The Avengers

The Avengers – Every year, I attend a couple big summer blockbuster films. Generally, I pick films that the critics claim to be hip, witty, and ironic – movies said to make light of genre conventions. Invariably, after these experiences, I stagger out of the Multiplex dismayed and depressed. Josh Whedon’s The Avengers, a comic book movie featuring an assortment of Marvel-franchise superheroes is the number one film in the country as I write these words. The picture is supposed to be a hoot, sophisticated and genre-bending. But, in fact, the thing is massively overlong, bombastic, deafening, and tedious. Nothing in the movie makes any sense at all – the plot involves a MacGuffin called a “tesseract” that the Norse god Loki has snatched from some kind of secret mountain-top laboratory. The MacGuffin is a cube of light that opens a portal in the sky. Metallic monsters and skyscraper-sized armored polliwogs drizzle down from the portal and attack Manhattan. There are lots of explosions and collapsing facades, but the whole thing is curiously abstract and non-violent. After the trauma of 9-11, we can be shown our cities imploding, our bridges falling, our streets upended and rolled like carpet, hurling Yellow cabs in all directions, but it seems to be streng Verboten to show any human carnage amidst all of this spectacular property damage. Post 9-11, blockbuster filmmakers can show the Twin Towers plunging to earth so long as it is made explicit that no people are killed or, even, injured in that cascade of fire, steel, and masonry. The bloodlessness of this architecturally destructive mayhem is matched by interminable fights between superheros and their adversaries that are absolutely without consequence – the protagonists get hurled through facades, brush themselves off, and, then, return to the fray, pitching their adversaries across the island to bowl down various girders, pillars, and pylons. Neither the heroes nor the bad guy villains can be injured or, even, much rumpled by these curious contests which are mostly one caped character throwing another actor similarly garbed like a discus across town. Since the combatants are apparently immortal, no one can get hurt and so nothing is at stake and, of course, the audience ultimately doesn’t care who gets thrown or where or why since the outcome is always the same – that is, no outcome at all. The camera is always moving, swooping, and skidding here and there, but most of the camera movements are meaningless, gratuitous motion for the purpose of motion. Most of the fight scenes are confusingly edited and consist of exceedingly short cuts – something getting broken, another angle of something breaking, someone somersaulting through the air, then, something getting broken again. The editing violates all rules of continuity and most of the time you have no idea who is being pitched across the street or why. About three-quarters of the film are shot in semi-darkness with the actors prancing around in front of ill-conceived and cluttered industrial sets – the shots are almost all monochrome, dim, and obviously designed to economize on the special effects. The final battle on the island of Manhattan is brightly lit and this sequence is obviously where the money was spent. The fight goes on and on, and about every five minutes, a sequence gels almost as if by accident and there may be 20 to 30 seconds of stunning coherently shot and edited action – one bravura sequence following the different combatants as they whirl through collapsing buildings, shifting points of view vertiginously between various heroes, is particularly exciting (it seems modeled after the sequence in one of Peter Jackson’s Tolkien movies in which an elf scales the limbs of a monstrous mammoth shaped creature and brings it to ground – a thrilling scene that is far better than anything in Whedon’s film). The characters mouth snarky insults to one another but what they say doesn’t make any dramatic sense – everyone speaks in harangue, bombastic quasi-Shakespearian comic-book diction, or one-liners. Robert Downey is funny as the Iron Man – he’s the only character who is even remotely likeable. Parts of the film are totally incomprehensible – for about forty minutes in the middle of the movie, the superheroes all turn on one another and battle among themselves, pitching each other hundreds of yards through the metal walls of a huge flying aircraft carrier. I have no idea why the protagonists began to duel among themselves – the chaotic fighting just begins, runs it course, and ends as abruptly as it started. As these kinds of pictures go, I suppose The Avengers is pretty good, post-modern, everything enclosed in knowing “quotation marks’ – but, in the end, all that you get are the quotation marks; they don’t bracket anything and, as soon as you notice them, some idiot in a cape picks them up and throws them about a thousand yards like a javelin or a football.