[After the “noted” “success” of our LOST rewatch two years ago, James and Scott are back to prepare for the release of Avengers: Age of Ultron the only way they know how: by going through the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, movie by movie. We are not very imaginative. Check in every week as we go into way too much detail about pop entertainment and frequently say people are wrong about things.]
Scott: The time has come.
James: I have honestly been dreading it. The past few weeks I’ve been behind with my watching and catching up while we recap, but due to poor scheduling. This week, I’ve actively been putting it off.
Scott: Yeah, let’s just talk about WrestleMania instead. Maybe Brock Lesnar will retain now that he’s re-signed!
James: I am genuinely tempted. Because, really, the movie we’re about to discuss is one I’ve come completely around on since I loved it in the theatre.
Scott: My feelings aren’t quite that extreme, but as far as the Marvel movies go, I agree it’s the dud. It might not be as much of a drag as INCREDIBLE HULK, but considering its reputation far exceeds IH, there’s a bigger disparity between perception and reality. That said, if you asked me to list something I liked about this movie, I’d say that I really like Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner.
James: We are, of course, talking about THE AVENGERS!
Scott: MARVEL’S THE AVENGERS, that is! They had to re-title it for home video! Because I guess someone is still expecting to make a sequel to the Thurman-Fiennes Joint.
James: When I searched for “Avengers” in PSN, that’s actually the one that came up first!
Scott: This caused me no end of trouble when I was working for HMV. We stocked it under “A,” but alphabetically it WAS “M.”
James: It’s not like I hate this movie, or think it’s completely bad. But I definitely think it’s one that works best being watched once or twice in the theatre and plays less well with repeated watchings, which is what we’re getting now that it runs in the middle of the day on basic cable a few times per month. And in this case, a situation where I’m specifically watching and making notes to dissect individual bits, it certainly draws out the aspects of the movie I dislike.
Scott: Yeah, that’s the thing. It’s pure spectacle, and I agree that when I came out of the theatre I was DAZZLED - and Alison Blair wasn’t even in it! It’s the definition of mindless entertainment, and to that end it’s actually pretty successful. But as a subject of study, it falls flat. Watching it after all these other films that have a LOT to offer /BESIDES/ mindless spectacle, the flaws become a little glaring.
James: THOR is a movie that grows with reconsideration, but AVENGERS definitely doens’t.
Scott: It’s a good deal better than, say, TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON, which I caught 10 minutes of a few weeks ago and had to get away from real quick. But that’s about the faintest praise anyone has ever drummed up for anything.
James: “It’s not as bad as a shitty, racist movie that’s visually incomprehensible”
Scott: There’s your pull-quote, Rotten Tomatoes!
James: I remember, when AVENGERS came out, and Roger Ebert was getting eviscerated for basically saying the movie wasn’t perfect, even by nerds who hadn’t seen it yet. And now, in retrospect, I’d say he was actually being generous. But shall we get into it?
Scott: Nerds, every single time you tangled with Roger Ebert you came out looking terrible. Let’s begin with some ominous raspy exposition! The Tesseract has apparently awakened, and some mysterious personage seems pretty keen to get it away from its home at SHIELD HQ. The Tesseract is such an odd MacGuffin. Nobody on Earth knows what it does, except that it generates seemingly-unlimited power. HYDRA wanted to weaponize it, and apparently Howard Stark thought it held the key to unlimited energy, indirectly inspiring the Arc Reactor, plus the Asgardians know about it, so it has this place as a link between all the previous MCU films (except iHULK) but nobody really says where it’s from or what it really does. Or how.
James: We then cut to Nick Fury arriving at Tesseract HQ to review things and ask THOR’s Dr. Erik Selvig about something that it’s kinda weird he doesn’t know about already. Like, isn’t it weird that Fury’s literal description is “the guy who knows everything” and he doesn’t know that the Tesseract can’t be turned off, or that Hawkeye, a guy there mostly to shoot at something if it seems off, understands that the Tesseract is a door better than Fury?
Scott: Right away, the film is a bit wonky with its exposition.
James: I understand that it’s exposition for the audience, but considering the entire second act of the movie revolves around Fury knowing stuff and keeping it secret, it’s a weird flub. Joss Whedon reworked a Zak Penn script for this one, and it shows.
Scott: But we don’t have time to ponder that for too long because before you know it LOKI zaps in! You remember Loki, right! Handsome devil with a silver tongue, okay in a fight but really great at just manipulating situations to his advantage? Where, um… where did that Loki go?
James: Loki was the breakout hit from this movie (that and Iron Man/Hulk buddy fanfic), and I’ll admit that Loki is one of the more consistently well-done parts of this movie. Even if he’s a little more ham-fisted here than he was in THOR, a movie directed by Kenneth Branagh. A lot of my problems with Loki in this movie, as with most of my problems about the movie apart from its third act, actually, can be blamed on Joss Whedon, and specifically Joss Whedon’s dialogue.
Scott: It’s great that Loki, the consensus most popular (and powerful) villain from the franchise so far gets to go for round two, but the character has to be flattened out to make the movie’s dynamic work. The pathos and nuance are gone, now he’s just Lord Zedd sending putties down. His big move in Act 1 is to brainwash Hawkeye and Selvig with a magic stick.
James: It pains me, as someone who literally watched Buffy from the premiere, to admit it, but Whedon’s quirky wordplay is at its nadir in this movie.
Scott: Oh we will have words about Whedontalk
James: And it starts with Loki saying he’s “burdened by glorious purpose.”
