Spoiler: There isn’t much.
I’m not sure if I’m ready to stick Joss Whedon’s Marvel’s The Avengers at the top of my favorite based-on-a-comic-book movies or even at the #1 superhero movie spot (although it’s damn near). It would have to share space with the first Superman movie (largely on Reeves’ perfect nailing of Supes, and nostalgia), the second Spider-Man movie (great themes, the first perfect superhero movie fight scene, my love for Spidey), the second X-Men movie (better script, better acting, Nightcrawler), the first Iron Man movie (almost flawless) and Batman Begins (first version of Batman that villains might actually fear).
But it was far and away the most fun I’ve had in a movie theater in a very, very long time.
So why pick on it? Well, my love for Whedon is well-known. Many excellent reviews and essays have already been written — check FilmCriticHulk, and theonetrueb!X’s look at sentiment as a theme — and I’m sure PopMatters is already gearing up for a collection. But I’m known for my amateur script-doctoring, so my self-appointed, unrequested task is to analyze this movie and see how it could have been improved, in my own unfair and uninformed way.
MAJOR SPOILERS ahead, probably, for those ten or twenty unfortunate people who were in a coma over the weekend and therefore did not see the movie. Doctors are, even now, feverishly working on ways to pipe The Avengers directly into their brains.
WHAT WAS WRONG WITH THE AVENGERS MOVIE
1. Um.
2. I’m thinking…
3. Oh! Here’s one! How come it took days and days for Tony Stark to plummet from his tower, leaving his VII armor plenty of time to zoom after him and encant him, but the letters that got knocked off the same tower during the Loki-Thor fight hit the ground almost immediately. There’s this experiment with differently-weighted falling things, see…
UPDATE: Answered in the comments. The letters didn’t fall to the ground, but to a nearby rooftop. Fair enough.
4. Yeah, that was movie-time and not really a deal-breaker. Give me a few minutes.
5. The Galaga scene on the helicarrier. Yes, it was funny, but it was a bit too obvious. It’s across his whole frickin’ screen! How could anyone NOT have noticed that? I’d have preferred a more subtle version, with his Galaga-playing almost hidden among a sea of different windows and apps, with only the quiet music to tip off the observant viewer. (Also, the sound effect was wrong for the action, so, you know, that.)
6. Banner in India. The movie has already gotten some flack for the repetition of the If-you-want-slums-you-want-India trope, and frankly it deserved it. How about Sub-Saharan Africa, or Somalia? Even the second Hulk movie ended with Banner in British Columbia.
7. Hawkeye’s bow. I’m sorry, there’s no way a bow with any power at all can be “snapped” from folded to full-length. I kept thinking he was fighting with a Nerf Bow. Which, granted, would have been awesome.
8. Captain America’s helmet. The WWII one was better. He’s a soldier, dress him like one.
9. The attacking army. Which was not so much. I mean, yes, there were hundreds dropping through the big floaty hole, but I expected thousands just pouring out of there. Maybe the LotR movies have spoiled me, but when I hear “army” I think masses, waves of warriors. And they weren’t so much an army as a marauding force. They didn’t seem to have any tactics other than “shoot stuff.”
Which was understandable, since no one was leading them. I thought that was Loki’s role, but even after he got away from Thor he didn’t do anything leadery. Might have been nice to see him try to direct the battle, only to find out there wasn’t actually anything under his control, foreshadowing the stinger scene later on.
10. The resistance. There wasn’t one. I’ll grudgingly accept the lack of military presence — there were tanks, eventually, and one nuke-carrying jet, so maybe the shadowy council nixed the idea? — but no New Yorkers took any swings at invading aliens? Really? Have you been to New York? I’d rather have seen some indication of a civilian resistance that Cap could have guided before going back to the super stuff.
11. The big floaty snake things. I guess these were troop carriers? And we saw, as they went down, they were capable of a great deal of destruction, but before that they were mostly galumphing past for the heros to beat on. They should have had a clear agenda for the heroes to thwart.
12. The waiting army. When Stark flew the nuke through the portal, there should have been thousands, hundreds of thousands, of warriors waiting. The Earth should have been in dire danger of being swarmed. It should have made the audience gasp. Instead there were a dozen or fewer ships, with a big mothership thing in the distance. Ehh.
13. The 3D. I’m not a fan of 3D but I heard good things about this one, so, after seeing it in 2D first, I went back and ponied up the dough for my cheap glasses. It was… OK. I was impressed when it worked, which was a lot of the time. But the final battle looked worse, I thought. The flying warriors looked even more CGIish, and it was more difficult to make out what was happening. I think it’s because in an active scene like that, the movie’s choices as to what’s in focus and what is not is just different enough from what I would naturally be focusing on made it jarring.
