Yeah, I
know, a week after the rest of the country, I finally saw The Movie. I’ve been
sleep-deprived, okay? And I wanted to actually enjoy seeing The Avengers.
The
short review? I liked it … mostly. And
I’m not sure which part of that statement surprises me more.
Joss Whedon, maker of things I like. Canceled things. |
I’ve
been a fan of Joss Whedon’s since the second episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (I didn’t see the pilot.) As soon as I
read the words “spontaneously combusting cheerleaders” in the TV listings, I
was in. I loved Buffy. I loved Angel. I loved the two minutes of Firefly I got to see while it was
actually on the air (I was living in a place that banned television—yes,
really) and all of it that I got to see in reruns and on DVD. I adored Serenity and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. I even gave Dollhouse the old college try. I’m not what you’d call a hardcore
Joss fan—I don’t read the message boards, or cosplay, or even stalk him on
Twitter—but you slap his name on something and you will have my fannish attention.
You slap his name on a comic-book movie the size of The Avengers …
And I
will get seriously, seriously worried.
Really,
Joss? You’re gonna go there? I mean
sure, you write some great superhero comics—you wrote the only X-Men comics I
truly enjoyed, and your run on Runaways wasn’t
quite as good as Brian K. Vaughan’s, but you did include that bit where an
eleven-year-old slugged the Punisher, and that was brilliant. But your stuff is
very meta, and The Avengers is very …
not.
I
wasn’t.
Honestly,
I was surprised at how much it didn’t suck. I expected to be at least somewhat
bored—by the Iron Man sequences in particular, because I’m probably the only
person in America who doesn’t find Robert Downey, Jr. funny. And the Hulk?
Nobody’s done the Hulk right since the Bixby/Ferrigno days. And the Black Widow
in Iron Man 2 was just dull, so why
should I expect more from this outing?
But
Iron Man was actually kind of funny—mostly when he shared the screen with Thor,
but still. I liked the very
Whedonesque take on how Banner is controlling his Hulk side now. And the Black
Widow got a personality transplant courtesy of her complicated relationship
with Hawkeye, who is probably the last character in the movie I expected to
like, but holy cow, I like him now. I’m very glad that Trevor’s going to be
using a bow in an upcoming Masks story,
because Hawkeye has officially made it cool again. I never thought I’d say
this, but I’d buy a ticket to a Hawkeye movie. (Well, a Hawkeye/Black Widow
movie.) More on Hawkeye in a minute.
See? Told you it was a silly hat. |
For
those who’ve read all the way through this blog post without any idea what I’m
talking about, the basic plot of The
Avengers is that Loki, Thor’s evil-ish half-brother from Thor, has teamed up with some generic
aliens called the Chitauri (who are sort of like Skrulls, but less challenging)
to use the tesseract from Thor and Captain America to take over the
wooooorrrrld, all while wearing an impressively silly hat. Standing in Loki’s
way is superspy Nick Fury, who has assembled a motley band of heroes to stop
Loki—a group including Iron Man, Captain America, the Black Widow, and the
freaking Hulk. Thor and Hawkeye come along a little bit later, because Thor’s
working his own angle and Hawkeye’s busy at first being mind-controlled by
Loki. Cue about an hour of infighting and various members of the team getting
trashed because they can’t or won’t play nice together; then a key character
gets jossed and they mostly pull together to kick the crap out of Loki and
company.
[Side
note for non-Whedonites: “to joss” means “to build up a beloved character and
then unexpectedly kill him/her off somewhere in the last third of the story.”
Yes, it’s a verb now. Yes, you should be
worried about that.]
Cap is okay in this part. Also: Hey. Thor. |
99
percent of this movie is amazing. The plot, the characters, the action
sequences, the snarky dialogue—all a lovely melding of good popcorn fare and
vintage Joss. In fact, there was really only one part of the movie I didn’t like: its portrayal of Captain
America. Because this movie picks up shortly after Cap comes out of the iceberg
and happens while he’s adjusting to the modern world, it has to deal with what
fans have come to call the “man out of time” element. This has been done about
a billion different ways—everything from watching him visit a dead girlfriend’s
grave to seeing him struggle to operate a cell phone. Joss didn’t have a huge
amount of screen time to devote to it, so he mostly just had Cap suck it up and
be all about the job. Joss also needed someone to call Iron Man out for being a
smartass and an egomaniac, and Cap usually gets that duty in any story, so that
was no surprise.
Not shown: Many, many Steve-and-Tony snits. |
But I
was a bit disappointed in how it was all handled. There were a few Luddite
jokes at Cap’s expense, and otherwise he spent about half the story acting like
a military grunt from Buffy, storming
around barking at people who weren’t doing things his way. Yes, Joss, we
understand that this is a guy dealing with loss by not dealing with it. Yes,
Joss, we understand that you don’t get to play with a lot of Cap’s arc because
that’s presumably being saved for his own sequel. But … I just wanted a little bit more. Making the military guy
look stupid is part of your oeuvre. So is making a fool of the jock. But you’re
at your best when you surprise us, and there was nothing surprising about this.