Scott: The “ant-boot” line is the most salvageable part of that exchange, especially because it comes back later (albeit not as strongly as it could have.)
James: The magic stick is dumb as hell and I actually love it, because it’s basically solved by hitting someone really hard, one of my favourite Classic Comedy Bits(tm)
But back to the dialogue, it works its hardest to sink this scene; it’s Whedon-y past the point of it being a fault, and if the “ant-boot” part is salvageable, then the “He means to bury us,” “Like the pharaohs of old,” exchange certainly is not. I’ve been keeping a running count of the number of times different characters say someone “means” to do something in this movie and I’m halfway through and I think I’m at 4. NOBODY TALKS LIKE THAT.
Scott: Like, “I’m here to save you from the burden of freedom” is like an only-okay first draft of a motivation.
James: It, like a lot of the dialogue in the movie, sounds like a first draft that really needed to be edited. And that’s a shame, because Loki’s actual getaway is really well-shot and exciting!
Scott: Loki absconds with the Tesseract and the two heaviest hitters in SHIELD — Clint Barton and Erik Selvig — and buries SHIELD in its own rubble in, yeah, a pretty decent getaway. I love Loki riding in the back of a jeep. We also get Agent Maria Hill, played by a tragically under-utilized Cobie Smulders.
James: It’s a scene that was made to be a Lego set, and I mean that as a compliment.
Smulders, like a few parts of this movie, represents an interesting idea that would be better utilized in CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER. See also: Captain America’s doubts about SHIELD, Cap’s interest in pop culture, Nick Fury keeping secrets
Scott: The idea that SHIELD’s best agent is Canadian?
James: Well, the idea of Fury’s right-hand-person. In AVENGERS, she’s mostly here to be someone for other characters to talk to when giving exposition. She’s not really a character until CAP 2.
Scott: I just want to know why Agent Phil doesn’t get one of those lycra bodysuits.
James: I will say, though, that the next scene, Black Widow’s introduction, is pretty much aces all around. Well, other than the over-exposition-y Russian mob boss, but if you pretend he’s a James Bond reject villain then it works. But otherwise, Natasha being someone who can manipulate others, who is always in control and who hurricanranas people is really well done here. She basically beats up some rubes and is told by Coulson (who contacts her by calling the thug, in a fun and cheeky play) to go find Bruce Banner, “the big guy.”
Scott: It’s a sign of how much trouble the movie is going to have wedging Natasha in with all the Asgardian-spacewar stuff that her biggest and best showcase comes before the plot kicks in. The line about the mob boss “giving [her] everything” is GOOD-Whedon.
James: I will say, the Avengers’ introductory scenes are generally pretty well done! Like, the individual Avengers get introduced in pretty good ways. Natasha showcases her James Bond-ness, we find Bruce trying to help people and avoid being the Hulk in what is basically the first few scenes of INCREDIBLE HULK, Stark is a cocky jerk who flirts with Pepper and Cap is a dedicated soldier. There’s good humour in each, and it’s good! The movie just really has problems when it starts combining them. Which is weird, because at the time, I thought combining the characters was the thing the movie did BEST.
Also, Hawkeye gets introduced like a putz in the opening scene because he’s a putz who the movie isn’t really concerned with.
Scott: Yeah, the “getting the band together” sequence is tasked with boiling each character down to their archetype, to remind you who they are and what their place is in this team. It’s really effective and efficient. Unfortunately, they all stay as archetypes for the duration of the film, because hey they have their own movies to be 3-dimensional characters. Listen, I dunno if you caught this during the 144 minutes of runtime, but Tony Stark isn’t a team player.
James: Also, Pepper Potts saying, “What? Booooooo,” to Coulson in the background of the scene as he talks about his girlfriend moving away is kiiiiiinda perf.
Scott: I like that Pepper and Phil have kept up their friendship as established in the first IRON MAN movie. It’s a cute dynamic.
James: I 100% loved the visual gag with Steve going through punching bags like they’re candy, though.
Scott: And how he carries one around like laundry!
James: But yeah, these scenes are well done but a little surface; they’re only a problem when the movie doesn’t really move past them that organically.
Scott: I loved Banner’s too, because at this point with the new actor it’s almost as if INCREDIBLE never happened - new actor, newish status quo, but Ruffalo is the kind of actor you like from the moment he appears onscreen.
James: We talked about actually liking Ed Norton as Bruce in Leterrier’s weird pseudo sequel, but Ruffalo is fanTASTIC in AVENGERS.
Scott: Banner is a tough character to nail down: he’s as smart as Stark, but so much more nervous for obvious reasons. The thing I noticed and admired is that the parts I do like are the ways the other Avengers interact with him!
Which is so strange since Banner/Hulk has never been a longstanding Avenger in the comics, nor much of a team-player… but in the movies it kinda turned out to be the best possible thing for everyone!
James: That’s true! The way the other Avengers react to Bruce is where the team interaction is at its best. Case-in-point: when Steve meets Bruce and is so matter-of-fact accepting of Bruce because he can tell Bruce is a good guy who wants to help.
Scott: The pretense to get Banner onto the Avengers is a whole bunch of flimsy — apparently the Tesseract emits Gamma radiation but really you just wanna see the Hulk later. But the scene with Natasha gives Banner his first chance to stretch his character, arguably having as much or more to say about himself in one scene than Norton got during the entirety of his movie. I also like that Banner calls Hulk “The Other Guy” even though he slips up and says “Hulk” later. That’s not the movie being afraid of codenames, that’s Banner not wanting to acknowledge the Hulk’s identity. Credit where it’s due, and I think that’s original to the movie, I think that’s great.
