fun. Lots of cleavage. Correlation?

And I'm spent. This was a pretty exhausting argument, and I get the feeling it got us nowhere, but it was a lot of fun all the same. It has been a great week. It made the mediocrity of The Avengers worth sitting through twice. Even if I haven't talked you down from your insane opinion that this is a great film, at least we can agree that Spider-Man 2 is the (far) superior Marvel film. Now, unless things have changed since I saw it twice in 2007, I'm off to face the disappointment that awaits me in Spider-Man 3.

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