14. The death. You know the one I mean. I don’t actually have a problem with this one on its own merits. Coulson’s death makes sense in the situation (a guy against a god), it makes sense thematically, and it serves a purpose to the plot while giving him some good lines to go out on. But as part of Whedon’s oeuvre it’s getting too predictable, and he needs to start paying attention to that before it becomes too much of a joke, like M. Night Shyamalan’s plot twists.
And that’s pretty much it, really. The first hour dragged a bit with the necessary exposition, but I don’t think there was a solid five minutes anywhere in the movie that didn’t have something cool in it. Everyone got not one but several hero moments, with the Hulk getting even more (which makes sense, he’s bigger). I can’t count the number of ways Hulk was handled correctly, from the humor to the motion-capture to the easily-discernable Mark Ruffalo features to the pudginess. He was pudgy! And had chest hair! And a personality! And yet somehow looked more menacing than the weight-lifter cut of the first two movie Hulks. Oh, the humor and the action and the teamwork at the end and Black Widow and Steve Rogers vs Tony Stark and and and…
If it’s not clear, I love this movie to an absurd degree and plan to see it again in the theater a few more times. Doesn’t mean I can’t poke at it…
Great, as always. But didn’t I read something that Whedon wasn’t behind killing you know who? Thought I saw him say something like “You know they’re going to blame me for this, right?”.
Agreed, with two points to argue.
Aside from the “snapping out” bit (which, as an archer, also bothered me) Hawkeye’s bow IS REAL. It’s a Hoyt Buffalo. But the snapping out bit and his form in general kind of bothered me.
The only other thing that I complained about as I walked from the theater was the “Iron Man underwater” bit. If you’re THAT DEEP underwater, I don’t care who you are. You can’t come up THAT FAST and then FLY without serious health complications.
I think my main issue is that I’m living the whole “she who dies with the most skills wins” lifestyle, and when I see folks get things wrong, it BOTHERS me.
I thought everything before the movie title was formulaic (exact opposite of Serenity, where everything before the title was brilliant) and the scientists and technicians acted helpless instead of doing the kind of problem solving attempts that you would expect specialists to be preoccupied with when an experimental setup is melting down. The obvious way to close a portal in a tesseract is to reduce the tesseract to a cube, but this wasn’t even discussed.
I assume, in the kind of fill-holing technically savvy fans have been doing since Star Trek, that his bow has locking servos. His snap activates an inertial switch that causes the servos to extend the bow limbs against the force of the string until they reach full extension, at which point they mechanically lock.
I’m more concerned with how high his brace height is, but I don’t shoot modern bows so maybe that’s something Hoyts do.
Iron Man has a suit of armor. It can fly, shoot repulsors (or lasers or rabid bears or whatever those things are) it can protect him from extremes of heat, cold, pressure and reducing atmosphere, allow him to perform high-G accelerations that should turn his skeletal system into something a team of orthopaedic surgeons could base a career around, and (presumably) allows him to go potty.
Perhaps Hawkeye just got his hands on some of that tech? THough were I he, I’d have said ‘Gimme one of them suits. I’ll make a bow out of a Sequoia or a suspension bridge or something.’
I’m also disappointed Alan Alda did not reprise the role.
Superheroes, as a genre, sometimes lack a certain logic.
I just got back from seeing the movie in 3D and, to point number 3, the letters landed on the roof of a neighbouring building which, for whatever reason, Stark missed.
However, now that I’m watching to nitpick, instead of just watching for fun, I’m incensed by Hawkeye’s poor archery form. It’s not just kind of bad, it’s like he just walked in off the street and picked up a bow bad. Also like he’s going to have grievous sport-related injuries bad.
“6. Banner in India. The movie has already gotten some flack for the repetition of the If-you-want-slums-you-want-India trope, and frankly it deserved it. How about Sub-Saharan Africa, or Somalia? Even the second Hulk movie ended with Banner in British Columbia.”
No matter where they put him, they were going to get flack for it. If it were Africa, then he’s playing the “Africa-as-Dark-Continent-that’s-completely-f’d-up-and-in-need-of-Western-aid” trope. Given they could have dropped Banner anywhere there were slums, why Calcutta? And, taking a cue from Black Widow’s observation, why would a guy who’s got an anger management problem choose to put himself in a situation that considerably ups the probability of him losing control and causing a lot of damage (human population density-wise) if that were to occur? I think you can make a solid case for Calcutta being a specific choice that’s not a mindless “slums=India” thing.
“12. The waiting army. When Stark flew the nuke through the portal, there should have been thousands, hundreds of thousands, of warriors waiting. The Earth should have been in dire danger of being swarmed. It should have made the audience gasp. Instead there were a dozen or fewer ships, with a big mothership thing in the distance. Ehh.”
Neither Loki nor the Chitauri thought Earth was going to be a big deal to defeat. Loki says at the beginning, referring to the battle he envisions on Earth, “I said glorious, not lengthy.” And at the end, when The Other is speaking to–y’know, that guy, he mentions how the humans turned out not to be as weak and easy to dominate as they thought. So if they’re going into this assuming that the fight is almost perfunctory, why in the universe would they put all of their military might into the operation? If the Chitauri have any kind of galactic empire at all, putting their full military in one place means taking troops away from other locations/fronts.