James: Yeah, the way this movie picks and chooses what to take from INCREDIBLE HULK is a bit wonky, and we’ll get to that, but that is a very nice detail.
Scott: So Banner and Captain America are wrangled onto the SHIELD Hellicarrier, where Phil gushes about having the original Cap Trading Card set (That’s Whedon deliberately setting his sights on Phil as a potential breakout character.) My favourite part here is where the Hellicarriertakes flight and Steve makes good on a bet with Fury that he hasn’t seen everything weird yet.
James: The gags in this movie are pretty good! I think Whedon is at his strongest in the movie when he’s having fun and not trying to be Important.
Scott: Yeah. It would have been nice to find a bit more room for it, because so much of this movie is slam-bang action and most of the MCU movies were bolstered by the addition of charm and humour. Like, THOR is a movie where an Asgardian god gets tazered, and it doesn’t seem like a cheap laff. When MARVEL’S THE AVENGERS hits that tone, it works pretty well, but it doesn’t aim that way quite enough.
James: For better or worse, it’s mostly interested in being pretty serious and having a team of heroes who spend most of the movie hating each other, one of my least favourite tropes in superhero anything.
But anyway! Nick Fury mentions that they’re scanning the globe looking for Loki, because they have control of basically every camera on earth, and the quick little shot of Steve Rogers being uncomfortable with that is the second thing about this movie that is handled better in CAP 2. The cameras find Loki pretty quickly though, following up on the Tesseract showing Hawkeye his “next target” in Stuttgart, Germany, and Steve heads off to try to capture him.
Scott: Best thing about this exposition-heavy series of events is “super-jazzed-to-be-brainwashed” Erik Selvig. The movie dents the Selvig we know and love from THOR pretty bad, but at least it’s amusing to watch.
James: Stellan Skarsgard is an international treasure.
Scott: In a move that is not overly explained but speaks pretty well for itself, Loki attacks a scientist at a Gala (there’s always a Gala!) to use an eye-scanning machine with a lot of sharp edges to get his retina so Hawkeye (who is never called Hawkeye but is called “The Hawk” at least once) can steal a supply of Iridium that Selvig needs to Loki’s portal-opening machine for the Chitauri army.
James: That might actually be the one instance in the movie where something ISN’T over-explained!
Scott: It’s nice! You get that moment of “What’s he doing? Oh, I get it!”
James: It’s also, unsurprisingly, one of the better scenes in the movie. Loki plays the right amount of giddy at the chaos he’s causing, and an Old German Man(tm) stands up to Loki by drawing comparisons to Hitler, but then Captain America shows up and saves him. I’m not a fan of Loki getting Godwin Law-ed, but it’s a good place for Steve to show up and be handsome.
Scott: There’s a certain amount of cliche and schmaltz in this scene, but he movie has already firmly established its level of nuance, so you can’t blame it for being itself.
James: It’s probably one of the BETTER examples of the lack of nuance. In that it’s still an enjoyable scene! Loki gets to be a foil to Captain America, and then Iron Man shows up and, well, the movie starts doing one of my least favourite things.
Scott: FIGHT HEROES FIGHT!
James: I might as well say it: I think it’s stupid when the entire point of a movie or a comic or whatever is, “these heroes hate each other and fight, but realize they’re on the same side so they put aside their differences for the greater good!” Both of these guys know who the other is. They may not really like each other yet, but there’s not really a reason for them to be so snippy and whiny to each other, let alone for another hour and change.
Scott: What gets me is that Tony, who ostensibly knows the difference between right and wrong and whose best friend is in the military, and Steve, who was something of a firebrand himself, have to be flattened out a fair bit for their conflict to even exist. But they get Loki anyway. Then Thor shows up. The thing I like best about this movie besides Mark Ruffalo is Thor’s eyebrows, which are now a more manageable shade of brown.
James: Before we get to one of my favourite things (Thor being adorable), though, we have to get to two of my least favourite lines in the movie: Stark saying “I have a plan: attack,” and Captain America responding to Agent Hill by saying that he only knows of one god, and He doesn’t dress like Thor. I don’t know why Captain America is suddenly bigoted for a single line. At this point, we’ve had a literal entire movie all about how Steve Rogers represents the best of humanity, and how he’s trusting, friendly and accepting of all until proven otherwise. This line makes zero sense. It strikes me as a weird intrusion of Mark Millar’s version of Cap as seen in the Ultimates (an out-of-touch bigot representing 40s conservatism) and not the entire characterization of Steve we’ve seen so far.
Scott: I hadn’t really paid it much thought, but yeah, it’s kind of icky.
So Iron Man and Captain America team up to fight Thor. I don’t hate hero-fights as much as you do, I just kind of see it as an obligatory exercise because the fans want to see what it looks like, but what they don’t want to see (and thankfully we don’t get) is an actual resolution. They just kind of play rock-paper-scissors/shield-hammer-repulsor ray until they realize they probably have a common goal. I will say this: It makes more sense in context, and is more entertaining to watch by miles, than the Tony-Rhodey fight from IM2.
James: Oh, it’s visually interesting, and at least here, it’s a bit narratively explained by having Thor - the one of the three who doesn’t know the other two - jump in to try to get his brother from what he sees as two weirdos interloping. It’s got some awkward lines (like Tony calling Thor “Shakespeare in the Park”), but it at least sets up why they’d fight for a minute before going, “Okay, we good?”
