Avengers!...Assemble!

The Avengers (B) Pretty good summer blockbuster. It does what it's supposed to do, which is provide a bunch of big, dumb entertainment with explosions and punchin' and giant things like buildings and flying aircraft carriers going boom. Joss Whedon directed and had a hand in writing it, which is why it's so well crafted. Whedon is like Alan Moore, in that they're both capable of taking hackneyed tropes and cliches in pop fiction and finding fresh and unique turns on them. In Whedon's case, he takes things like vampires and demons in 'Buffy' and 'Angel', and makes a metaphor for growing up out of them. In the case of Firefly, he takes the space opera genre, and makes it an exploration of how dysfunctional people function together. And so on. (I have no idea where 'Dollhouse' fits into my tenuous thesis, so I'm not going to go there.)

For 'The Avengers', his twist, so to speak, is to play it completely straight. By which I mean he doesn't fall into the trap these type of movies always fall into. There is always, always, always a moment in the superhero/sci fi/horror blockbuster type film where an unexplainable event occurs, usually to flashing lights, ominous bass lines in the soundtrack, and lots of CG. We then cut to a scene of a lead character, with light on their face, and hair blowing from the event, looking up in awe/shock/horror. And they say: "You've got to be kidding me!" Or something along those lines. I've always wondered if this isn't a subconscious acknowledgement of the screenwriter that they're working on something beneath their talents.That never happens in 'Avengers'. Whedon and co-writer Zak Penn probably figured that if you're going to put a bunch of super-powered people in a movie, things like flying alien centipedes and air-bound aircraft carriers are going to be a given. The central idea in the script is watching the Avengers come together as a team. It's a blast seeing how Tony Stark and Bruce Banner just naturally get along, and how the Hulk doesn't play well with anyone, until the end when he saves Iron Man. The clever dialogue in the script serves the characters and moves the story forward. It doesn't just show off Penn and Whedon's considerable skills.

When I say 'completely straight', I mean it. There's no cynicism or eye-rolling in this film on a meta level. (There is cynicism, in Loki's attitude towards the Avengers, and in Fury's trick in motivating Captain America. But it's not directed at the audience.) Whedon's said in interviews that his job is not to give the audience what it wants, but what it needs. And that's why this film works so well. It could've been a snarky smirk-fest, with lots of gags about Captain America's inability to adapt to modern times, and Black Widow and Hawkeye feeling inadequate, and so on. We don't get complicated back stories of all the characters, because we don't need them. It does feel like a 'special episode' of a T.V. show, however. In this case, that's not a bad thing. (I got the same impression with Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, also.) I suspect Whedon's pedigree in television had something to do with his ability to distill the essence of storytelling into a time-limited format. And at two and a half hours, this movie just flies by.

If there's any cynicism here, it's in the attitude of Marvel Entertainment. They've seen the writing on the wall, and in this case the writing is, "Superhero comics are dying, and superhero movies are the way of the future!" I earlier predicted that superhero movies were going to hit a critical mass and fade out, and oh, how foolish I felt when I was proved utterly, completely wrong. Marvel (and DC) have figured that people like superheros, but they like them these days in controlled dosages. Two hour chunks where you don't have to plow through convoluted back stories sit much better with people these days. It certainly beats going into a comic shop these days, which tend to smell like musty paper and sad.

It's funny, now. A good visual metaphor for the comic industry these days is like a lamprey living off a much, much smaller fish. The guppy in this case would be the comic book medium itself, and the massive lamprey being the movie industry. I admit I'm no shakes as a Criswell these days, but here's my current prediction: Comic books will occupy a much smaller market in publishing than they do now. A best selling superhero comic will top out at, oh, 5,000 copies a month, at best. Doing comic books for a living will be even more dicey a proposition than it is now. In a critical sense, making comics will be on par with being a professional poet, or a person who makes folksy, whimsical 'art' bits to put on the lawn or over your front door. Any legitimate talent that wishes to make a mark in comics will, through sheer economic ruthlessness, wind up as an anonymous cathedral builder in the T.V., movie, or video game business.

Which leads me to my only complaint about 'The Avengers'. There's an uncomfortable scene near the end where the Avengers dig up Jack Kirby's actual corpse and proceed to play hackysack with his skull for a few minutes. Honestly, Marvel! That was a little uncalled for? (That post-credit scene where Tony Stark prank-calls Jim Starlin came off as mean, too.)