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| Alien army attacks. Fights back with pistols, arrows |
Marvel's Avengers film, you may have heard, divorced many millions of people around the world from their money this week. By all objective standards, including financial (it's already made about $450 million worldwide), and critical, (94% on Rotten Tomatoes) it's an overwhelming success, with reviewers calling it "The perfect comic book movie."
That's nice.
That's nice.
My friends I went with and I thought it was basically a giant dump. Granted, sometimes taking a dump can be highly enjoyable -- I don't want to brag or whatever, but I'm really pretty good at pooping myself -- but the end result is still a piece of shit no matter how you look at it. Or even worse, you sit there grinding it out it and pushing and can't even muster up a decent excretion for your troubles. I really, really wanted to poop this one out, so to speak. It's rare that I ever even go to a movie anymore,and I was willing to be thrilled by magic, but I just couldn't pull the pleasure trigger in my fantasy butthole. It wasn't for lack of effort.
While I certainly enjoyed decent chunks of this movie, particularly some of the Whedonesque quipping, which against all odds made me laugh out loud on occasion, eventually even that got old and predictable as the tension-releasing post-action-piece-larfs started to feel telegraphed. RED LIGHT ALARM. BOOP BOOP. HERE COMES A JOKE. BOOP BOOP. For large chunks of the movie it basically seemed like the Avengers doing a fan-fic version of a Buffy episode.
Keep in mind, however, that the movie was about 2.5 hours long. That leaves a lot of floppy baggage that could've been trimmed out. Maybe, I dunno, the part where they basically had to replace a light bulb on the aircraft carrier for 30 minutes, as I saw one commenter put it online.
The attempts at symbolism and "meaningful" drama were even more heavy-handed than the humor. "Do it for Phil YOU GUYS!" You remember Phil, that one affable super spy whose probably killed hundreds of people in his line of work.
How about "do it for the billions of people about to get attacked by an invading alien army?" That wasn't motivation enough to clock in for your job at the super hero emporium?
OK, how about Nazis, then? Would you get your ass in gear, uh, because Nazi? Just when I thought the most obvious symbolism in the movie couldn't have gotten any worse -- the Loki scene in Germany where he's making the people kneel and the old guy stands up to him to prove that humans have a defiant spirit or whatever -- Captain America actually explicitly explains it to us. "The last time a guy around here tried to get people to kneel..." Jesus, who didn't already pick up on that? Dumb people. This film's audience, i.e. everyone.
OK, how about Nazis, then? Would you get your ass in gear, uh, because Nazi? Just when I thought the most obvious symbolism in the movie couldn't have gotten any worse -- the Loki scene in Germany where he's making the people kneel and the old guy stands up to him to prove that humans have a defiant spirit or whatever -- Captain America actually explicitly explains it to us. "The last time a guy around here tried to get people to kneel..." Jesus, who didn't already pick up on that? Dumb people. This film's audience, i.e. everyone.
This is without question a movie for dumb people. Not because it's a comic book, I'm not saying that. I happen to be a huge comic book fan. In fact, the parts I enjoyed the most were the ones that reminded me of the comic books, like every time a shot was framed with the team standing in fight-ready poses about to jump into action. Chills. Ok, one time I got a little water in the eyes. But why did I like those? Not because of the quality of the movie, but because it reminded me of the images on the covers of the comics I used to read. I have a feeling a lot of people are mistaking their fondness for something else entirely for the relative merits of the film. It's not Avengers the movie that's getting such great reviews, it's our collective consciousness of Avengers-related personal experiences.
Which is how things are sold now, obviously. I remember that one board game Battleship. Haha, I played that as a kid. Fuck it, I'll go look at a screen for two hours and remember what it was like to be a kid again.
Battleship, as the preview before Avengers is eager to remind us, is just like Transformers, another Hasbro property. So too is Avengers, essentially Transformers with more likeable good guys. Giant alien robot thing smashes buildings up real good/ good guy makes a wise crack/pathos/repeat.