Scott: Oh, and Iron Man’s armour getting supercharged by Thor’s lightning is another one of those Whedon-fanservice-“wouldn’t that be cool” moments that detracts from the movie at regular intervals.
James: It’s slightly undercut by Jarvis saying Tony’s armour is at “400% capacity” when the screen display clearly says it’s 475% [pushes up glasses] but yeah, it’s fun.
Scott: If you wanna play UM, ACTUALLY, we learned in CAPTAIN AMERICA THE FIRST MARVEL’S THE AVENGER that Cap’s shield produces no vibrations but what happens when Thor hits it?
James: I WROTE THAT DOWN TOO. I’m not proud of it, but I did write down those two weird inaccuracies for fun.
Scott: *Frink noise*
Like, I don’t care, but it was in there!
James: I definitely get the interest in having heroes physically fight, and I don’t mind it here; it’s the fact that the next hour of the movie is them being jerks to each other before a lie from someone they don’t trust brings them together that I dislike.
Scott: So, in all that fighting, Loki manages not to get away, and they take him to the Helicarrier where he is put up in the Hulk suite.
James: And if only Bruce - one of the smartest people on Earth - had paid attention to Loki smiling at him and let the others know that hey, this is a trap, let’s get that dude the fuck out of here, the next act would have been unnecessary!
Scott: Womp womp
James: That said, Fury asking Loki if “Real Power wants a magazine or something” is delightful. And, well, Bruce IS the member of the team who immediately realizes Loki is up to something.
Scott: So now that Marvel’s The Avengers have Assembled, they have a lengthy conference about Loki’s plan. And I have to say, I loved the “He’s my brother” “He killed like 80 people!” “He’s adopted” exchange.
James: That’s because it’s great! Like we said before, when this movie wants to have funny quick exchanges, it’s really good!
Scott: Also the chemistry between Stark and Banner. Like I said, Banner makes such a great figure for everyone to interact with because 13 GOING ON 30’s Mark Ruffalo is so affable. “I’m a big fan of your work with particle accelerators and also how you turn into a giant green rage-monster.” Good-Whedon.
James: “No hard feelings, Point Break, you’ve got a mean swing” Good-Whedon.
Scott: “I understood that reference!” Okay-Whedon.
James: I would have liked the getting-the-reference one more if it wasn’t based on the idea that Cap isn’t that interested in the modern world (something introduced in his first scene with Fury), something that doesn’t really make sense for the character, and which is flipped completely in CAP 2.
Banner’s line about Loki being as crazy as a sack of cats! Good-Whedon!
Scott: “That man is playing Galaga!” RDJ ad-lib for sure.
“How does Fury see this screen?” “He turns his head.” “Hm, inefficient.” Good!
James: Ugh, no way, that “He turns” exchange is garbage, I hate it, Whedon should have to do 20h of community service for that stinker. And I want to know when he’s doing that community service so I can drive by him picking up garbage on the side of the road and throw a half-full milkshake at him. Maybe it’s because I’m blind in one eye and I know the answer is “You use your other eye,” which seems like something the SMARTEST PERSON IN THE WORLD should be able to figure out.
Scott: Anyway, there is SOME good dialogue in there, but that’s just about it for the rest of the movie, because a lot of the remainder of their dialogue boils down to “You’re a wild card! You play by your own rules! We can never get along! We’re totally not a team!” And when I say remainder, I don’t mean for that scene - it feels like they’re yelling that at each other for the next 40 minutes or so.
James: They basically yell at each other until a lie brings them together, which is frustrating. Especially because it basically says that Loki was right when he called them misfits and lost souls. And I honestly don’t know why Marvel would want the villain of the movie, the guy whose entire deal is that he lies, to be correct.
This scene and the next few also have TWO instances of different characters saying someone “means” to do something, at which point I started bleeding from my ears.
Scott: Stark hacks into SHIELD’s computers to find out what they’re really doing, and Cap says “Hey let’s follow orders” which is weirdly out of character for the Cap we know, and then thankfully going off on his own anyway and brekaing into thge secret plot development room where he finds some HYDRA stuff and thinks “Hey, SHIELD is using the Tesseract to build weapons!” Which is another of those ideas, or part of one you already mentioned, that is addressed better in WINTER SOLDIER. Minus the Tesseract.
Meanwhile, Black Widow interrogates Loki in her other big scene.
James: I’m gonna say something unpopular: as much as Joss Whedon “gets” Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, he just does not really get Steve Rogers, I think in part because of Rogers’ earnestness. Either that or he just flat-out didn’t watch CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER. Cap’s not really that quippy, and Whedon LOVES quips and irony.
Scott: Which is odd, because he CAN quip in TFA - remember “I’ve punched out Hitler 200 times!”
James: The other earnest character in the movie is Phil Coulson and that’s the actual single worst character plot in the movie.
Scott: He gets Tony, but maybe loves him too much, and he creates a version of Banner that is better than any Banner I’ve seen before, maybe because Whedon felt he had leeway to rebuild him from the ground up. But mostly because of Ruffalo
James: That’s the good part about basically ignoring INCREDIBLE HULK completely: Whedon makes a Banner who’s funny, smart and very self-aware.
Scott: At the same time, he manages not to make fun of Cap. He wants to do right by him, with the “You wouldn’t lay down on the wire” dialogue, but he does not GET him the way the screenwriters of TFA did. He becomes very unsubtle and broad in his execution, moreso than Tony and Thor, who also get it pretty bad. And of course Tony has an answer for all of Cap’s assessments of him.
