The Avengers
Directed by Joss Whedon
Screenplay by Joss Whedon
Story by Joss Whedon and Zak Penn
Released May 4th 2012
Joss Whedon. It would be hard to talk about this movie without talking about him a bit. He is someone who has created a lot of art which I greatly enjoy (spoiler: including this movie) and a lot of stuff that has meant a lot to me (Buffy, I’m talking about Buffy.) He is also, by many accounts, not a very nice person. He’s done some bad shit. For a while I kind of just ignored this. “Well, nobody’s perfect but his tv stuff is still good!” But more and more stuff came out and it became clear his bad side went beyond just cheating on his wife a lot (which is also bad.) I’m not going to recap everything here, you can look it up if you want reminded. I got the point where I didn’t really want to see anything new from him ever again. But what about his past worrk? How do I feel rewatching that now? I…still enjoy it? I’d never be able to think of Buffy as anything less than one of the greatest and most influential tv shows of all time. And there were a lot of other people working on that show besides Joss, so it’s not like I’m constantly thinking “BAD JOSS DID THIS AND NOW IT’S SPOILED, FUCK” when I’m rewatching it. I can understand if other people feel differently, if all his past work is ruined for them. There are definitely valid critical looks you can take at his work. Myself, I’m not really interested in going back and looking at something he did twenty years ago and saying “wow this is proof that he was racist/sexist/sleeping with that Potential Slayer actress.” Maybe there is stuff you can spot, but I think having the knowledge we have now would influence me and I’d be looking for stuff that isn’t actually there. So I’m not really interested in looking at this movie through the lens of modern Whedon criticism, trying to look for moments where the camera lingers on ScarJo’s bum as “evidence” that Joss was evil all along. I’m just trying to rank every MCU movie in order of goodness, I don’t feel like doing anything more than that. For the record I haven’t seen any reports of him acting unprofressionally when shooting this movie, but that makes sense when you consider it was the biggest thing he’d done at this point. Of course he’d be on his best behaviour. So yes, Joss is definitely not a good guy and doesn’t deserve a Hollywood comeback, but I’m not going to pretend he wasn’t hugely talented at one time and that this movie isn’t any good. And hey if you want to see me being more critical of a Joss Whedon superhero movie, I will get to Age of Ultron eventually!
I remember there being a feeling of surprise when Joss was announced as the movie’s director. This movie was really, really important to Marvel! A crossover of their first five films, something that hadn’t really been done before (yes I know there were movies where Godzilla fought Dracula and Frankenstein or whatever, but this was bigger.) It had to be their biggest movie yet for the MCU to have a chance to continue on. Maybe we’d still have gotten Iron Man sequels but I doubt we would have gotten much else if this was a flop. So you’d think they’d want a director who could make it really spectacular, someone with blockbuster experience. Whedon’s only previous feature film had been Serenity, which was well received but flopped at the box office. He was best known for his tv work. So were people right to be worried? Well, no; the movie was a huge hit and it turns out Joss Whedon was absolutely the right person to direct it (with some reservations, see below!) But, more importantly than that, he was also the perfect person to write it.
Zak Penn wrote an early draft of the script, but when Whedon was brought in to direct he rewrote the script completely and claims that nothing of Penn’s mad it into the movie. Penn disputes this, but the script really does feel like pure Whedon to me. It’s a pretty simple story: the Avengers are brought together to stop an alien invastion. They clash with each other at first but ultimately come together as a team and win the day. Simple, but very satisfying! While this is a crossover of the previous five movies, there were likely to be many people watching it who hadn’t seen those movies, so there are introductions to all the characters. They’re quite brief though! Tony activates a new clean energy thing, establishing that he’s a rich smart guy who uses his powers for good. We get a nice scene with him and Pepper (a more casual Pepper than we’ve seen before, WITH BARE FEET) which also introduces Coulson, who gets some quick character background too. Whedon is (OR WAS, I KNOW HE'S BAD NOW) REALLY GOOD at doing stuff like this. Captain America just gets introduced with some war flashbacks while punching a bag, but his characterisation throughout will tell you all you need to know about him. Black Widow’s Buffy-style introduction scene is far better intro for her than her entire appearance in Iron Man 2. Hawkeye is naturally the least interesting Avenger – just being a guy who shoots fancy arrows – and the movie doesn’t really help make up for that with him spending the first two thirds of it brainwashed. Once he finally gets to shoot those fancy arrows it is actually fun. Thor gets introduced the latest of the main characters, which I think makes sense as he’s the most outlandish and you have to ground the movie with the guy in the iron suit and the super soldier from World War 2 first. This Thor is pretty similar to Branagh’s but does get a few comedy one-liners (“he’s adopted”) which Hemsorth delivers well. Then there’s Bruce Banner/The Hulk, now played by Mark Ruffalo. So for the second time in the MCU we’re inroducing a new version of that character, and for the third time in under a decade. Luckily Whedon and Ruffalo totally nail it and Hulk is one of the strongest parts of the movie. We get the scary version of Hulk, which is sold by Black Widow being terrified of him and it’s far better than a blurry Hulk we can varely see roughing guys up in a bottling factory. Then later we get the heroic version of Hulk too in the big third act extravaganza and he’s far far more satisfying there than the 2008 version too (it helps that the CGI is much improved.)