Mostly,
though I think I’m just mildly annoyed that Joss Whedon got me to like Hawkeye—Hawkeye, for God’s sake, the lesser
clone of Green Arrow—and didn’t give Cap a moment. And I think it only bothers
me because the rest of the movie was so damn good. Loki was more fun in The Avengers than he was in Thor, and that’s saying a lot. The Black
Widow did more than show off her butt, and yet didn’t take over the whole movie
as powerful women tend to do in Joss’s work. We saw more of Bruce Banner than
we did of the Hulk, and Banner was a genuinely interesting guy to watch. Iron
Man made me smirk with some of his one-liners. Thor made me laugh and cheer. And the inevitable property
destruction was actually entertaining, even though I usually find my mind
wandering during fight scenes.
I
really haven’t said enough about how much I liked this movie, and I think I can
sum it up by explaining the Hawkeye thing.
Do you see a boxing glove? I don't. |
Hawkeye
is pretty much Marvel Comics’ version of DC’s Green Arrow—a non-superpowered
guy whose superhero thing is that he’s a freakishly good shot with a bow and
arrow. Don’t ask me how Movie Hawkeye developed that particular skillset—in the
comics, he’s a former circus performer, but I doubt that’s the case here.
Anyway, Hawkeye’s main job in the Avengers
comics is to be a hothead, to mouth off to Captain America, and to
unexpectedly make the perfect shot when it’s most needed and remind everyone
that you don’t need powers to be a hero, blah blah blah. Not that interesting,
although I don’t think he’s ever sunk to Green Arrow’s level and used an arrow
with a giant boxing glove on the end. However, he tends to wear strangely
designed purple costumes, which is just wrong.
Anyway,
I scratched my head for the better part of a day over the fact that Joss got me
to like this guy. It helped that Movie Hawkeye wasn’t the annoying loudmouth
that Comics Hawkeye is—in fact, he was so closemouthed I was tempted to
nickname him Captain Laconic—but he also spent half the movie as Loki’s sock
puppet, so what’s to like? How does a sock puppet come across as simultaneously
sympathetic and badass?
Yes, I'm showing the loner with his bestie. Shaddap. |
Well,
Hawkeye’s established early on as an interesting guy—he’s supposed to be
watching a group of scientists work with the tesseract, but he does so from a
ridiculously high catwalk above them because he prefers being high up and “sees
more” from up there. He makes an observation about the artifact that everyone
else seems to have missed, too. This character is clearly a solitary kind of
guy by nature, unusual in big government organizations, and yet unlike most movie loners, he still works
all right with others and is fairly perceptive. He’s also the first of the
people Loki fights that he doesn’t kill—apparently Loki sees something
interesting in Hawkeye, too, which is why he zaps him with the mind-control
whammy. It’s always nice when a charismatic villain confirms our impression of
a character!
Hawkeye
doesn’t come across too well for a while after that, though, because he’s
basically a sock puppet. So from there, the work of making Hawkeye cool falls
to the Black Widow, a kickass super-spy who breaks off a pretty funny
interrogation scene (she’s tied to a chair and yet getting the bad guy to tell
her everything) because she hears that Hawkeye is in trouble. After one of the
most impressive fight scenes of the movie, she’s off to join the good guys and
rescue her friend. And throughout the flick, even when she’s playing
manipulative mind games with Loki, it’s fairly clear that she respects Hawkeye
more than just about anyone else on earth. There’s a bond and a history between
these two characters that isn’t discussed too much, but is clearly the engine
of their relationship.
Big friendship reunion. With shooting and a third wheel. |
And
because this is Joss Whedon, this relationship never involves Black Widow going all melty at the sight of Hawkeye
or needing him to rescue her. She does her job, she kicks butt—and she’s simply
going to drop Loki out of an airplane if she doesn’t get her friend back. Do
you have any idea how hard it is to balance a strong female character with her
own arc against an interesting male character who can’t talk? I do; I’ve tried it. It’s incredibly hard not to
succumb to rom-com clichés, or action-movie clichés. Joss pulled it off. He
made me like Hawkeye, and he made me like the Hawkeye/Black Widow combo even
more. By the time Hawkeye gets his personality back (after a fight with the
Widow, of course), we’re all rooting for them to work out whatever it is that
they’ve got going on. And they don’t get a big kissing moment or anything like
that—they just go back to work, and they’re uniquely fantastic together. That’s
maybe a fifth of the movie right there, and it’s completely satisfying both on
its own and as a part of the whole film.
This. This is how you do superhero movies.
Especially team movies. Everybody gets an arc, everyone gets a storyline,
everyone gets a moment, but no one takes over. The pacing was strong, the
characters were solid, and it was a great ride all the way through. I’m
actually getting excited about writing Volume 2 of Masks, which has a lot of team dynamics now that the kids are
really working together. I’m getting some good ideas.
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