The Avengers

This is war! Though the superheroes here are self-centred weirdos (like the Watchmen), they know what to do when the world needs them and they don’t spend a lot of time thinking it over (unlike Superman). The Nordic bruiser with a hammer and theatrical tendencies, the scientist who turns green from time to time, an action figure brought to life – perfect products of American war propaganda, otherwise known as heroes of the Marvel universe. In line with the target audience, all of them were placed in the nerdy world of Tony Stark (i.e. the protagonist of the franchise’s two commercially most successful titles). The exaggerated pop-culture lens through which Thor and Captain America are viewed protects the film from being too serious, without giving the impression that it’s actually about nothing. Getting the audience emotionally involved in the plot is the main objective of both Whedon, who needs to convince viewers, and Fury, who has to more firmly unite the heroes. This is actually a purely pragmatic goal, a work task, so to speak, so there is no needless sentimental blathering or crying. The death of one of the more important characters ends the self-destructive sizing-up of egos and the plot can then shift to the oft-mentioned war of “us” versus “them” (in the end, the Avengers are ultimately just more weapons of mass destruction, except for the emotions...). This doesn’t mean that the preceding hundred (or however many) minutes didn’t have anything to offer beyond the action scenes and Stark’s one-liners. It is a joy to see how consistently, and without annoying repetition for the thick-headed, the film’s creators use every piece of the provided information, thanks to which we don’t have to figure out for ourselves how any given character knows this and that. The first third of the film contains the gradual, cleverly connected introductions of the individual superheroes (or, more precisely, their introduction to the scene, as most of them were previously introduced in separate films). This is followed by the confrontational second third, where Whedon is clearly in his element – as he did in Firefly, here he conducts a group of individualists onboard one ship). Thanks to their abilities and the film’s budget, only the conflicts that arise between them are significantly weightier. The necessity of suppressing individual idiosyncrasies in favour of the team forms the core of the narrative, as is pointedly illustrated by the last shot with the emblematic A. This involves putting together money (Stark), science (Banner), idealism (Rogers) and moral ethos (Thor), and getting all of the heroes with their different performance styles and the slightly different style of directing of “their” scenes (the Captain with his old-fashioned patriotism; the Hulk, unpredictable like a horror-movie monster; Thor and his theatrical sense of grand tragedy; the conversationally comedic Iron Man) in the same boat (both literally and figuratively). The Avengers’ primary objective is to coordinate these various styles due to the necessity of close combat. I thought that roughly the first two-thirds of the film were very good entertainment, but nothing extraordinary. The final action-packed bacchanalia of the final third, and especially the two indescribable and, for such a massive mainstream film, boldly self-ironic scenes with a pissed-off Hulk prompted me to give not just a satisfactory rating, but an enthusiastic rating. These are pretty shallow reasons, I know – I’ll leave the more sophisticated ones for films that don’t offer attractions like a one-eyed Samuel L. Jackson with a bazooka. Next time, I would like to see less techno-fetishism and more Scarlett Johansson playing the first-ever superheroine who can be taken seriously, because she only feigns fragility and emotional weakness for “work” purposes and has to tame her partner in order to get him back. 90% (04/25/2012) (less) (more)