You know, in prep for this I’ve been having my roommates (huge comic fans) show me some Ultimate Avengers related media (cartoon series, animated movies, motion comics, et al) and of course one of the big fun things about this movie is the idea of these hugely different egos crushing into each other between epic setpiece battles. I’m not entirely expecting anything cogent coming out of this thing but hopefully it doesn’t make a mess of their characters.
However, as time goes on I’m realizing that what makes the Ultimate Avengers the most problematic and hard to not mess up is The Hulk. The issue is that he’s simultaneously hard to control by definition (and that works narratively as well as diegetically), and so oftentimes both his breaking out to fight AND what ends up happening in the fight have to be overly contrived. Check out the duo shorts ‘Hulk Vs’ to see what I mean (it’s on Instant Watch if anybody cares). Too much screentime has to be worked into figuring out how to get Hulk to be productively, usefully chaotically raging destruction on everything in his path…. you see the problem here?
I didn’t see Thor, I honestly cannot say his character sounds all that interesting, but I’d love to see how Thor’s, Stark’s, and the Cap’n’s various values clash. And it comes down to that, the values they believe in and the cross-signals their cooperation will cause. Hulk is…. he’s a force of nature, not a personification of any values I can really see (sure, self control, but that’s sort of written into the vigilante issue of superhero narratives anyway).
—PolarisDiB
I’m glad to see this movie get good reviews, as so often these comic book movies are crap. So I’ll see The Avengers and hope for the best.
However the movie I’m more excited to see that opens this weekend is In the Family. I’m sure I’ll be seeing that opening day and then The Avengers later in the weekend or the following week.
Man…that review from SFX magazine has me on pause, though it’s good to hear that Joss goes a little beyond just mashing action figures together and calling it a day.
Hey, if all those people exist in the same universe, why aren’t they always helping each other out?
I’ll wait for word of mouth from the half dozen people I work with who will inevitably see it on the first day and will be talking about how good or bad it was the week after.
“Hey, if all those people exist in the same universe, why aren’t they always helping each other out?”
To be fair, comic book universes have gotten increasingly intertwined after they started colliding, so that often times they do just jump between pages to help each other out, and the narrative of the Ultimate Avengers as it’s been so far told in the movies is toward their individual coming-of-age as they’ve been collected by Sam L Jackson (whatever his character is called I’ve already forgotten). In Iron Man: Extremis people keep asking Stark, “Why not call the Avengers together?” and he sees it as a personal matter to be dealt with himself. Thor existed on another planet and Captain America is from the past… basically what I’m saying here is the Marvel and DC Universes play with that equation quite a bit.
And then it all becomes a huge mess and they have to revamp to clean it all out. Heh!
—PolarisDiB
I’m not gonna see it on its opening weekend. There’s a more important movie that I have to see :(
Plus it’s an advantage because I’m gonna be avoiding the crowds. I bet this one’s gonna be huge.
avengers looks more interesting as an entertainment news story than a movie. Has a crossover on this scale ever been attempted before? Alien vs Predator? Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein? I think I will write a movie called 100 public domain characters in a haunted house.
Going to the midnight showing in about 24 hours. "Nuff said. I’ll share my thoughts later.
Also going to a midnight showing. I’m no action junkie, nor a comic book fan. But I’m excited and ready to have a helluva time.
I thought this would probably just suck, but after seeing a preview yesterday and all the reviews I am quite pumped for this. O_O
I’m seeing Sound of my Voice this weekend
stoked :)
" I think I will write a movie called 100 public domain characters in a haunted house."
Great idea, I would produce that
While everyone else chews on the Avengers this weekend, I’ll be at the art-house seeing In the Family. I can’t believe this movie is 169 minutes. Oh well – I still can’t wait to see this tomorrow night!
Long movies are not a problem at all when seen in theatre. I saw all 900 hours of Scenes from a Marriage and it was smooth sailing.
I’m not particularly interested in The Avengers so I’ve looked around for anything else this weekend, besides The Pirates!, it’s a rather bland beginning of summer, no?
Yeah, so The Avengers was a fuckload of fun! It probably doesn’t hurt that I grew up loving comic books and these characters (and still read graphic novels, etc. now) – the film was miles ahead of any of the other Marvel films leading up to this one and it’s chock-full of great character moments, wit, it never takes itself too seriously and caps it all off with a pretty amazing action set-piece. Won’t be a hit on MUBI and it’s not without flaws, but it’s a damn good time. Might even see it again.
The most boring BoxOfficeMojo article about box-office shattering ever It was just all too expected and everybody knew it. Too bad lack of surprises in mega box office hits doesn’t cut down on the amount of coverage of box office (the irony of me even bringing it up recognized, thank you).
