Finally, The Avengers!

Warning. This film has been out long enough for me to not worry about revealing spoilers, which I do freely in my review. If you are one of the few people who haven't seen it yet, just keep in mind, I hold nothing back.

I'm probably one of the last people on the planet to see The Avengers (2012). Usually even a very popular film and especially one so "hyped" as this one has been contains a few flaws, but frankly, I couldn't find any. The Avengers just rocked.

I actually wasn't worried about the action sequences because the Marvel films know how to do action. I was worried about continuity, plot holes, and an imbalance in characterization. It's tough to get that many different lead characters into one film and not favor just one or two. The various Star Trek: The Next Generation films such as Star Trek: First Contact (1996) carry this flaw. Typically Picard and Data take the lead and all of the other characters play second fiddle.

I was worried that, in the case of the Avengers, Tony Stark/Iron Man (played by Robert Downey, Jr.) would dominate the screen since he seems to be the strongest personality. Fortunately, I was wrong. I was wrong, happily wrong, about a lot of things.

Of all of the Marvel films about each of these individual heroes, I'd have to say the Avengers was the strongest of them all.

I only saw the film a few hours ago, so I'm still trying to put the experience back together again in my head. The film is long (official running time 143 minutes) and there's almost no let up in the action. Even when a scene involves more dialog, there's usually a lot going on with various verbal gags and it's tough to keep up with all of the changes.

I was worried about teamwork between the actors and having their roles "compete" with one another, but at only happened within the context of their characters. It stands to reason that as strong individualists, it would be difficult to get Captain America, Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, the Black Widow, and Hawkeye to merge as a unified fighting team and this is exactly how it was played. They fought more among each other during the first half of the film than they did against their primary antagonist Loki. Of course Hawkeye was off the hero list for the first half of the film, having been compromised by Loki, but Jeremy Renner still played him as a brilliant tactician in addition to his role as archer/assassin. He very nearly brings down SHIELD's flying headquarters (literally).

The film also showcased Natasha Romanoff's (played by the beautiful and talented Scarlett Johansson) vulnerable side, which never meant that any part of her was weak. However she got to be human in this film. The relationship between her and Barton/Hawkeye was explained with relative brevity but enough that it was satisfying. I'm glad that the Black Widow and Hawkeye were played as both strong, skilled, and highly intelligent. The original relationship between them in the early 1960s Tales of Suspense comic books (which first featured Iron Man before he got his own title) was highly unbalanced, with her as the femme fatale Soviet spy and him as the angry, misguided, not particularly bright, but still heroic archer. It really didn't work as a romance. The only thing here that I wasn't convinced about was that Johansson's Black Widow was actually Russian. She's like an American spy who happened to know Russian but who was best as kicking ass.

In spite of or maybe even because of his role as the classic "good guy" hero, Captain America emerged as the leader of the Avengers. No mean feat given the dominance Downey brings to the role of Stark/Iron Man. By the time the main battle with the "army from hell" begins in New York City, you can believe it when Cap starts giving orders and everyone lets him take the lead. I was afraid the film makers wouldn't "get it" and ignore this very vital part of Cap's involvement with the Avengers in the comic books, but amazingly, Hollywood got it right.

Thor's appearance caught me a little by surprise at first since, with Bifrost having been destroyed at the climax of the Thor (2011) film, he was effectively trapped in Asgard. However, a short bit of dialog between Thor and Loki and the problem was solved and without seeming too quick and cheap. From that point on, the God of Thunder was present and accounted for as part of the "Avengers initiative." However, if there was a single hero in the film who I didn't connect to quite as well as the others, I'd have to say it was Thor. I don't know exactly way. His whole "this planet is under my protection" role didn't quite "make it" with me for some reason.

Speaking of gods, I rather liked that the film makers allowed Captain America to retain a faith in God. It was only expressed in a single line of dialog, but it's completely consistent with who Steve Rogers would be given that he is an American raised in the 1920s and 30s. Being flash frozen for 70 years and reanimated in the 21st century wouldn't automatically turn him into a politically correct, culturally consistent icon of our morally relativistic world. The conversation between Cap and Phil Coulson confirmed that now, more than ever, we need a basic, foundational hero like Captain America. We may think we've gained a lot since the middle of the 20th century, but we've lost a lot, too.

The Hulk. Mark Ruffalo played both Bruce Banner and (wearing a motion capture suit) the Incredible Hulk. Of the three versions of the Hulk in film, Ang Lee's miserable failure (2003), the subsequent Incredible Hulk (2008), and his current incarnation in the Avengers' film, Ruffalo's Banner/Hulk is the best. That's saying a lot since Edward Norton is a brilliant actor who throws just about everything into not only his characters, but the films they appear in (to the point of continually rewriting/reinventing the films), but Ruffalo brought his vision of both Banner and the Hulk into the Avengers.