Which leads me to “no one was leading them. I thought that was Loki’s role, but even after he got away from Thor he didn’t do anything leadery. Might have been nice to see him try to direct the battle, only to find out there wasn’t actually anything under his control, foreshadowing the stinger scene later on.”
You don’t need to see him try and fail to direct the battle to know that he doesn’t actually control the situation. From the very beginning of the movie, it’s already laid out that Loki has made a deal with something much more powerful than him, and that he’s less an ally and more a pawn. He’s naive, insecure, and prideful. I’m glad they never tried to portray him like a Darkseid-figure, all-powerful and utterly in control (sorry, I’m more familiar with the DC universe so I don’t know who the Darkseid analogue would be in the Marvel-verse). Loki’s a hurt creature all the more dangerous because he is powerful. (Interesting, that means there’s a point of similarity between Loki and Banner/Hulk.)
FYI the Galaga scene was subtle but brilliant foreshadowing. The entire city fight scene at the end was real-life Galaga, with an endless horde of aliens coming from a hole in the sky and defenders on the ground shooting up that them.
Pure genius.
I forgot to make my point about Loki and leadership explicit. Loki wants to be a ruler and yet, as Thor tells him, he has no idea what it means to lead. We’re shown over and over again why Loki is unfit to be a leader, way before we get to the final battle.
Ooh, nice catch. I didn’t make that connection.
But we never get to see him realize he’s failing to lead. His frustration at that would make his later mistakes more understandable (facing down the Hulk, not having an escape plan when Loki always thinks several steps ahead, etc).
“But we never get to see him realize he’s failing to lead.”
I don’t know how Loki is in the comics as I’m pretty unfamiliar with the Marvel-verse. Going off of how his character has been presented from Thor and The Avengers, Loki seems mentally quite young (by which I mean teenager-ish). His experience in messing around with people appears to have been generally restricted to Asgard, where he would have been under the protection of Odin. This implies that no matter how bratty or shitty he acted, they would’ve given him a pass because his dad is super powerful. The movie Thor was, in a lot of ways, a coming-of-age story not only for Thor but for Loki as well. However, they both take very different lessons from their experiences, resulting in their clearly growing polarization. Loki comes out of it thinking he’s this bad-ass who doesn’t need his family, doesn’t need his brother, is strong and tough all on his own. I wouldn’t be surprised if part of this sense of “I’m past this” manifests as an attitude of “I don’t need to question who I am or the choices I make”. He’s going to have to get over his pride and re-orient himself to the bigger playing field and the power relations that come with that before he can think several steps ahead. And besides, you can only strategize when you have a good sense of the variables involved. And Loki doesn’t. He misread the situation on Earth and the “unruly” nature of humans. Hell, he even thought that he could silver-tongue his way past the Hulk. The Hulk! Of all the characters, the Hulk is exactly the one that’s least likely to be affected by this particular tactic–and the story showed that. Overall, this progression of Loki’s character is good though because it means that there’s potentially somewhere for his character to go, development-wise, in Thor 2.
In general, I try to take the movies and their continuity on their own terms rather than trying to pin them strictly to comics and its continuity. After all, as comics these characters exist in a medium and genre that appear to put much more stock in coherent continuity (as a contrast, see the original Star Trek series and Roddenberry’s insistence that the episodes shouldn’t build on each other). But, at the highest end, with nearly a century of history, it’s inevitable that there will be major problems with trying to pin down the “essence” of a character because of the changing stable of writers, artists, social trends, etc. Look at all the iterations and variations of Batman, for example. If you do a Batman movie, which one are you going to use as your jumping off point? Because they’re all arguably valid, giant-penny Batman and Milleresque asshole Batman and all.
And it seems a smart and also a necessary move to build in room for character development since Marvel Studios clearly wants to tell this story over time rather than all in one go.
I agree they were probably trying to avoid Africa for the reasons E stated. Also, Kolkata works as slums that are not an active war zone, which would up the risk for Banner to Hulk out. They’d already done Rio, one of the other well-known international slums so that leaves India.
India has some pretty serious slums and a lot of health issues Banner could have sunk himself into, but Kolkata? It has a population density of over 62,000 people per square mile. If he was looking to reduce collateral damage, he would be hard pressed to find a worse place.
The U.S. Census shows only two places in the U.S. with a higher population density: Friendship Village in D.C. and Manhattan.
In total, Kolkata has half again the population of the entire city of New York.
I realize I’m late to this conversation, but I recently found this article and thought you might find it both interesting and relevant:
Why Loki won in “The Avengers”
This might just be me but I think, since it’s a fiction based super hero movie, there’s room to bring Coulson back.