Entry 4: RE: "Avengers" - That Pesky F-Word

Posted by: Bradley Redder

Ack! Pthu! Ptui! (cough) (cough)... Aw, Chad, your words taste awful! Could you take them out of my mouth, please? If you're going to insist on inserting them in the future, at least have the courtesy to dip them in barbecue first. I never said that the Chitauri look exactly like a Power Rangers villain; what I said was they look like scrapped Power Rangers concept art. Much different. Much more belittling. And to be perfectly honest, I can't tell if you're being sarcastic with those pictures and claims or not, because it looks to me that if you take Goldar's chest armor off, you've got at least an Uncle of the Chitauri. And take a look at this guy...

If you animate this guy with CGI, he's a Chitauri. In all seriousness, this image is a Richard Linklater rotoscoping away from being that shot of a Chitauri that you posted. The leader on the mind-meld Transformers 2 planet even wore a goofy headdress like this one, so even if he and the Chitauri aren't exactly the same, they at least run in the same circles and buy from the same eBay seller. If you like them so much, I suggest you check out "gOoFyLoOkInGbUlLsHiT069's" eBay store immediately for some more cool stuff before Ivan and his Chitauri poker buddies snag it all up.

As for this fun you're so obsessed with, I wasn't having much of it. Yes, the characters are funny, but didn't it get tiresome? Didn't it start to get in the way? And is that all it takes for you to love someone, a laugh? I'm sure Saddam Hussein used to have some pithy one-liners; does that mean you love him too?

Okay. Invoking Saddam is maybe a little bit extreme, but I do so to add at least one formidable opponent to this discussion of a good-vs.-evil superhero film. The Avengers lacks a legitimate sense of danger, partially because its designated threat resembles baddies from a silly 90s after school toy advertisement. But what also holds it back is the fact that Whedon is afraid to go five lines of dialogue without a gut-buster. Yes, a lot of the jokes are actually funny, and the comedic timing of his actors is pretty remarkable, but unfortunately Whedon's own timing is off, inserting witty comments where they don't belong and ruining any tension he accidentally builds up when a few consecutive jokes miss the mark.

I'm all for fun, especially in a $220 million superhero team-up movie, but not at the expense of my taking any moment of it seriously. Fun here, as in Whedon's writing project, The Cabin in the Woods, only cheapens the experience as a whole, like when S.H.I.E.L.D. agents are playing fucking Galaga in the middle of a world-threatening crisis... Ugh. To relegate the responsibility of character development to the individual films leading up to this one, as you say Whedon does, only strengthens my case for its emptiness. Due simply to enthusiasm, your argument comes off as an endorsement for the film, but is essentially as condescending as my Power Rangers remark. Are you sure you don't agree with me that The Avengers is simply bloated and shallow? It sounds an awful lot like you do, especially now that I have you on my side about the goofy Chitauri.

Entry 2: RE: "Avengers" - No Assembly Required

Posted by: Bradley Redder

Well to start, I too find no basis for saying that Whedon "claims the characters as his own," because I never said that, nor did I think it. And that is exactly the problem... He does nothing with them that we haven't seen before, aside from giving Tony Stark a new way to put on and take off his Iron Man suit. You say that each actor brings to the screen the character they developed in previous films, and Whedon's film simply brings them together; is that all you wanted from this film? Is that the "brainy" superhero film that everybody seems to be trumping this up to be? Snooze. I'd rather just buy the action figures from the separate films and put together the toy playsets to create my own world-saving scenarios.

I say these characters need an arc. If not individually, then at least as a group. The first act serves as a refresher into who that characters are, a very long time to spend on something you assume the audience is already familiar with, which is why I say this is an awkward experience. The Avengers is the first of its kind... How much can you assume people will know about these characters? And at the same time, given how much the film isn't actually about them individually, is using the first act to re-establish them one by one really an efficient way to open a two and a half hour film? I don't necessarily blame Whedon for not being able to handle it gracefully, but I can't just give him a pass on it, either, simply because there is no precedent informing how such a venture should be approached.

I'll also stand by my claim that Whedon uses humor as his instant character developer. Luckily a lot of the jokes are actually funny, or else this would go from bothersome to downright infuriating, but in lieu of giving these characters anything to actually do or figure out about themselves, he simply turns them into the Brat Pack and gives them a bunch of funny dialogue to gloss over how shallow they actually appear in this film. With the exception of Tony Stark, who is the perfect combination of wit and energy that Whedon seems to wish all of his characters could be, do you think you could come up with an adjective to describe any of these characters as portrayed in this film? I know they've been developed in other films, but do they actually embody what was conveyed in those films? (And if you say Bruce Banner is always angry I'm going to dropkick you in the face the next time I see you.) It looked to me like he was just trying to write six Tony Starks, giving all of the superheroes impeccable comedic timing, rather than something to really say, or even stand for. But more on the humor in another post.

So if this was really just bringing everyone together as you say, I still need something more. Though they do come together in the end, the group doesn't really grow in any way... They're pretty much the same going out as they were coming in. They bicker and fight each other along the way, which was very dull, and then are brought together by what was probably the cheapest, most cynical moment I've seen in a film this year (more on this, also, in another post), but it doesn't reflect any actual shift in perspective.

As for the Chitauri... Yes, I found them to be that silly. I wish I could find a picture from the sequence in which Loki does a mind-meld transportation to the Chitauri kingdom, so that I could put a picture of the remarkably similar sequences of The Fallen from Transformers 2, and to show how closely the character design and outfits resemble Power Rangers villains. I Googled them, and yes, they do look very similar. In the end, the army of Chitauri is a little bit different, but after that ridiculous introduction to them, there was no way I was ever going to take them seriously. Also, the very concept of this film, bringing together six distinct heroes into one ultimate fighting machine... Is it not another parallel to Power Rangers? Is the shot in which we finally see the Avengers assembled not essentially the same thing as the Rangers forming into the Megazord? Perhaps Joss Whedon is more firmly rooted in television than I thought. And perhaps you could elaborate on that "distinct visual style" you were talking about too, because all I saw was blah, meh, and so what.

"The Avengers" Reviews are Being Assembled!

Posted by: Chad Van Alstin

Get it?  "Avengers Assemble!"

Reviews for Marvel's The Avengers will go LIVE tomorrow evening. Expect a very entertaining discussion for this one.

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