BEFORE: Yes, I gave myself the day off yesterday - we drove upstate on Wednesday, after our trip got delayed by a neighborhood stray cat who showed up on our porch, pregnant, just as we were packing up the car. I'd been meaning to catch her and take her to the vet to get spayed, to help control the number of strays on our block, but I hadn't seen her in a while. When I brought out the cat carrier, she jumped right in, so I figured it was fate, or else she understood more about the process than I realized. Anyway, after that we drove up to see some of my wife's friends who are staying in an RV park for the summer. We haven't had a road trip in a while - though I was still concerned my number would come up in the jury pool.
After a burger cook-out and a tour of the Culinary Institute of America, I learned that I was released from the jury duty obligation, so I could finally relax, go out to a brewpub, and then catch a movie on Day 3. I did go through the trouble of reconfiguring my chain to accommodate the trip, plus I did the prep-work last month of seeing the other three Marvel movies that led into this one. With 30 years of comic book collecting under my belt, a film like this is pure catnip to me - this is the payoff.
Chris Evans carries over from "The Losers" -
THE PLOT: Nick Fury brings together a team of super-humans to form The Avengers to help save the Earth from Loki and his army.
AFTER: What a relief, this movie was as awesome as I hoped it would be, and as awesome as other people have said it was. Now my friends can stop dancing around the plot and avoiding spoilers and we can have conversations about it. It's not exactly perfect (what is?) but it's darn, darn close.
For starters, it's a bit long, by about 10 minutes or so. I bet if someone really tried they could trim 10 minutes off the running time and not sacrifice anything. However, the film does cover a lot of ground, and they did give each and every character a lot to do. It takes an hour just to get all the heroes assembled, and when they finally get on the same page, there is some bickering - I'd say they could have cut this, but I do understand why it's there. When you get these different alpha personalities together - the cocky billionaire, the outdated patriot, the arrogant god of thunder - they won't mesh unless a disaster forces them to.
Of course, the standard comic-book staple is to have two heroes fight when they meet for the first time. It's one of those comedy-of-errors things, and I admit that getting two characters in the same room and having them shake hands and exchange business cards wouldn't be nearly as exciting. Here's where this film really delivers - answering those "Who would win in a fight?" fanboy questions. So we get Iron Man vs. Thor, Hulk vs. Thor, Black Widow vs. Hawkeye - all great matchups. These are the moments that cause nerdgasms. I'm all for seeing the Avengers sit around in a mansion and play poker, but they went a different way with this, and I respect that.
My history with Avengers comics goes back 30 years - to an event in 1983 called Secret Wars. I'd been reading Fantastic Four and starting to pick-up on the X-Men, when they did a crossover limited series in which all of the major Marvel heroes and villains were whisked away across the universe for a bizarre cosmic competition of sorts. They came back an issue later with different costumes and different team line-ups, and you had to read this other series over the next 12 months to find out what happened. This limited series was like a gateway drug for me, and I got hooked.
The Avengers at the time had a line-up of some heavy hitters like Thor and Captain America, but also some second stringers like Wasp, She-Hulk, the substitute Captain Marvel, and the substitute Iron Man (James Rhodes). Hawkeye was there too, I think he came over for one of those poker games, and got caught up in the madness. While the main team was on the other side of the universe, they called in the reserves - the main team came back, and there were just too many Avengers. So they opened a franchise in California, and that's when I really became a fan of Hawkeye, as the leader of the West Coast Avengers.
Hawkeye may be my favorite Avenger, since in a world of gods, mutants and super-soldiers, he's just a guy with a bow and arrows. Sure, he's got trick arrowheads, but for the most part he's got a human skill that he just practiced and practiced at, a regular guy who got so good at something simple that it put him on a team with Iron Man and Thor. I guess you can say Black Widow's the same way with espionage, but archery seems like a more tangible skill. The film gets Hawkeye right, and also starts him out as sort of a villain, which is also in line with his origin in the comic books. The character has been around since the mid-1960s, but I don't think the writers really knew what to do with him until the mid-1980s.
The film also got Hulk right, on the third try in recent years. Both of the Hulk films fell into a simple trap, since they assumed that the bestial Hulk needed to be treated as a villain, or at least an anti-hero. This made the character harder for the audience to accept. Hulk's no more of a villain than an animal, or a savage Wolverine, but when he's shown fighting the U.S. Army, it's hard to see him any other way. In 30 years I've seen a lot of different takes on the Hulk - gray Hulk, green Hulk, dumb Hulk, smart Hulk, Vegas gangster Hulk, future warlord Hulk, etc. I've seen Bruce Banner separated from Hulk at least twice, turning his story into more of a Frankenstein tale than a Jekyll-and-Hyde one. But here the Hulk is (somewhat) controllable, the two halves work together (more or less) to make a coherent whole, plus he's told to smash the bad guys with abandon, so we can finally cheer him on as he lets loose.
The second half of the film is action, action, action. As it should be - you get these heavy-hitters together, I expect nothing less. My one complaint, without giving anything away (since it's mentioned in the IMDB plotline) concerns Loki teaming up with aliens. This isn't just apples and oranges, it's more like apples and oil filters. The worlds of Asgard are so rich, and full of villains - what's wrong with attacking Earth with frost giants, the Midgard Serpent, the legions of Hel or the dark elves of Svartalfheim? A war between Earth and one of the other 9 worlds, like Jotunheim or Niffleheim, would have been a more logical progression from the "Thor" film, and would have united the Avengers just as well. They can do aliens in the next film -
Also starring Robert Downey, Jr. (last seen in "Iron Man 2"), Gwyneth Paltrow (ditto), Samuel L. Jackson (last seen in "Captain America: The First Avenger"), Mark Ruffalo (last seen in "Where the Wild Things Are"), Scarlett Johansson (also last seen in "Iron Man 2"), Chris Hemsworth (last seen in "Thor"), Jeremy Renner ("Thor"), Tom Hiddleston ("Thor"), Stellan Skarsgard ("Thor"), Clark Gregg ("Thor"), Cobie Smulders (last seen in "The Slammin' Salmon"), the voice of Paul Bettany ("Iron Man 2"), with cameos from Powers Boothe (last seen in "Nixon"), Jenny Agutter, Harry Dean Stanton and Stan Lee.
RATING: 9 out of 10 trading cards
No comments:
Post a Comment