The Avengers
The main question I’ve been asking myself today is; can you love a movie and still have a huge list of problems with it? Apparently, yes. Yes, you can.
The Avengers is an amazing accomplishment in filmmaking, not because of what’s contained in the movie itself, but what came before it; five prequel films by four different directors over four years. Each of the prequels was its own origins film, containing a beginning and ending, yet tied together by a few key cameos and some after credits extra scenes. Each film built on the previous with the goal of coming together in the most ambitious superhero team film to date.
And come together they did. Recurring their roles from the previous films were Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner and fan favorite, Clark Gregg as Agent Coulson. Gwyneth Paltrow made an appearance as Pepper Potts, Stellan Skarsgård was back as Dr. Selvig and Cobi Smulders joined as Agent Hill. The one replacement from the prequels was Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner/The Hulk, picking up from Edward Norton’s turn in The Incredible Hulk.
Directing and co-writing fell to fan favorite Joss Whedon who brought his excellent sense of humor and incredible ability to write character driven dialog. Anyone who has seen “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Angel” or “Firefly” already knew that Whedon had talent and after this film, so will the rest of the worldwide moviegoing public.
Because of the ambitious prequel films, The Avengers was able to show an origins story for the team without having to go into the backstory of each member. After a brief setup to reintroduce Loki (Hiddleston) and bring us up to speed on his scheme to conquer Earth, Whedon and crew jumped right into the action and didn’t let go until the final post-credits scene.
One of the best things about The Avengers was the humor. Whedon is an excellent writer and Downey and Evans have perfect comedic timing. As Steve Rogers/Captain America’s ‘Man out of Time,’ Evans played it straight-faced and dry to Stark’s (Downey) zinger one-liners, but even Thor’s (Hemsworth) aloof, not-from-this-world ironic humor sent the audience into fits of laughter. All good action films try to inject humor to break up the intensity of the action scenes but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it done so well.
Scattered throughout the movie were shout-outs to the previous movies which reminded us that Disney and Marvel were crafting a much larger universe for our heroes to play in. Even Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster had a cameo via a computer screen photo. The vision behind The Avengers is better than anything I’ve seen from a multi title comic book crossover and the future looks very bright for Marvel superhero films.
I could go on and praise the film for a lot of other accomplishments but then I might be getting into some spoiler territory that I’d rather skip; go see the movie, it’s overall excellent and enjoyable and I think you’ll all love it.
But having said that, we’re back to the question I asked at the top; can I love a movie and still have a huge list of problems with it? The Avengers was able to overcome the problems I had because of the writing and the story and how all the actors stepped it up for the movie. However, I feel the need to go over a few of the issues I had with the movie because I feel that they are things that can be improved on for the future movies and to point out that no matter how enjoyable the end product was, it was far from perfect.
I gripe about this all the time with movies but The Avengers has potentially taken it to a whole new level; I don’t think it’s possible for Whedon and his editors to have cut so many of the fight scenes into jitterier, more disorienting, blurry masses of unwatchable crap. It’s a disservice to the actors, stunt doubles and CGI artists when you waste their hard work by doing this. Stop it! While some of the fight scenes were fine, there were two fights involving Black Widow in particular that were complete wrecks. The final battle of the film had more of this but the scale was so huge that it was less bothersome. Still, there was room for a lot of improvement in the fight scenes.
Goofy filming angles for no reason. Joss, you’re not Michael Bay, you don’t need to film everyone from the ground up with crap flying overhead. I was feeling a little queasy at the start of the film with the Bay-like camera swooping and up-angle shots as Fury walked around his base. All that was missing was a huge ball of fire following him and a flock of Woo-doves to fly through the shot…
What was up with all the lingering shots of unimportant characters? The girl in NY watching Cap fight off some Chitauri and then being interviewed at the end? Panning over to Agent Hill (Smulders) and lingering on her when all she was doing was reacting to someone else speaking or doing something. Granted, IMO, she’s hotter than Scarlett anyway so it’s not like seeing her was completely terrible, but either involve her in the scene or spend time on something more important or fun, like RDJ spitting clever one liners.
Jeremy Renner getting the short end of the stick for 3/4 of the film. I can only hope that the rumored Hawkeye origins movie is in the works somewhere.
Phil getting Washed.
Too many heroes. Yes, this is a superhero team movie and yes, there are a lot of heroes by necessity. But I’ve said it before about villains, when a film has too many villains (Spider-Man 3 is a prime example) it becomes a problem involving everyone in the story without being overwhelmed or having someone underutilized. The saving grace for The Avengers is the prequel films for the main heroes. We know them, we understand them and we’re looking forward to seeing them together. But with a lesser director or a less capable writer, it would be very easy to have a problem in future movies of this type. In my opinion, Hawkeye suffered somewhat in this movie and while we did get more of the Black Widow’s story, there were other characters introduced (Agent Hill) without much fanfare. Even Selvig (Skarsgård) got shortchanged on screen and he had a very important role in the movie.
Alien Snake Things
Character designs. This point is really specific to one of the villains of The Avengers, the leviathan, for lack of a better term, that the Chitauri bring along with them to invade New York. The giant Chitauri snake thing looks a lot like the giant snake thing from Transformers: Dark of the Moon and, apparently, also the giant snake thing from the upcoming Battleship movie. In that picture on the right, do you know which film is which? Probably, but I’m preaching to the choir here. If you’re not a geek, from top to bottom it’s Battleship, Transformers and The Avengers. The leviathan from The Avengers even shares a feature with the ship from Transformers; soldiers deploy from the armored sides. We’ll have to see if the alien from Battleship has this feature also (my money is on yes).
Relying on the prequels. Although the previous movies led into The Avengers, each can be watched as their own film without having seen the others and never seeing any sequels. The Avengers, however, relies on you having seen those five films in order to understand some of what was going on. I probably shouldn’t count this as a negative, as plenty of films have prequels, but for people that don’t pay attention to this type of thing, aren’t already Avengers (or general comic) fans or are deciding to jump in at this point due to the hype, there’s probably going to be some confusion. I just re-watched all five of the prequel films over the last week and even I had to stop and think back on a few things to get the references or to understand some of what was going on. And I still don’t really get how Thor got back to Earth. One positive is that the Avengers sequels, and the individual movies still to come (Iron Man 3 and Thor 2 are already announced), will tighten things up and with this film’s success it’ll expose more people to the earlier movies. This specific problem will pretty much go away after this movie.
I’m sure some would argue that my problems with the movie are unwarranted or nitpicky, and I might agree on a couple of them (but I’m sticking with the crappy editing on the fight scenes and the snake thing!), but as good as The Avengers is, I don’t think it was perfect. Is it the best superhero movie of all time? Maybe. Top five? Definitely. It certainly stands alone as superhero team movies go and I think it would take an incredible X-Men or Justice League movie to ever rival the accomplishment.
Normally I’ll ding a movie up to a whole point for the bad action scenes but even I can’t be that cruel this time around. The Avengers, even with a few shortcomings, is still a masterpiece and anything less than 5 Wheels of Cheddar would be lying.