I remember reading that during the filming of the "Hulk" scenes in the Incredible Hulk TV series (1978-1982), Bixby refused to watch those sequences because he wanted to be able to react as Banner with true surprise and shock at the aftermath of the destruction caused by the Hulk. Obviously, Ruffalo chose a different path and it really works. Even the Hulk's face resembles Ruffalo's and you can see the personality that is shared between Banner and the Hulk. This is especially important when the Hulk is expected to act as part of the team since otherwise, he's just a mindless engine of destruction. However, Ruffalo plays the Hulk as both exceptionally dangerous to his allies while also somehow accepting them as his allies (although the Black Widow didn't fare so well in her first encounter with the Hulk and even Thor didn't escape the Hulk's "grudge" during the battle in New York).

It was just slightly overly sentimental when Agent Phil Coulson ended up playing the part of "the gipper." I understood that his death was to be the final inspiration that brings the Avengers together as a team (although only Tony, Steve, and Natasha would have been aware of it), but it did represent a small weakness in how the film was developed. It's only just a little schmaltzy though and was only a tiny blip of an issue in an otherwise overwhelmingly brilliant film.

I do have to give actor Clark Gregg (Coulson) his due. Often overlooked as a bit of comedy relief in the other Marvel films, he was truly "badass" when facing down Loki single-handedly, with only an experimental weapon he had no idea would even work. It was almost unfair that he had to die, but once he's gone, you suddenly realize how much you loved him.

Tom Hiddleston continues to be amazing in the role of Loki. He is wonderfully evil but with an apparent "monkey on his back" which is particularly noticeable in the beginning of the film. Who did give him his army anywhere and what sort of deal did he make in exchange for the technology of the tesseract and rule over Earth? We don't find out until the end of the film (past the credits) and if you weren't a Marvel comic book fan from the 1970s or later, you'd have no idea of what the scene really meant or why that big, ugly guy smiled at the mention of "death."

Loki lives on to fight another day, but it took the Hulk to bring him down in a scene that had the audience cheering.

So much happened in The Avengers so fast that I know I missed a great deal. This is one of those films that you have to see again and again, not only to keep the adrenaline rush going, but to try and catch all of the subtle details that you couldn't possibly have picked up on during a single viewing.

If by some miracle, you haven't seen this movie yet, I can't recommend it highly enough. Most films are never quite as good as the previews and trailers make them seem, but The Avengers was even better. It's a super hero classic.

Addendum: I know I didn't mention Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, but this review is long enough. If you want to find out more, see the movie.

DVD Review of Captain America: The First Avenger

It wasn't bad. It wasn't bad at all. I think Chris Evans turned in a pretty good performance as "Cap", allaying my fears that he'd play Steve Rogers in the same crappy manner as he did Johnny Storm in both lousy Fantastic Four movies (2005 and 2007 respectively).

By the way, if you haven't seen the film yet and want to be surprised, stop reading now. I'm jumping right into some major spoilers. Here we go.

I was initially dubious about changing Bucky from a teenage sidekick to a "big brother" character, but there'd be no way to realistically introduce a 14 year old onto a World War II European battlefield. The main point of Bucky anyway is to provide Cap with plenty of guilt and post-war angst over how he should have prevented Bucky's death, but didn't. In that sense though, the separation between the time of Bucky's death and Cap's going into deep freeze diminishes the impact (at least as far as I could tell). If Bucky had died just seconds before Cap crashed the plane, it would have been the last, horrible thought on Steve's mind when he was flash frozen and the very first when he woke up almost 70 years later. Oh well.

I thought the pre-Cap Steve Rogers was handled pretty well. The film was a little light on why Steve wanted to enlist so much or for that matter, why he was always so courageous, even when getting the living snot beaten out of him, though. After getting a brief look at his medical records early in the film and noticing he had heart problems, I'm a little surprised the repeated beatings he alluded to didn't put him in the hospital or even kill him. It's one thing to be a 98-pound weakling with asthma and another to be extremely medically fragile.

I know Director Joe Johnston wanted the character of Captain America to be less about being a patriotic symbol and more about how nice guys make better heroes, but Cap is all about being the American hero at a time when we are all about symbolic inspiration to help us endure the sacrifices of war. I found Steve, both before and after his transformation, to be a little too humble. Captain America is a decisive leader of men. His character started developing in that direction but Evans never took it quite far enough. To be fair though, it's a difficult balance to strike between being heroic and always being portrayed as a "nice guy" (as opposed to an arrogant ass like the guy Colonel Phillips [Tommy Lee Jones] wanted to put through the experiment).

