Every week, a group of friends and I are rewatching a Marvel movie in preparation for the Avengers: Endgame. Might as well talk about them on the way, right?
2012’s “The Avengers” is almost definitely the most ambitious movie made up to that point. It’s incredible that Marvel was able to cram so many characters that the audience is invested in into a single movie.
…but it’s not very good.
I’ve never been a fan of Joss Whedon, and it wasn’t until I read the leaked Wonder Woman script in 2017 that I realized why: He’s an asshole. Buffy, Dr. Horrible, The Avengers… none of it ever really did anything for me. His “badass woman” routine seems like little more than an excuse to get women to do wild gymnastics in front of the camera for his own gratification. Just watch all the Black Widow scenes in The Avengers and how many of them have ScarJo’s ass prominently displayed on the screen. It’s embarrassing.
All that said, The Avengers has a lot of merit. It’s one of the best pieces of pure spectacle I think I’ve ever seen. If you ignore the dialogue, characterization, and basic expectation that people act like… people, it’s a wonderful ride. It’s a gorgeous movie, and if you were lucky enough to see it in theaters you’ll know just how immersive an experience it was.
I should at least try not to be too hard on the movie: Nothing like this had ever been attempted before, so of course there were going to be missteps. At the same time, seeing Marvel mash all their heroes together like me at age… 28… playing with action figures is the part they got right. They (and by they I mostly mean Whedon) just forgot to make their story… work. On any fundamental level.
Like, what happened in The Avengers? Loki shows up, wreaks havoc, and the team stops him. His stated goal was to rule over Earth… how exactly did he think that was going to go? That he was going to yell and shout and everyone would Kneel Before Zod? Fuck outta here.
Also, his plan. This has been criticized by everyone and their grandma, but what the hell was Loki’s deal? He got captured and imprisoned by S.H.I.E.L.D., but why? What did he gain? In his escape, he didn’t steal anything that he needed to build the Tesseract portal- he had done most of that before getting caught. The only thing he accomplished was uniting his enemies against him. So why, Loki? Why? Don’t @ me with any of that “He was under the influence of the Mind Stone” stuff, because it wasn’t in the movie so it doesn’t count. HiddlesTom was perfect though. So goddamn charming.
The dialogue and characters really bother me- especially in the cases of Thor and Loki. In Thor (2011), they talked like fantasy-ish characters, but for all that movie’s faults, they at least sounded like people. In The Avengers, Whedon’s obsession with Shakespeare shines through these two, and it’s really distracting. It’s like, “wait, Thor didn’t sound like that in the movie that came out only a year ago, what gives?”
And this Flanderization impacts more than just Thor and Loki. Whedon picks individual aspects of every Avenger and dials that one trait up to 11. Tony is toxic, let’s make him completely unlikable. Steve is optimistic, let’s make him completely naive. We’re pretending that 2008’s The Incredible Hulk didn’t happen, so let’s just make Bruce weird and shy. And quippy.
QUIPPY
The financial success of The Avengers has made every movie since infected with the disease that is quippy characters. It used to be manageable, like in Star Wars (1977) when our heroes would yell at each other in combat situations. But, true to Whedon style, it becomes the focal point of every goddamn sentence uttered. It’s like Ebola, only worse because I have to stay alive and endure the pain forever. I hate you, endless barrage of quips. Just talk like people!
STOP IT
To that end, a lot of the emotions in the movie don’t ring true. Midtown New York gets obliterated while Black Widow is quipping. And Tony, who spends the next 12 movies suffering from PTSD, is quipping. Do I take this movie seriously or not? Am I supposed to be invested in this conflict where the characters are so blase about people dying that they’re fucking quipping or am I supposed to just laugh whenever a civilian gets crushed by a piece of debris? There’s so much sarcasm and sass that none of the movie gets to have an emotional moment. Even when Loki kills Phil Coulson, there’s a goddamn quip.
To all writers and filmmakers and artists, heed my call: Let people feel things. Let emotions be emotional. Don’t undermine loss with constant bathos.
Okay, enough negatives. I try to put the positive stuff first, but since everyone’s seen The Avengers 200 times, I figure there’s not much persuasion to be had. Like I said up top, The Avengers has a lot going for it. It’s the first Marvel movie to capitalize on musical themes established earlier in the franchise- namely the Tesseract theme from Captain America.
This theme will later evolve to represent all the Infinity Stones, but we haven’t gotten there yet. There are bits of the Captain America theme (that I love, by the way) that made its way into The Avengers, but mostly, we get the new Avengers Theme (which I also love).
It’s a crying shame that there wasn’t a musical supervisor overseeing the MCU from the beginning. A layered series of leitmotifs representing each character would have been fantastic subtext to have across the series. After heavy criticism, Marvel’s music has been improving, so I hope the future of the franchise includes richer scores.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. We’re still in 2012 here!
So what’s my takeaway from The Avengers? I like it. It’s a good shut-your-brain-off action-and-blams movie. Where it lacks in story it makes up for in the childlike whimsy of seeing a bunch of costumed weirdos punching things. I have my issues with it, but it’s an important and necessary movie that will forever shape the future of the genre of action movies- not just the MCU.
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