James Reviews: Marvel's The Avengers

Joss Whedon has had a lot of luck/skill (although it's diminished in recent years) getting awesome television shows made. However, his one film prior to this one was essentially a flop, and it's thus rather surprising to me that he got to direct

Let me explain what I mean by that.  Serenity was a film with a pre-established cast who already know each other, who team up to fight an oddly-compelling villain even though most of them end up being cannon fodder, because it's really down to one guy at the end.  Take out the "already know each other" part and that's The Avengers.  Or possibly Marvel's The Avengers, which I feel compelled to call it in order to distinguish it from that show with the spy chick who beat up bad guys while wearing a skintight outfit.

I don't know why I bother trying, though.

Anyway, the film itself is... well, it's not perfect, and a surprising amount of the flaws seem to come in at the script phase.  Joss got his start as a script doctor, patching up other people's messes into something workable (including the original Toy Story(!)), so it's surprising to me that a basically solid concept - a bunch of superheroes come together into a genuine team - had such a muddled execution.


The film's basic problem (the one inherent to its setup and in no way Whedon's fault) is the same one Serenity had, in that it kind of requires you to know who all these characters are beforehand.  It is true that, unlike Serenity, which gave you the entire cast and a few character notes in one four-minute shot, this film does actually take the time to kind-of sort-of introduce every character... but only kind-of-sort-of.  I have no idea what's going on with Captain America's flashbacks to a crashing plane or anything, I don't know how they got the Tesseract in the first place, and I don't really know what Thor's deal is; I kind of assume he's Doctor Who with muscles, given both his arrogance and his attitude about protecting Earth.  There is not a whole lot of mercy doled out to people who haven't seen Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor.  So you get scenes where Coulson tells Thor that they're moving somebody* to a safe location, or where Tony Stark mentions that his father knew Captain America, and parts of the audience go "huh?" and "what?"  By doing all of this stuff, Whedon exacerbates rather than remedies the basic problem.

*Played by Natalie Portman. Also, this film ends when the bad guy's army are all killed the moment their mothership is blown up. This film reminds me of The Phantom Menace.

Now, I don't know whether it was the dysfunctional superhero family dynamic, or the fact that one of their number was a god, or the fact that one of their number was a scientist-turned-reluctant god, the fact that half of New York got totaled during the climax, or just Captain America's costume design, but I was constantly reminded of Watchmen.  And the shocking thing was, even though Watchmen left a bunch of background material out, it did a better job introducing the characters.  Nobody dropped out of the sky at the start of the second act of Watchmen just to drop a new Conflict Ball, for example.

Keep it simple, stupid, is what I'm saying. I thought the opening to Serenity was great: this is the world we live in, explained via Alliance propaganda indoctrination. Not every single detail from the TV show needed to be brought up.  And so on. Marvel's The Avengers, on the other hand, felt clogged with its continuity references.

Since I mentioned Watchmen, I guess I should also point out that the whole "our strongest fighter can't control his alter ego" subplot also reminded me of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and this is certainly better than that film. On the other hand, the "villain gets himself captured as part of his own evil plot" bit reminded me of The Dark Knight, and I am f*cking sick of seeing that plot done over and over again.

Next issue: I get that the idea was "They come together, they're not a team, then they become a team." And yet the middle-of-the-film confrontation was overly complicated and downright silly. How did Black Widow know that Loki was talking about the Hulk when he said "you brought it with you?"  Why is everyone so upset because Samuel L. Jackson is building weapons - what are you gonna use, harsh language?  How did neither of the two smartest men on the planet decide that quarantining the scepter was a completely unnecessary thing to do?  How come Thor is there at all?

No, seriously, how come Thor is there at all?  He and Loki are both more or less gods.  I get that they needed The Most Powerful (Established) Threat to justify bringing all the heroes together (and they needed an established threat because, uh, well, read the above and tell me whether you think continuity lockout was at all a concern of anyone involved in this project in any way). But it kinda lessens the tension if one of your heroes is basically on the same playing field as the villain. (And it screws up Thor's continuity, with Thor suddenly being able to find a way back to Earth...)

Basically the film kept veering back and forth between "this is so cool" and "this is so stupid." Basically everything I haven't mentioned yet falls under the "cool" category.  (Although I wish Whedon's big signature oner this time around hadn't been mostly CGI; I really liked the one at the beginning of Serenity.)  The cast is excellent and the scenes where they just get to play off each other with very little regard for the overall plot are the best in the film.  Its random attempts at philosophy fall a bit short compared to Serenity (my understanding is that there's an Author Tract in a deleted scene), but they end up just giving Loki some intriguing characterization rather than actually trying to deliver anything resembling "the point of the film." The Point Of The Film is that teamwork is a good thing, and that message comes across just fine.

The overall premise is reasonably solid - we do get to see a team actually form - but the film got bogged down in the execution.  Rather like Quantum of Solace in that respect, although at least here you can tell what's going on. And the villain's not a sissy. And there's no extremely gratuitous crotch-shot of an extra who will go on to be in Game of Thrones.  But at the same time... "The team (breaks up and) gets (back) together" is something Joss is an old hand at; seasons 3, 4, 6 and 7 of Buffy and seasons 2-5 of Angel all provide examples of him doing this sort of thing better than he managed here.

One final nitpick: shouldn't Black Widow's last name be Romanova instead of Romanov?

That this film happened at all is a miracle. That it's as good as it was is even more of a miracle. But it wasn't great.

Final grade: B+.  I suspect it would be higher if I'd seen Thor or Captain America or Iron Man 2.  But I didn't.  So it's not.