The Right Team at the Right Time

Obviously I think a lot of the criticism levelled at the MCU is valid, but I'd be a liar if I said I didn't think 2012's The Avengers is a great movie. Writer/director Joss Whedon so perfectly captured the tone and characters of Marvel comics and delivered them in such a perfectly paced ballet of dynamic action and dialogue it's little wonder the franchise can still run on fumes now.

I don't tend to re-watch a lot of 21st century blockbusters so when I see a new MCU movie or series I probably don't appreciate the experience a lot of people have, watching Secret Invasion, for example, with The Avengers fresh in their minds. But surely the diminishing audience for the MCU shows this juxtaposition doesn't always benefit the newest entries.

The Avengers is a film unburdened by many of the infamous issues facing big budget genre fare to-day. No writers more intent on pushing a message than on crafting a good story. No bottom of the barrel, inexperienced writers because Disney incredibly still thinks it can make profits off brand recognition alone. No sense of the intrusive tampering that gives us tonally bizarre moments like the "Boner" joke on WandaVision or the Wasp's nonsensical insertion into scenes in Quantumania. Whedon reportedly cut ties after too much interference on Age of Ultron and tiffs between the studio and Edgar Wright and others are well known. The Avengers, the culmination of that momentum that began to build with Iron-Man, was maybe the last time the studios thought they might as well let people with proven talent drive a franchise.

Whedon knows these characters and he doesn't just pop in character traits like infoboxes that pop up over the action. He knows who they are and how they would interact with each other and the environment. Of course, Thor, as a god, is not going to ask permission to extradite his brother to Asgard. Tony Stark is too arrogant to spend much time reasoning with him--though he's smart enough to spend a little, even raising his visor before two fight. Steve Rogers, who told Stanley Tucci in the previous movie that he didn't want to kill anybody, not even Nazis, is of course the guy who can mediate and make peace.

Black Widow got the short in the of the stick in most of the MCU movies. She seemed like a different person in every movie. Here, Whedon seems to be channelling Buffy, making Natasha someone whose everygirl reactions, like her shrug of acknowledgement when Tony points out to Steve he's still a pretty impressive guy when he's not wearing the metal suit, contrast and augment her hypercompetence. When she shows her hand with the interrogators in her first scene, she shows the talent and skill of someone who's spent years studying psychology and combat, and delivers casual lines with the provocative insight of a precocious teenager. Definitely Buffy, but with more psychology. It occurs to me now Whedon's Dollhouse series may have been originally conceived as a Black Widow movie.

Whedon knows we're waiting on tenterhooks for Banner to turn into the Hulk, and he teases us in almost every scene. Tony prods him, half-jokingly, trying to see if he'll change, a moment that also conveniently puts Tony in our point of view. At the same time we're being teased, it's also valuable for making us focus on Banner as a character. Is he angry? How's he holding it in? Is he holding it in?

Now with Disney's financial woes, do you suppose they're nearing the breaking point of hiring real talent and giving them free rein? We could quote from a DC movie here--Why do we fall? So we can rise. The marvel here is that the people in charge of these massive companies can be so stupid.

The Avengers is available on Disney+.

Infinite Avengers in Infinite Combinations

I went to the Marvel trough and fed on the nondescript paste called Avengers: Infinity War yesterday. It wasn't really bad or really good, but felt like an overproduced, late career album from a wealthy rock star. With so many hands in the mix also collectively constrained to strands of continuity, the mandated beats of a modern blockbuster, and the general lifelessness of so much cgi, there's little chance for distinguishable flavour to rise from the soup. But the filmmakers did manage to find a unifying theme.

Spoilers after the screenshot

This is a movie about sacrifice. Duh. I suppose there might be two or three people who missed that after it was hammered home again and again and again. Maybe Drax (Dave Bautista) missed it. Not since "With great power comes great responsibility" has a superhero movie so heavily slathered its theme over the top of everything else. One character after another arrives at the point where they must choose between killing another character or allowing disaster to occur.

Let's see if I can remember them all.

Quill (Chris Pratt) has to kill Gamora (Zoe Saldana)--he tries but Thanos (Josh Brolin) prevents it.

Scarlet Witch (Elisabeth Olsen) has to kill Vision (Paul Bettany)--she finally tries but Thanos prevents it.

Loki (Tom Hiddleston) failed to let Thanos kill Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and gave up the Tesseract instead.

Gamora failed to sacrifice Nebula (Karen Gillan), giving up the location to the Soul Stone instead.

Thanos successfully sacrificed Gamora.

Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) gave up the Time Stone instead of allowing Tony (Robert Downey Jr.) to die.

This one seems the fishiest, though I don't for a moment believe Loki died trying to stab Thanos with a little dagger. If he really is dead it was the most underwhelming end for any Marvel cinematic character to date.

But Strange giving up the Time Stone for Tony Stark seems really weird. They'd just met--plus there was the earlier scene that abruptly ended when Strange said there was one way out of--I think it was--fourteen thousand they could win. And just before Strange was wiped from existence he said something about how "this was the only way."

I do like that the filmmakers seem to have turned the aspect people complain about most into part of the main idea--the movie's overcrowded and suffers from it; Thanos sees a universe that's overcrowded and suffering for it. So his solution is a seemingly random wiping out of 50% of the population of the universe. Thanos becomes the central figure of the film because of how he factors into everyone else's stories and it's nice that he actually seems conflicted about what he's doing. Josh Brolin delivers a good performance through the veil of cgi, too. So I suppose if one flavour does distinguish itself in this movie it's grape.

The point of all the sacrifices seems to be to ponder the idea over and over--the good of the many outweighs the good of the few but can you put that knowledge in practice if it means killing someone you love?

It's a worthy subject to ponder but diluted a bit in how repetitive it is, and even more by the really really lame wisecracks. Having all these people together did also highlight some of the flaws in the too consistent Marvel formula--suddenly instead of one dopey funny guy and his long suffering, beautiful, and dull girlfriend, we have a hundred dopey funny guys and their long suffering, beautiful, dull girlfriends. There's dopey Quill who won't grow up for Gamora, there's Vision who stumbles over his words while trying to talk to Scarlet Witch, and there was dopey Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) who can't get his Hulk up and his almost girlfriend Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) who, when a foe is vanquished, quips, "That's rough." To be fair, Black Widow is usually more interesting but, then, most of these characters are. I guess this movie helps you appreciate the circus Joss Whedon ran in the first Avengers.

So the movie ends with a bunch of people dying we know won't remain dead. Unless Spider-Man Homecoming 2 is going to be about Miles Morales. Something that obviously was meant to be a gut punch feels like a waste of time. But the performances were entertaining and some of the comedy from the Guardians of the Galaxy folks was genuinely effective.