I actually had to do a bit of mental work trying not to get snarky and annoyed at box office. It’s so ingrained, I think, for oversaturated media to annoy us that even when something’s actually good, if it gets overhyped or overrated we want to start tearing it a new one. But I did indeed see Avengers over the weekend, both contributing to box office AND enjoying it for what it was, so I have nothing to complain about.
In short, Joss Whedon did perfectly what people wanted the most from him, and that was to play off the character’s personalities in the film as the major source of conflict to lead up to the epic New York set-piece battle of the ending. There is a lot of fine work with having their personality inform an event that happens later and throw it into context, and one of the absolute best scenes is where they are all arguing about how they’ll not get along and Whedon includes a subtext explanation that runs through the argument that shows how each and every one of the heroes in some way is responsible for the other heroes’ situations — in other words, I never really understood how these four even fit together despite being branded by Marvel, but Whedon makes them fit logically in a cause-and-effect universe where the presence of Captain America incites the research of Hulk and Iron Man and the presence of Thor influences the movements of Nick Fury and so on and so forth. Good times.
So it was exactly what it needed to be and was very satisfying, which means DC may take the opportunity of Nolan wrapping up his Batman franchise to start a five year Justice League development. And it will probably not be as good, simply because what Marvel pulled off is pretty difficult to achieve. I could see Marvel even setting up Avengers movies in five year schedules to allow the interval movies to develop the ‘universe’ toward new showdown stories for the whole group, which would be a pretty good long term business model.
—PolarisDiB
@DiB
However, as time goes on I’m realizing that what makes the Ultimate Avengers the most problematic and hard to not mess up is The Hulk. The issue is that he’s simultaneously hard to control by definition (and that works narratively as well as diegetically), and so oftentimes both his breaking out to fight AND what ends up happening in the fight have to be overly contrived. Check out the duo shorts ‘Hulk Vs’ to see what I mean (it’s on Instant Watch if anybody cares). Too much screentime has to be worked into figuring out how to get Hulk to be productively, usefully chaotically raging destruction on everything in his path…. you see the problem here?
Are you talking about finding ways to turn Banner into the Hulk? (Btw, I liked the Wolverine vs Hulk anime.)
On another note, the problem I have with the Avengers is the difference in capacity of the characters. For example, Thor is so much more powerful than Captain America. When they fight villains that Captain America can handle, Thor could probably take them on all by himself. On the other hand, when they fight more powerful villains, CA seems pretty useless.
^Those differences in power are presented in the movie. Thor and Iron Man have a ‘versus’ moment pretty much set there to signal how each of the characters’ skills are equalized in various ways. Captain America is the ‘ground troops’, so to speak, who is also best able to rally nearby humans and military forces to provide support while the big guys zip around the air ’sploding shit. It works.
—PolarisDiB
Well, I’m glad it works in the film. (It doesn’t always work in the comics or animated series.)
Of course the success of The Avengers will incite more superhero developments (see recent talks about revamping Hulk w/Ruffalo). But all it takes is for audience burn-out and a couple stinkers and it will all be scrapped. I just can’t imagine quality superhero movies to continue indefinitely. I mean, how many times can they remake Spider-Man before it starts making Green Lantern box office?
The Avengers was good but it wasn’t anything special. In terms of super-hero movies, it wouldn’t even be in my top ten.
^ There are ten good superhero movies?
I’d say that these films are all better than The Avengers:
1. The Dark Knight
2. Batman
3. Batman Returns
4. X-Men First Class
5. X2
6. Superman
7. Iron Man
8. X-Men
9. Batman Begins
10. Superman II
Ten Best Superhero Movies
1) Superman: The Movie
2) The Dark Knight
3) The Avengers
4) Spider-Man 2
5) Superman II
6) Captain America: The First Avenger
7) Batman Begins
8) Spider-Man
9) X-Men: First Class
10) Watchmen
^Oh come on!
Brad – I do love that you give Superman top spot. Old school love.
Sorry. Forgot about X-Men First Class, Which should be at #9.. :)
I’m all about old school and so is Joss Whedon. The Avengers is closer to the spirit of the original comic books than any other film I can think of.
It’s funny, I only really like superhero movies about people that aren’t actually superheroes, just rich guys with cool toys. Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and Iron Man are the only ones I’ve really liked. I also kind of enjoyed Captain America.
Dennis Brian
Summer is here (ish) and this is the first big movie. I am gonna let the fanboys have at it cause its too big for me (at nearly 2 and 1/2 hours). And I could tolerate Iron Man and Hulk but dislike Thor, and Capt. This is not one for me, tho I am impressed the makers got all these people together and em happy they dumped Ed Norton.
from sfx magazine:
By royal decree we Brits are supposed to refer to this, in full, as Marvel Avengers Assemble. It’s an ugly rechristening, of course, but in a way it’s utterly apt. The word “assemble” reeks of the unique pain of flatpack furniture, gazing blank-eyed at brain-melting diagrams of nuts, screws and neat chunks of plywood converging in some impossible pan-dimensional ballet on the page.