James: I think it kinda works with Thor, because he’s inherently such a melodramatic character front to speaking like a character in a musical. But with Tony, it’s a problem that he doesn’t respect Cap, or give Cap a reason to respect him. And honestly, I think Whedon plays Steve as way too square. He wants him to be a stick-in-the-mud guy who only respects good little soldiers, and, well, check last week’s several thousand words about CAPTAIN AMERICA for why that assessment is inconsistent at best.
The bad part of ignoring INCREDIBLE HULK, as is brought up after Black Widow tricks Loki into revealing that his play is to unleash the Hulk on the Helicarrier by pretending to be emotional and weak, is that the movie can’t decide whether or not Bruce is in control of his transformations or not, and really doesn’t care that INCREDIBLE HULK’s final shot seemed to give a pretty definitive answer. The final act of INCREDIBLE HULK was all about how the Hulk is a good guy and not a mindless force of nature like he is in his first action scene here, and the end of IH basically said, flat out, that Banner can control the transformation through yogalates.
Scott: I know that certain internet pundits dislike the “red in the ledger” dialogue, and maybe that exact metaphor is cheesy, but I love that Natasha’s function here is to out-talk Loki, and she does it pretty believably.
James: I think it’s a great motivation that gets repeated word for word a bit much. And yeah, Loki is pretty consistently a dude who wants to trick people into being irrational, so it makes sense that Natasha could play that, since her training as a spy basically makes her a natural foil for him.
Scott: That said, it’s weird that Loki’s big plan is “Get captured, something something, provoke a Hulk attack, chaos, escape.” Well, not his big plan. His BIG plan is faceless alien hoverbikers.
James: It makes sense if you assume that he was doing it just to hopefully kill the Avengers before he brought in the Chitauri, but it’s definitely a little circuitous. And if you assume that him being freed (through chaos) is a prerequisite of getting himself caught as a distraction so that Hawkeye can steal the iridium. But really, does he actually need to be on the ship for the proto-Avengers to self implode? They did that just by being in the same room as each other for five minutes.
Plus, the proto-Avengers’ objection to Nick Fury using the Tesseract for weapons (because Thor) as a nuclear deterrent is a little weird when you consider that they basically use a nuke an hour later. And the movie never really resolves the fact that Nick Fury is kind of the villain of the movie. It’s him using the Tesseract for weapons that causes the entire plot to happen, and then he lies to the heroes to get them to do what he wants. The scenes on the helicarrier, while they lead to a BOSS sequence where Thor fights Hulk and where Cap and Iron Man team up to save the ship, also expose a lot of the movie’s big narrative problems.
Scott: This is where the movie - which had been sputtering for a while - slams hard into autopilot.
James: You can tell the moment it happens, too - it’s where it pulls a Whedon and kills Coulson, just to use him as a motivating tragedy for the team to come together. Coulson’s final line, “This was never going to work unless they had something to” rally around is dumb as hell. Why does it take that? Aren’t these good guys who have had 1-2 movies each setting up that they’re good guys who do the right thing no matter what?
Scott: “This was never going to work if they didn’t have something… to…” Avenge, of course. Because they’re the Avengers. Because wink.
James: And it’s used by Fury in his Motivating Tragedy Speech(tm) that is actually pretty okay until Maria Hill goes, “Yeah, but that was a lie, right?” This is a movie where the good guys only act like good guys instead of spoiled babies because another good guy lies to them, based on the death of someone none of them have any reason to be really gutted by.
Scott: Omit that line and the game is changed. Fury says he never believed in weaponizing the Tesseract, but the secret board of shady figures never believed in his Avengers, so compromise. And how convenient that Fury literally has a bunch of faceless shadows calling the shots so they can be blamed for ATTEMPTING TO NUKE MANHATTAN LATER.
James: That would, honestly, play a lot more kosher with how Fury acts in WINTER SOLDIER.
But back to Phil’s death, the movie works REALLY hard to make him the audience stand-in character, and even gives one quick line where Tony is finally nice to him despite actively hating him for literal years, but that’s the problem: it tries to convince US that Phil is important, but not the characters. And convincing them would, by default, kind of convince us. It’s just sloppy autopilot screenwriting. But here we are: the team is separated but finally coming together, the villain is about to make his final move and New York will imminently be in danger.
Scott: Yeah. Phil winning the audience over isn’t the same as winning the characters over. “He died in the line of duty, you should feel bad.”
James: Before the big action climax though, we have to get a really stupid but kind of charming Bruce Banner scene, where he’s told by a security guard in the abandoned factory he wakes up in after having crashed into, that he was awake when he fell and was clearly aiming to avoid hurting anyone.
Scott: There is a literal moment where one character Loki boasts that this is the end of the second act where the heroes are all scattered and the chips are down and the Iceland team is one win away from sending the Mighty Ducks home.
James: Do it for Hans!
Scott: Look, I fucking love REPO MAN’s Harry Dean Stanton in this.
James: Oh, Stanton is great, he should have gotten two cheques.
Scott: “Are you an alien?” “No.” “Then you got a condition.”
James: A+++
Though I don’t know how he knew that the Hulk would shrink into a regular person and be able to wear regular pants eventually, but oh well, it’s PRETTY IN PINK’s Harry Dean Stanton being delightful, whatevs. I mean, listen: he’s basically tasked with summarizing the entirety of INCREDIBLE HULK in like three lines without being able to acknowledge that the other movie actually existed. Stanton did good with that insane responsibility.
