Movie Review: THE AVENGERS

"Superheroes. Get your superheroes."

In case you haven't watched your TV or listened to your radio or read any entertainment magazines recently, The Avengers have finally assembled--the Marvel Studios culmination of seven years and five previous movies, inevitably leading to this super-est of super hero franchises, The Traveling Wilburys of comic book movies. It's an oddly mixed bag of high concept spectacle and witty banter, where multiple stories collide like a disaster movie. (That's not to say that the movie itself is a disaster.)

 

The plot, if you insist, revolves around the Tesseract--a mysterious energy source first introduced to this series in the earlier Captain America: The First Avenger. When the Tesseract somehow activates, Loki--(adopted) brother of Thor--emerges through a portal and lands in a S.H.I.E.L.D. facility, stealing the glowing orb and hypnotizing agent Clint Barton and scientist Dr. Erik Selvig among other S.H.I.E.L.D. workers. The facility itself is destroyed.

As a result, all the heroes from the preceding movies--Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger--are recruited to the newly reinstated Avengers Initiative, headed by S.H.I.E.L.D. director, Nick Fury. Agent Phil Coulson interrupts a Russian interrogation by Agent Natasha Romanoff over the phone to tell her of the disaster at the facility. Coulson travels to New York to brief Tony Stark/Iron Man of Fury's plans. Fury himself visits Steve Rogers/Captain America and Romanoff is sent off to find and recruit Dr. Bruce Banner/The Hulk. Thor arrives later, after Iron Man and Captain America succeed in temporarily capturing Loki. Newcomers to this series may have a bit of trouble figuring out how all the pieces fit together. But really in a movie like this, those are merely ancillary concerns.

As it turns out, Loki is working for the Other, another God-like ruler from his dimension, and the abduction of the Tesseract will allow him to send an alien army through a portal to Earth to help Loki conquer the human race. We've been here before, haven't we? The Tesseract is the MacGuffin of all MacGuffins. Stakes will always be highest in these stories. Bad guys will always want to do no less than rule the planet.

Some superhero movies, such as Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight--whose own saga will culminate this summer--strive for gravity. The Avengers instead strives for levity. Much of the middle section takes place after S.H.I.E.L.D. reconvenes on a massive, floating (and invisible, no less) aircraft carrier where the recently-captured Loki is being held captive and Dr. Banner is in charge of attempting to find the missing Tesseract. The best sequences of the movie take place here. Interestingly enough, much of it takes on the appearance of a drawing room comedy. A $200 million, heavily CGI'd drawing room comedy, but a drawing room comedy nonetheless. The dialogue is written with an endless amount of wit, with the superheroes not only trying to physically one-up each other, but verbally as well.

This all makes sense given the movie was directed and co-written by Joss Whedon, who brought a wry sarcasm to his TV adaption of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and his criminally short-lived Firefly series. And he works perfectly with someone like Chris Hemsworth, whose Thor was maybe the only good thing about the earlier Thor movie. But it's certainly a match for Robert Downey Jr., whose irreverence and complete indifference to tactfulness is as much a hallmark of his Tony Stark as his genius mind is. That insouciance is what made the first Iron Man such a joy, but by Iron Man 2, tiresome and insufferable. The sarcastic quips and barbs he provided in that sequel only served his own pomposity. In The Avengers, the acidity of his wit is again pointed outwardly--to S.H.I.E.L.D., to Loki, even to the egos of the other superheroes.

But this of course is a summer blockbuster franchise, based on a comic book, backed and distributed by major studios and corporations. As such, everything is a matter of scale and Whedon is bound to constrain himself to the typical beats of the genre. He can explore character through all the verbal bobbing and weaving he wants--but only up to a point. After that, he's got to provide some actual bobbing and weaving. And that's when the movie loses some of its life. The final climactic scene resembles every summer movie you've seen over the last decade: mostly indestructible good guys versus a seemingly endless supply of faceless bad guys. It's a cacophony of generic and often indecipherable special effects; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. In doing so, Whedon doesn't so much obey the will of the gods of Asgar, so much as merely fulfill a fait accomli--the destiny handed down by the gods standing on top of the Hollywood sign.