It's all those smashing buildings here, like in Transformers, or literally any other sci-fi action movie of late, that really tripped me up though. The thing that I can never really get past in movies like this is how outrageous the death count actually is, even though the filmmakers take pains not to show it to ensure a PG-13 rating. We see dozens of giant high-rises being demolished, cars flipping down crowded streets, planes and helicopters crashing etc etc. In short, brutal, massive carnage on an epic scale. More people die in this film than any other in recent memory. You just wouldn't know it because we don't see the bodies, just the things that the bodies are dying in as they crumple in massive explosions of twisted metal. Besides, who cares because that one funny guy in the shiny suit is ok.
In any world where almost anything that we see in a super hero film ever actually happened, the entire populace would be petrified and shell-shocked to the point of catatonia for the rest of their lives. Epic disasters all the time. Aliens invading. Gods exist. Imagine if you saw a giant skyscraper collapse with thousands of people inside, never mind entire swaths of the city leveled by alien fucking sky-snakes? Game over. All done. Mass suicide.
Yeah, yeah, it's a super hero movie. You're supposed to let stuff like that go, but for some reason that's the type of thing that I can't suspend my disbelief for. I'll buy flying aircraft carriers, but not completely ridiculous human reactions to the things they do. I said this same type of thing back around when the Star Trek reboot came out. The characters watch a billion people die when Vulcan is destroyed. A few minutes later we're back to really, really caring that that one dude whose name we know is not getting punched in the face. The characters are even making jokes again soon after. Dude, remember that planetary genocide? How can you ever show up to your space-job again? You should be shell-shocked for life, if not driven insane.
I agree they tried to make a few nods in the direction of the concern for civilians in Avengers, but I didn't buy it. Captain America evacuated like one store, so it's all good? Where did all the people of New York City actually go? It's not like the aliens were just attacking one block. And the news footage stuff at the end was played for bullshit feel good effect, I thought. Like, "oh man, that was a bad day, but we're inspired by heroes!" Not "life on earth will never be the same, the world is in shock."
I realize that if movies like this were more realistic they would all be horrific and maudlin, so I'm not sure what the solution is. Maybe don't make the stakes so high?
Then again, thousands of people die every day in horrible circumstances and we all manage to get by just fine through our personal lives without paying attention, so maybe I'm overestimating the what the reaction of the general populace should be in fictional tragedy. Someone, somewhere, is being brutally tortured to death right now as we speak in the real world, but I just saw something funny on the internet, so who gives a fuck really, right? Not my problem.
Still though, I liked it when the Hulk smashed shit. No joke. I remember when he used to smash shit all the time in my brain when I read comics as a kid. Things were great back then, therefore Avengers rules.
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8 comments:
Truth. People when I saw it were actually applauding when the portal thingy did its whole closing routine. I guess they were happy that the one-hour segment where they fight endless disposable goons had ended.
I THOUGHT IRON MAN MIGHT NOT MAKE IT BACK FROM SPACE
Loved your review, very good points. :)
Yeah? I think we can all agree that the biggest problem with any movie is because the previews are so long by the time the actual film starts you've already come down from the dome spinner you just smoked in the parking lot.
As a fellow childhood comic fan I just feel that live-action movies are never going to capture the aesthetic of the comics properly. With that in mind I watch comic-book films without any expectations for faithfulness to the original comic experience. Avengers was aiight - 6/10. Initially I said it was 20 minutes too long but my girlfriend just reminded me that I fell asleep for about 15 minutes of it so that makes for at least 35 superfluous minutes. I missed why the aliens actually wanted to invade. The Hulk was awesome though. (Worth noting that Joss Whedon wrote the initial run of the Amazing X-Men comic a few years ago and did a good job, he knows about comics.)
No way am I reading all of that! Joking, joking. It would be awesome if that shit was realistic. Human holocaust, millions dead, civilization knocked back to the middle ages. This huge green mofocka raping refugees and using Robert Downey Jr. as a buttplug. HULK HAVE NO MORAL COMPASS!!!
It's still better than the even shittier Spider-Man flicks. Tobey is a damn froot.
See, I would love that. Well, not love it, but it be more believable. We see that sort of thing all the time in zombie movies, and people still like those.
New Spider-Man looks good in theory.
@patrick agree pretty much
It was pretty depressing to listen to the crowd guffaw like a bunch of jackasses at every dumb joke this movie spit out.
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