That said, the fact that the Hulk isn’t mindless and, in fact, actively good, is something that was the actual point of the entire previous Hulk movie. I only harp on it because the movie got a lot of credit for “bringing together” the established elements of the MCU even though it actively botched 1/4 of that.
Scott: Tony realizes that Loki wants to use Stark Tower as his base of operations because “he wants an audience” which is code for “we wanted to set the climax of this movie in Manhattan.”
James: Any perfunctoriness of Tony’s realization, to me, is made up for by the delightful way he realizes it and then mutters, “Son of a bitch!” Like we’ve often said, when the movie wants to be charming, it’s good at it!
Scott: Then comes my actual least favourite scene in the movie: Tony’s chitchat with Loki because he needs some stuff to say that can make it into the trailer and hey what if Loki tried to use his magic stick on Tony but he couldn’t because of the arc reactor ha ha ha right guys because it’s metal or whatever
James: Yeah, it’s not really a great scene. It’s mostly an excuse for the baller image of Stark Tower basically de-suiting Tony for him (something we already saw at the Expo in IRON MAN 2) and a few cool lines like “We have a Hulk.” But it tries to put slightly too much on Downey and Hiddleston’s charm here, I think.
Scott: There’s just no content to go with the performances. That said, the MarkVII mid-air suit up is a great sequence.
James: Yeah, it’s two charming guys being charming for a few minutes. It feels like the movie is basically stalling for time until it can reveal the Mark VII. It also has the dumbest line in the whole entire movie, where Tony says that if they can’t save the Earth, then they’ll damn well avenge it.
I mean, okay. Avengers is a shitty name for a team because it’s way too aggressive and basically implies they’re reactive and have already half-failed. It’s fundamentally Not Very Good. But the movie REALLY should not have steered into that.
Scott: Like, what does that even MEAN, man! If you can’t save it, you’ll be dead!
James: I… guess… it’s Tony saying, “Hey, we might fail at being heroes, but if you destroy everything, we’ll just kill you” And that’s just not very superheroic.
Scott: Oh well, it’s still a better name for a team than The Ultimates. Unless of course they all had face paint and arm-bangles.
James: I think the Ultimates kind of works in the stupid Millar-y corner of that universe where it makes sense, just like I think Avengers worked in the 60s and they never had to explain it again so nobody ever really had to think about it until it needed to be justified in a billion dollar movie.
Scott: If we hadn’t already heard “Avengers [Initiative]” several times in several movies, it would feel like another codename bingo moment.
James: It’s the free space on the board.
Scott: So, Loki opens his hole in the sky and out pour the Putty Patrol, er, I mean Chitauri and AHHH SO MUCH DEATH AND DESTRUCTION AND FIRE IN THE STREETS
James: Is… this where we want to get into this? Because I’ve been saving it up for a while.
Scott: Readers: This gets posted on a a few weeks of delay, but we are discussing this on the actual day of the 2nd Ave. Explosion in the real-life New York City. I mean, hopefully you remember, it isn’t THAT long ago.
James: And Japanese restaurant workers basically did more to save New Yorkers than the Avengers do in this movie.
Scott: All right, you take the lead on this, and I’ll jump in.
James: THE AVENGERS often gets favourably compared to the final act of MAN OF STEEL, namely the part where Superman and Zod smash through the city with little regard for civilians, and except for the fact that AVENGERS is fun and quippy in other places, I 100% do not get that comparison. This is a movie where we get countless shots of buildings getting destroyed, people running in fear and presumably getting crushed, and an invading army running roughshod over civilians while the heroes take out, what, 20 bad guys? AVENGERS is better at balancing the destruction with a sense of fun, but the last 40 minutes of the movie are basically disaster porn. There is zero way this movie happens and like a million people don’t die, just by what’s on-screen. And the thing is, that’s ENTIRELY voluntary. The movie has set up the stakes where this invading army is basically killing everyone, but it didn’t HAVE to. Heck, pick up an Avengers event crossover comic book and see how few civilians die. Heck, look at CAPTAIN AMERICA 2 and see what great lengths the movie goes to to show people NOT denying, and setting up a situation where as little killing has to happen as possible, especially by the titular hero.
Scott: It’s directed a lot more light and watchable than I found MAN OF STEEL, but that doesn’t keep it from being an unsettling way to end an ostensibly feel-good movie. I understand the impulse to ratchet up the stakes and spectacle for your big team movie, but there is SIX PEOPLE fighting about SIX HUNDRED alien invaders, and two of our people are armed with a handgun and a bow and arrow. This seems wildly inappropriate.
James: Whereas in AVENGERS, the final 40 minutes are just he heroes killing people nonstop while a million civilians die.
Scott: I got to a certain point in life - and yeah, it happened after AVENGERS came out - where every time I see a movie end like this, I think “There was a time when we genuinely didn’t know if we’d ever see a building blow up in a movie again.” IS that a good thing, or a bad thing? I dunno, but I don’t think this is the big triumphant battle the movie should have ended with.
[2015-03-26, 11:44:51 PM] Scott: *sorry change that to SIX PEOPLE fighting SIX
James: Especially not when what happens is that the Morally Ambiguous Shadow Council Who Will Be Totally Good Guys In Captain America 2 basically say, “Well, this battle isn’t winnable, send in the nuke,” and they aren’t completely wrong. The nuke they fire literally saves the entire day. And ESPECIALLY when the “side of good” in the argument with the Council is Nick Fury, who we last saw lying for an hour and a half. The entire final third of the movie is basically morally unconscionable in a different way than the middle third was.
