The Avengers

[brushwolf]

What we have is basically a fun movie with some incredibly brilliant characterization and what's largely a washout plot.

The good parts;

• They show the SHIELD carrier. And not just the lumpy streamlined ugh that got drawn a lot as the SHIELD carrier, but the SHIELD carrier made as believable as possible by everything modern CG has to offer.
  
  
• They use the SHIELD carrier. That everyone's on board basically a huge flying ship is a batch of plot in the movie. That is of itself awesome. If that was on the shelf, I would look at those 4 issues longingly and if they were pencilled by John Romita Jr. or someone else I really think is awesome I'd buy them.
  
  
• Bigass superhero fights. You get the Avengers versus hordes of random goons which is awesome to watch. Random goons in comics should still look cool, and these guys did.
  
  
• Bigass superhero fights. You get the Avengers beating each other up, which is incredibly awesome. Part of the sheer joy of comics is that eventually you start wondering about the heros going head to head with each other. Writers then need to jump through hoops engineering just why Daredevil would wind up fighting Ghost Rider or whatever. A writer who can pull that off without being too clumsy has just been really cool. The writers got big fights between Thor and Cap and Iron Man and Hulk without being too clumsy. Really, really cool.
  
  
• Characterization. SHIELD does occupy that eh-are-these-dudes-really-the-good-guys niche that they did in a batch of comics. While this is problematic (see below), it means we get to see Samuel Jackson be not the good guy. It means that instead of Jackson being the sympathetic Black muthafucka who muthafucking shows up and muthafucking says fuck a lot, it means Jackson gets to be this really smart, backstabbing, vicious bastard who nevertheless is a ridiculous idealist in some ways. That's a lot more fun, and I think the guy's earned it.
  
  
• Characterization. Captain America actually gets stuff to do. Cap actually has skills that the rest of the group doesn't have (they're great on superscience and flailing away and taunting bad guys and jumping around, but none of them sunk points into tactics...). The first scene where Cap shows up really establishes him as someone from the 1940s. The guy actually has a personality and I don't hate him. This qualifies as cool.
  
  
• Characterization. Okay, I sorta knew Stark was going to steal the show (he does). I sorta hoped Hulk would steal the show, and he does. Hulk is pretty much the ultimate Marvel character in that the superhero yelling in fist fights aspect is only the flip side of some adrenaline from some angsty dude processing his issues, which is great, but it means it's too easy for Banner to be written less interesting and if that happens then the only appeal to Hulk is that he's big and yells and hits things (there is a lot of appeal to big and yells and hits things). This? Banner is charming and smart and likable. This movie puts the two smart guys - Stark the engineer and Banner the scientist - in the same place, and I didn't come away thinking either got favoritism. Did I mention that there's some really cool character stuff in this movie?
  
  
• Kickass surprise ending 1. Kickass surprise ending 2 is nice, but 1 is one of the most badass "you guys wondering what might happen in a sequel?" moments ever.

The bad basically breaks down to plot I can't care about in a lot of places;

• Alien invasion. After getting to see so much cool fights, actually having the aliens show up in NYC actually loses most of its punch. Okay, issue 10 just hit the store, it was sort of cool I guess.
  
  
• Loki. Okay, so comics-Loki is never going to be mythology-Loki, but it grates to have one of European mythology's greatest gadflies simplified to a standard issue "freedom is bad, kneel before Zod" Lawful Evil baddies. The overwhelming drive Loki has in Thor to finally claim legitimacy in Asgard isn't here and instead you get this bad case of Anakin Skywalker. Worse, Loki isn't a physical villain, so as much as it isn't a payoff to see The Odinson lay the beatdown on his brother, it's even less of a payoff to see other powerful types with less history beat the crap out of him.
  
  
• Usually I don't dig on the whole liberal "look at the bigoted assumptions!" but dude. There is like, one Black person in this entire universe, apparently. One.
  
  
• Okay, so it is flimsy to go from point A where the heros hate each other and stuff in ruins, to point B where they're suiting up to fight aliens together. But hey. It makes the movie work. I can forgive that one.
  
  
• SHIELD's eh-not-really-good-guy status means it's very hard to care about 'em. The most extreme part of this is that a big plot point has one of SHIELD's regulars dying. This isn't "oh man! That asshole killed an off-duty Coast Guardsman!" it's "oh. Some guy just killed one of the TSA asswipes." Yeah, dude, your hyper-wonderful-materiel is getting wrecked and a batch of SHIELD guys might die. So what? Can you think of all the schools you could fund with that money? Similarly, after the past year, I just don't fucking care about the poor NYPD guys getting endangered. Similarly, Black Widow and Hawkeye? I don't really care about 'em. They're the same ultra-supra-cool-elite-clandestine-operator-badasses I've seen in a b'jillion comics. Honestly Black Widow seems to be in there because Every Super Team Has A Chick.
  
  
• So the movie's big fatality is one of the SHIELD dudes, but there's another plot point that should tragically kill off one of our big name heros. This amazing huge thing. There's even this ridiculously tragic little tiny personal touch in there. Heck, you could even kill the character off comic style, with lots of chance of coming back. And they totally pull that punch. Dude, no. Spock's answer to the Kobayashi Maru test was so emotionally resonant because Spock doesn't make it. (See comic book death, above. It still counts.) Pulling back on that one loses all emotional resonance. The movie had me at a point where potentially I might really be emotionally worked up over a fictional superhero dying and then oh hey, don't worry, the character was never really doing anything like serious after all, let's go grab some food as long as we're in Manhattan.