Joss Whedon is the man who’s been handed the screwdriver, Allen key and infinite amounts of tea and patience, tasked with bolting together countless separate pieces of the Marvel universe into a functional cinematic whole. Does the finished product wobble slightly, sit not entirely flush? You bet, and small wonder, too.
It’s an insanely ambitious ask for anyone, let alone a director with only one true big-screen credit to their name. Whedon not only needs to deliver a profoundly bed-quaking climax to years of tease and foreplay. He must also juggle four big-gun superhero icons, and fuse together the disparate DNA of their worlds: noble-eyed ‘40s heroism, mythic wizardry, weaponised techno-cool and big, green smashy-smashy stuff. It’s an inescapably jarring clash of tones. At one point a Norse trickster god rides in a military jeep, strafed by machine gun fire, and it feels like The Lord Of The Rings crashing brutally and inexplicably into 24.
Whedon’s A-game has always been powered by a smart mouth and a gift for ensemble writing, and those are the best muscles on display here. The movie’s true energy is a relentlessly catty wit, deployed as an endless hail of snark-grenades: Iron Man refers to the freshly defrosted Captain America as a “Capsicle”, while Loki’s Asgardian pageantry is coolly dismissed as “Reindeer Games.” You also sense Whedon the linguist’s mischievous smirk as he smuggles the phrase “mewling quim” into mainstream blockbuster cinema. And top marks for that.
Miraculously, the movie feels equally shared between its superpowered pantheon – though some Avengers are rather more equal than others. Robert Downey Jr steals scenes with the insouciance of a man trousering a Rolex at Tiffany’s, especially relishing some screwball byplay with Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts. Chris Evans has rather less fun, dignity visibly wilting in a shockingly misjudged costume, but he maintains Cap’s winning, Jimmy Stewart-on-steroids appeal. Elsewhere, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor appears to have misplaced the easy, boyish charm of his own movie but has sufficient golden-maned charisma to hold his own.
Two Avengers feel shortchanged in the leap from page to screen: Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye is an inscrutable blank with none of the impetuous fire of his comic strip counterpart, while Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow, though she may boast Buffy-style self-possession and aptitude for ass-kickery, remains as convincingly Russian as the Fourth of July.
The Hulk is better served. As the new screen incarnation of Bruce Banner, Mark Ruffalo brings a soft, sweet weirdness that barely masks a broiling anger (“I’m exposed, like a nerve. It’s a nightmare.”). His first shirt-shredding Hulk-out is genuinely unnerving – for once the Hulk’s eyes are Banner’s eyes, and just for a moment there’s a rending flash of vulnerability there. Once in green, tattered-trouser mode, the Hulk moves with a loping hint of Kong and soon earns the biggest laughs in the film.
Whedon plays his character cards well, revelling in the interplay of these icons and adding an intriguingly adult layer of ethical complexity to the Marvel universe as SHIELD’s agenda takes a turn for the shadowy. He’s an actor’s director, too, coaxing strong performances from his sprawling cast. Tom Hiddleston’s Loki is a finely played antagonist, all psychological game-play and sickly smile.
But if Avengers Assemble showcases Whedon’s strengths it also exposes his weak spots. An early smackdown between Thor and Iron Man feels curiously low-key, betraying Whedon’s small-screen roots. It’s not short on the eye-smacking visuals – a sequence where the SHIELD heli-carrier rises from cascading waves is majestic – but too much here feels pinched and boxy, too tightly framed and televisual, lacking true widescreen wow.
A final reel assault on Manhattan adds some much needed spectacle (all ash, rubble and scream of emergency sirens, it’s a clear nod to 9/11 and Millar and Hitch’s The Ultimates, an obvious creative inspiration). But this sequence exposes the deepest faultline in the film: the alien villains are faceless armoured goons, a strikeforce of anonymous cannon fodder. There’s no insight into their motives, their culture, their plotting. Why are they here, other than to have their extra-terrestrial asses handed to them on six superpowered plates?
Avengers Assemble motors on quips and star charm and the primal Top Trumps thrill of assembling its protagonists. But beyond an intriguing experiment in franchise-mashing there’s no compelling reason for it to exist, no burning tale it needs to tell. It’s simply a slick delivery system for satisfying years of fanboy longing. As the plot pivots on the Asgardian Tesseract – “a source of unlimited sustainable energy” – so the film’s essential power source is the phrase “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?”
And, ultimately, that’s unsustainable.