Scott: What I said at the beginning was that it was mindless entertainment. And I stand by that. This is not a great film, and if you can shut off the part of you that is disturbed by a) the actual action onscreen and b) the dubious morals of the heroes and people who gathered them, then you are treated to some pretty entertaining action stunts, battle scenes, and snarky dialogue. I wish those stunts, battles and quips had been conceived with a better context though.
James: Yeah! The final big action scene LOOKS cool, especially all the stuff the Hulk does after riding in on a moped and saying, “Oh hey, I’m always angry and control the transformations basically at will, do not ask how this risks completely invalidating the second act of the movie.” I mean, the Battle for New York looks really fantastic, and as far as action scenes go, it’s one of the more epic ones to date. The Hulk literally punches out a giant mecha space snake and then jumps through the air knocking shit around. Thor uses the Empire State Building as a lightning rod, something that is Objectively Cool. Cap and Widow do some cool team-up acrobatics stuff! Hawkeye makes some impressive shots! It all LOOKS cool when you take the context away. It’s the biggest visual spectacle of the franchise to date!
Scott: Everyone gets their hero moment, Hawkeye gets that real winner when he shoots the exploding arrow at Loki (bud, how did you not see that coming? He was your stooge twenty minutes ago!) and they pay lip service to the idea of evacuating the city or whatever, then IMMEDIATELY show a space whale dragon turtle (one of the coolest things in the MCU) flying DIRECTLY AT a crowded office building in a scene that actually looks like 9/11 footage.
James: RIGHT?! I am honestly shocked the MPAA didn’t say, “Holy shit, back the fuck up and take another shot at this one, homies.” James: In conversations, I’ve basically equated the end of the movie to 9/11. Except for the part that’s basically Hiroshima. Basically, what happens is that the World Security Council of Morally Ambiguous People Who Will Be Straight Up Good Guys In Two Weeks go, “Well, there’s no way to stop this unbeatable army, let’s nuke the whole thing.” The Avengers manage, with the help of Erik Selvig taking a comedy bump to the head and being himself again, to close the portal, but there’s still an unstoppable army and a nuke on the way. So Tony, to presumably show how much he’s grown since Cap said an hour ago that Tony wouldn’t be the guy to jump on the grenade, basically grabs the nuke and rides it through the portal and commits genocide on presumably an entire civilization. Hiroshima, the most debated and morally grey single military action ever taken by mankind, is treated, without irony or reflection, as an unequivocally good thing. Take that, Kubrick!
Scott: All through this movie, we know nothing about the Chitauri. We don’t know if they’re an alien race or robots or clones or bugs. We don’t know why they’re fighting for Loki. We don’t even really get a good look at them because they’re pretty much constantly in motion, zipping around on a sky-scooter or getting murderkilled. And I think that’s to make us okay with them getting all blown up. They’re just putties, man. A faceless hostile force you’re not supposed to care about when they get exterminated.
James: One of them takes off its mask after the first mecha space snake is destroyed and it looks, very clearly, like an alien and not a robot! But then… they all deactivate after Tony commits genocide on their home? I dunno. I like that what you just described is basically “war propaganda.”
Scott: Sock old Loki on the jaw! Buy war bonds! Nuke Chitauria!
James: It’s kind of crazy that CAPTAIN AMERICA, where the villains were basically the most comically evil ones imaginable (the Nazis so evil the Nazis don’t like them!), still made the case that you should try to avoid killing people if you can. AVENGERS treats its villains with less consideration or forethought than actual Nazis, the world’s safest movie villains. The whole thing leaves a sour taste in my mouth, and has since the second time I saw the movie. The first time, in the theatre with my friends as part of a fun night out? There were some parts I wasn’t crazy about. But as soon as I saw it again with any kind of critical eye, I started to get uncomfortable.
Scott: There’s plenty of urban destruction in INCREDIBLE HULK, and the problematic-at-best terrorist-zapping in the first IRON MAN but this entire movie, as we’ve extensively detailed, is pretty broken. They had a vision for it that was way out of line with the preceeding bunch of movies, and they executed THAT vision pretty well, but the nature of it leads a LOT to be desired. Which is weird, because as noted earlier, just a few movies later CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER handled a lot of the same angles pretty dextrously! Probably because it doesn’t have faceless space goons wrecking everything!
James: Yeah, like I said earlier, CAP 2 does four things better:
-Maria Hill’s character (in that she has one)
-The moral ambiguity of modern warfare
-The hero’s rejection of moral relativism
-FRIENDSHIP
Also, when he wakes up after saving the day, Tony says that he hoped nobody kissed him because hahaha mouth-to-mouth resuscitation is totally gay if a man does it to a man, right?
Scott: Ugh, I had forgotten about the “Nobody kissed me” line, I thought it was only the Shawarma one.
James: Since you mentioned shawarma, we might as well wrap up the movie’s plot: Tony’s okay, a city is in ruins as a populace debates whether the Avengers were a net force for good or for worry, Loki is captured, the team bros out and goes their separate ways (TONY AND BRUCE, SCIENCE BROS!) and then we cut to a post-battle flashback to the heroes getting shwarma amidst rubble, something that was funny at the time and really rubs me the wrong way now. We can agree that it doesn’t look good that the heroes of the movie impose themselves on civilians for a snack instead of helping with the rebuilding, right? The Avengers do literally zero clean-up.
Scott: I mean, if Hulk Ruffalo can literally change back and forth at will it would be nice if he helped right a bunch of those cars that got overturned at the very least.