I still can't believe that douche politician turned Cap into some sort of cheesy performer. How many millions of dollars were poured into the experiment to turn Steve into a Super Soldier and yet, his only options were being a lab rat or a USO actor? What a waste of resources. I'm stunned the military went along with it. I suppose this was the only way Johnston could figure out how to put Steve in a red, white, and blue outfit in the ETO (European Theater of Operations) and then get him into action. I still wish he'd have found another way to do this.

I loved how Dum Dum Dugan, Gabe Jones, and the rest of the Howling Commandos (minus Sgt. Fury for continuity reasons) became Cap's "team". In the 1960s Marvel comic books, Cap would sometimes team up with Fury and the "Howlers" for one mission or the other. I didn't expect this and it was a welcome addition to the film.

I did expect Howard Stark to be in the film and he was depicted in a way that it's easy to see why Tony ended up being such a womanizing, arrogant playboy. Like father, like son. I was a little surprised at a few of the "miniaturized" devices Stark was able to create in an age when vacuum tubes had yet to be replaced by transistors (which were still bulky but allowed Marvel to justify the comic book Tony Stark creating the Iron Man armor in 1963). I thought the levitating car (even if it didn't work) was a little over the top. It's much more "real" to imagine Howard being part of the Manhattan Project and creating "the bomb".

The whole Steve Rogers/Peggy Carter relationship was interesting if expected. They never really "hooked up" (and for that matter, never got to that dance Steve had promised her), but they were really hung up with each other (sometimes to Peggy's surprise), adding the required "romantic relationship" to movies like this. I found myself wondering that if Steve didn't know how to talk to a woman and had never danced with one (because he was so puny at first and then too busy as Cap later on), what else had he "never done" with a woman? Does this mean Steve Rogers wakes up in the 21st century still a virgin? Maybe the Black Widow would be able to help him out later on. Either that, or Peggy's granddaughter or great-granddaughter (Sharon Carter AKA Agent 13 is bound to make an appearance sometime or another) will finish what Peggy started.

There is one, really big plot hole (not the only one, but I can live with the others). Why did Steve have to "die" at the end of the film in order to save New York from the Red Skull's "doomsday" plane? He'd already exited and re-entered the plane in flight by using one of the on-board "mini-planes". Couldn't he have just set the big plane into a dive and then escaped using one of the smaller modules? This was pointed out with great panache by the gang at How It Should Have Ended.



When the Cosmic Cube "short circuited" or whatever it did when it "ate" the Red Skull (great job by Hugo Weaving, by the way), Cap should have "discovered" that the energy discharge destroyed the mini-planes or fused the controls that opened the bomb bay doors or something, but it was just overlooked by Johnston. Steve didn't have to die/get frozen at the end of the film.

In spite of my bitching, I really enjoyed the movie overall. It wasn't exactly what I would have expected out of Captain America, but it was still good. Musical score had a hard time trying to figure out if it wanted to be 1940s nostalgia or modern hero theme music. Credits at the end (none at the beginning of the film at all) were straight up lame. The end and then the real end (after all the final credits) were good, which brings me to my last point.

Captain America and the Avengers. In the 1960s Avengers comic books, there was no one, permanent leader. Each Avenger took a monthly rotation as far as leading the team. Having said that, whenever Cap was around (and always when he was leading Quicksilver, the Scarlet Witch, and Hawkeye), he ended up being the de facto leader and the unofficial "heart" of the Avengers. Nice guy aside, even when he was the weakest member of the team, having no "real" superpowers, he always had the soul and the vision of a leader. He was used to being obeyed instantly, not because he was some kind of dictator, but because he was just that good at taking command, sizing up every combat situation, and taking decisive action in deploying his "forces". In the Silver Age comics, this was pointed out again and again by the other team members. I hope that he gets to fulfill that destiny in the upcoming Avengers (2012) film as well.

Unfortunately, based on the trailers I've seen so far, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is more likely to dominate any screen time he shares with Rogers (Evans) and Cap will just be another guy in a costume, probably more spectacular than Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) but trailing behind the other Avengers (the Black Widow will attract more attention only because she's played by the very beautiful Scarlett Johansson - yowza!).

Back to the current review, I would definitely watch this film again...and again and again. It's not perfect, but it's still Captain America. In an age where we have no one to look up to anymore, we need an American hero like Cap.