Before we get to that extravaganza, we have to talk about how the movie looks. Movies are a visual medium, after all! The big criticism is that the movie looks bland, that Whedon shoots it like a tv show. And I have to say, for the first two thirds anyway, this is pretty accuate. I think I said Iron Man was kind of bland looking, and maybe it is compared to some other blockbusters, but I feel I owe Jon Favreau an apology as he certainly did a much better job making his first Marvel movie look cinematic than Whedon does here (for the first two acts of this anyway.) It gets off to a really weak start with Loki and a brainwashed Hawkeye escaping Nick Fury in a car chase. A very unexciting car chase! The middle of the movie is set on a S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier, which of course looks cool when it takes off but Whedon doesn’t do much intersting visually with the characters sitting around talking. There’s a fight scene between Iron Man, Thor and Captain America in a forest which you really want to be good (it’s a fight scene between Iron Man, Thor and Captain America!) but it the forest looks so fake and bad. And Thor’s armour is made out of plastic. The “it looks like a tv show” accusations certainly have merit in these scenes.
But does it actually matter? I mean, obviously it does if you’re analysing the cinematography of the movie. I’m not saying the complaints aren’t valid. But the movie was a huge hit, far beyond the five before it, so cleary it looked good enough to not scare the average person away. Whedon’s writing is good enough to keep you interested even during those “people sititng at a desk” scenes. And where it really matters in the third act, the movie does deliver in spectacle. The big main event here is the battle of New York and it’s super hero team-up on a level that had never been seen on screen before. Yeah you can say “well the X-Men teamed up and fought Magneto on the Statue of Liberty, that was pretty cool!” and maybe it was, but this is better. This is literally a comic come to life. The Avengers fighting aliens in New York is about as classic a Marvel comic scene as you can get and boy does the movie deliver. Whedon is a total nerd who grew up reading these comics and you can tell he was doing stuff here he’d been imagining for decades (and self-censoring his imaginings of male heroes falling on female hereos’ tits, at least for now.) It really elevates the movie into something special – I still remember the childlike joy I felt when watching it in the cinema. It just gets everything right: from the team just standing together looking cool while the camera swirls around, to dramatic slow motion hammer and shield throwing, to the jokes (Hulk pounding Loki into the ground is so perfectly done that it still makes me laugh every time) to the big one shot fight scene…it’s as good as anyone could have hoped. It’s a kind of lightning in the bottle moment that later movies have struggled to recreate. And everyone’s in character and their character stuff results in big spectacular pay-offs like Banner transforming into Hulk and punching a huge space-worm thing all in one motion…it’s really good! And all in broad daylight with clearly visible (good!) CGI! Whedon got it all right here. And I don’t know who else could have done it better at the time. Maybe someone else could have made it look technically more impressive but who could have delivered this marriage of script, character and action better than pre-fall Whedon?
I wouldn’t normally give the mid credits scene its own paragraph. It’s just a fun little bonus thing, right? WRONG, ASSHOLE. Much like the Nick Fury post credits scene from Iron Man, the mid credits appearance by Thanos here is a masterclass in how to do one of those scenes. Thanos is revealed as the real power behind Loki’s invasion, which is obviously going to appeal to comic fans who know who Thaons is and appreciate the “courting death” line. But it works just as well for the normal people who just think “wow who is that purple guy and why is he grinning at the idea of fighting the Avengers!?” It’s the kind of scene teasing the future that works perfectly, doesn’t feel forced, and doesn’t take away any time from anything else in the movie.
Villain Problem?
Tom Hiddleston’s Loki is the main villain again, but he’s a bit different from his previous appearance. He’s a bit more evil, a bit more cartoony. He’s chewing up that scenery. The tortured, more complex Loki of Thor is mostly gone (but you still get the sense he’s in over his head) and I can see some people missing that version, but really he needs to be the way he is for this film to work. He needs to be a straight up bad guy (literally compared to Hitler by an old German at one point!) for The Avengers to get together and kick the shit out of. And Hiddleston is great here, absolutely nailing stuff like calling Natasha a “mewling quim” but still keeping some sense of the same character from Thor. And hey if you want a nerd explanation for his change in behaviour, you can believe that official wiki article or whatever it was which said the mind stone (on his staff) altered his behaviour. It actually makes sense as we see the same stone influencing the Avengers in one scene. But you can also freely ignore that because it’s never been mentioned on screen!
OTHER THINGS
Some fun casting notes! Enver Gjokaj plays a New York cop – he previously starred in Whedon’s kind of good show
Dollhouse and would go on to return to the MCU as Daniel Sousa in
Agent Carter and
Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. Oh, and if you thought Agent Coulson was dead in this movie, you’d be wrong(ish)! He was ressurcted to star in
AOS but the canon-status of that show is questionable due to later seasons not really fitting! It’s good though (mostly!) Alexis Denisof, who played Wesley in Whedon’s
Buffy The Vampire Slayer and its spin-off
Angel, plays Thanos’ Mouth of Sauron lookalike underling. Harry Dean Stanton has a cameo as an old man who sees Hulk fall through the sky and talks to a naked Bruce Banner. Ashley Johnson plays a waitress who flirted with Steve Rogers in a scene cut from the movie (she still gets some close-ups in the Battle of New York and a couple of lines.) Cobie Smulders makes her debut as Agent Maria Hill and hopefully she’ll eventually get a bigger part (spoiler: she doesn’t.)
This scene isn’t in the movie but maybe it should be:
I haven’t said much about the music in any of these movies yet. Maybe that’s a damning indictment of how said music isn’t very memorable (though I would say Captain America had some good stuff.) But the Avengers theme (by Alan Silvestri) is another very important component of the Battle of New York scene. It just screams SUPERHEROES TEAMING UP at you.
Ranking.
I’m pretty sure it’s number one. Like yeah it doesn’t start off that great. It drags a bit. It doesn’t look as good as it should in a lot of places. But the stuff it gets right is the most important stuff and it really gets that stuff right. You could argue that Iron Man is a better movie but as an MCU movie this is the best so far and yeah it’s number one.
NEXT TIME: The last Iron Man movie ever.