James: A grumpy politician on the TV says, “These so-called heroes have to be held responsible for the devastation done to the city. This is their fight… where are they now?” AND HE’S COMPLETELY RIGHT.
Scott: I noticed that too!
James: Like, at the same time as he’s saying that, the heroes are all going their separate ways, none of which include helping the city. There’s that civilian on TV repudiating the idea that “somehow this is all their fault” because “Captain America saved [her],” but we actually know that this is all Nick Fury’s fault. Like, that’s something the movie says and accepts an hour earlier.
Scott: Meanwhile, Fury tells the Secret Shadowy Board of No Oversight that I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of those crazy Marvel’s The Avengers.
James: “DISASTER AVERTED,” reads chyron on cable news, in front of a picture of a city in ruins. Doggs I don’t think you understand what a disaster is.
Scott: “NEW YORK IN RUINS … WORLD NOT ENSLAVED BY DERANGED DEMIGOD THOUGH”
James: It turns out that Fury’s entire purpose was basically to show the entire world (worldS) footage of the Avengers murdering people and a city in ruins to show how much devastation can be wreaked on anyone who Messes With Texas. So the one of the last lines of the movie is about how the heroes are scary! We are supposed to be scared of the heroes! GOOD JOB EVERYONE. The heroes are basically a metaphor for the Cold War. Yeesh.
Scott: But I thought they said that a hero will save us. I’m not gonna stand here and wait.
James: BOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Scott: YOUR BOOS SUSTAIN ME!
James: So the movie is over after establishing zero moral authority and then Thanos is there, revealing himself to be the super big bad that Loki was working for. See you in Phase 3, homie! Or is that Phase 4?
Scott: Who even knows anymore! Can’t wait to see how many buildings he destroys!
James: I will say I like the line about Thanos courting death because Thanos literally wants to fuck Death. He wants to have sexual intercourse with it on a literal level.
Scott: It’s accompanied by a huge grinning wink that works because it’s somehow awesome and adorable.
James: Final thoughts?
James: I’ll start it off with a provocative statement: if Zack Snyder’s name was on this movie, nerds would have hated it, because it has the same morality. I’m being a little hyperbolic, but not by much.
Scott: With the possible exception of INCREDIBLE HULK, anyone who thinks MARVEL’S THE AVENGERS is as good as any of the MCU’s solo films is definitely not getting the same things out of these movies as I am/we are. It’s not without its charm, but nothing the other films didn’t have more of. It has a visceral, dumb appeal, all the action is great and you are clearly not meant to think too hard about any of it. Unfortunately, it’s hard to get multi-thousand-word articles without thinking pretty dang hard about these things. I think we’re pretty justifiably tough on it because it has a towering reputation in geekdom. Really, it indulges in some of the less enjoyable facets of superhero comics while not providing as many of the pure pleasures. And that may just be the way it has to be for AVENGERS movies.
[James: Yeah, it would have been a cop-out to just go, “It’s dumb fun, don’t think about it!” when that’s the point of all this. Even though I do feel a little bad at saying, “Oh hey, this thing you all love? It’s Problematic At Best.” Midway through my third rant I was wondering if I was thinking about it TOO MUCH.
It gets some of the small things right: namely Black Widow, Thor and Bruce Banner, if not the Hulk
Scott: People shouldn’t feel bad for enjoying stuff like this. Like I said, it’s clear what Whedon’s mandate was, and he mostly delivered that. It just turned out to be problematic as hell, where so many of the MCU movies managed not to be.
James: I don’t think people should feel bad for enjoying it, but I do wish that people would consider what makes them support something like this, which has a lot of really immoral stuff in it, but have such a firm stance against things like MAN OF STEEL. To me, the big difference between the two is the humour; when AVENGERS wants to take little small moments to be fun, it’s usually pretty good at it. But that doesn’t absolve it of almost the entire second and third acts, which accidentally (I hope) reinforce some of the most odious acts and politics of the last century.
It ends up being a movie where jerks only do the right thing after being tricked into doing it, and then when they do it they commit a war crime in the process.
Scott: Reminds me of a bit early in Mark Millar’s ULTIMATES run, where the newly-formed team actually has nobody to fight (I suppose they just formed because they knew they had to star in a comic) so Banner takes the Hulk serum to give them someone to fight. And I was about 14 or 15 when that happened and I realized “Hey, this is dumb.” I think, ultimately, (sorry) I don’t like the idea that the Avengers were SHIELD’s idea. I like the notion that these superheroes become aware of each other and decide to form a team because there is literally a threat one of them can’t handle alone. But they had seeded the SHIELD thing from day one and pulled it off in that clumsy, cynical way.
James: I think there was a way to do it where SHIELD basically facilitated all these heroes meeting when there was a giant threat, but didn’t push them into it. And really, the big difference between that and the movie we got is if the heroes actually liked each other when they first met.
Scott: And so we conclude this rewatch of the most problematic movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (to date) — one that will probably be rolling around our brains when AGE OF ULTRON comes out.
James: Luckily, by then, we’ll have watched THOR 2, CAP 2 and GUARDIANS, so I’ll be feeling pretty good about it.
Scott: Next week: the first movie to beg the question: “Hey, where are the rest of the Avengers?” The oft-maligned IRON MAN 3!
James: I’ll tell you nerds right now: I just don’t have it in me to hate a movie where an adorable urchin teaches the hero a lesson and also Adam Pally is there.
Scott: Aww yisss
