Marvel's The Avengers: an exercise (pt.1)
...In how much of a movie I can remember after having seen it twice in as many days. XD
That is, one of the odd things I noticed about this film is how much of it I retained afterward (I am not one of those people who have a movie quote ready for every occasion). It's well-paced, yes -- but also organized, like Whedon drew a picture and left the blue guide lines in. I find myself using the thing itself as a memory palace (which, again, not standard modus operandi at all), sticking Post-It note observations under the mental equivalent of an iMovie timeline.
What I meant when I said The Avengers succeeded qua comic book is pretty simple, actually: most superhero movies are origin stories, because you're introducing the character to a general audience. So you go for standard hero's quest archetype, bildungsroman. Statistically speaking, though, most comics aren't origin stories. You know who the supers are, there's usually a whole team of them, and at some point they beat up a supervillain with their powers which is meant to be quite thrilling and satisfying. Or they fight each other, for REASONS(tm), which is meant to be especially thrilling and satisfying but would be awful if the situation were real. A lot of the time the book is trying to be both an ongoing narrative with evolving relationships and psychology, and a reset button that gets pushed every time someone's dastardly plan is foiled. Also, superheroes don't make sense, especially if you group them together: they seem completely weird and ridiculous.
In aggregate, I can dip into comics quite deeply, but I can't ever be fully invested in them like I can be in A. Random Shounen Manga that at least moves linearly forward always. At the same time, though, the things are fuelled by paradox.
All this is pretty much true of The Avengers. It is also a very carefully tuned movie, but it is fine-tuned to take the actual comic book formula and make it succeed in a different medium. And it does! There's a formula plot that carries you through, and then in each of the "single issues," character A matches up against character B - physical, psychological. Sometimes they don't fight! And sometimes it's a three-way!
So I said I'd analyze the movie matchup by matchup. XD Maybe at the end I'll draw a chart.
INTRO: some aliens plan to attack the Earth. This is pretty hokey and (because the credits are at the end) the movie equivalent of the dead zone right as you enter the supermarket, where they don't put goods because your eyes are adjusting and you won't see them. Anyhow. There are some aliens, they will be back.
SHIELD 1/LOKI 1: Loki takes the Tesseract, Hawkeye, and Dr. Selveig. Plot setup, intro to the SHIELD characters, establishes Loki as a badass villain which is why there is a car chase and mass detonations. The car chase part is not very absorbing, actually, because he has to get away or there is no movie. XD;
SHIELD 2: Black Widow (Hawkeye vs Black Widow 1). I have got the order of this right, right? This is Natasha's intro, she is written as Whedon Action Girl rather but still 4,901 times better than Iron Man 2, in which she's hobbled by having to play a sexy secretary. Also - can I make a sidebar? - there were some weird editing choices in that movie. When Tony and "Natalie" get a moment together, they mostly just stare assessingly at each other, which is realistic but makes for poor cinema. Either Scarlett Johansson didn't mesh well with Jon Favreau's improv-heavy style, or the character didn't - I can see either.
Putting Hawkeye there because this is in fact the first character moment, laying out the relationship between Natasha, Clint, and Coulson. (The rule this movie most consistently follows is that it shows the viewer, but never tells them what they just saw - "Your arc reactor runs off the same kind of energy!" "We may seem different, but deep down we are surprisingly alike!" etc. It doesn't have time to.)
Bruce Banner vs. Black Widow 1. Tense, funny, now funny-tense. The Natasha-Bruce face-off is interesting: Natasha is terrified of the Hulk, not just wary, and she's barely holding it together here. At the same time, something about Bruce speaks to her (resigned stoic to resigned stoic?), and you get the feeling she genuinely would prefer to do well by him. Bruce thinks she is bullshit, and SHIELD is bullshit, and Natasha is right to be terrified because he is actually very angry - but also accepting that the bullshit is going to happen whether he likes it or not.
SHIELD 3: Nick Fury vs. SEELE (ok no but...). The first dismissal of sentiment ("War is not won by ____"). It's an interesting leitmotiv in the script, because it's set up to be contradicted but isn't. Thor can't save Loki with affection, and Nick Fury is unapologetically grey hat and spends the rest of the movie Gendou Ikari-ing it up. If there is a conclusion implied there, it's "...nor is it won by cutting yourself off from sentiment, because true conviction is of the heart."
(Nick Fury vs.) Captain America 1. Both Nick Fury and Loki define Captain America as a soldier. They're not wrong, if primarily because soldiering is (as Steve states himself) the only aspect of the world that seems comfortingly familiar, and in between the end of the last movie and this one, Fury got himself accepted as his commanding officer. He shows up with a mission, playing the HYDRA tech angle, also for maximum familiarity. But watch that leitmotiv.
An interesting device: all the Avengers get a full briefing packet on all the other Avengers, so in most cases they meet each other not only with preconceived notions (or careful lack thereof), but with preconceived angles of approach. Again, you're not told what these are, but you see them in action.
Coulson vs. Tony Stark 1 / Tony and Pepper 1. Tony is the one who does this the most. Tony over-prepares, because SHIELD's negging really, hilariously worked. Possibly it's a meta-callback to RDJ's strategy for getting the Iron Man role -- "Over-prepare to a ridiculous extent, then bowl everyone over with the unstoppable force of my personality."
(Another sidebar: RDJ doesn't show up as Tony Stark to red carpets, so much as he shows up as "Tony Stark" - in the same sense that Tony Stark shows up to events as "Tony Stark." I find this entirely sensible of both of them: any intelligent person would need to develop an alter ego, not to get through these things, but to enjoy them. You have to become a person who enjoys them. If you already have an alter ego tailor made for the purpose, why the hell not? Remember this about Tony Stark: there is no such thing as an extroverted roboticist.)
Part 2.
I have figured out how to add the footer on a crosspost! Go me! /rollsalot (Original post is here: http://petronia.dreamwidth.org/40923.html)
That is, one of the odd things I noticed about this film is how much of it I retained afterward (I am not one of those people who have a movie quote ready for every occasion). It's well-paced, yes -- but also organized, like Whedon drew a picture and left the blue guide lines in. I find myself using the thing itself as a memory palace (which, again, not standard modus operandi at all), sticking Post-It note observations under the mental equivalent of an iMovie timeline.
What I meant when I said The Avengers succeeded qua comic book is pretty simple, actually: most superhero movies are origin stories, because you're introducing the character to a general audience. So you go for standard hero's quest archetype, bildungsroman. Statistically speaking, though, most comics aren't origin stories. You know who the supers are, there's usually a whole team of them, and at some point they beat up a supervillain with their powers which is meant to be quite thrilling and satisfying. Or they fight each other, for REASONS(tm), which is meant to be especially thrilling and satisfying but would be awful if the situation were real. A lot of the time the book is trying to be both an ongoing narrative with evolving relationships and psychology, and a reset button that gets pushed every time someone's dastardly plan is foiled. Also, superheroes don't make sense, especially if you group them together: they seem completely weird and ridiculous.
In aggregate, I can dip into comics quite deeply, but I can't ever be fully invested in them like I can be in A. Random Shounen Manga that at least moves linearly forward always. At the same time, though, the things are fuelled by paradox.
All this is pretty much true of The Avengers. It is also a very carefully tuned movie, but it is fine-tuned to take the actual comic book formula and make it succeed in a different medium. And it does! There's a formula plot that carries you through, and then in each of the "single issues," character A matches up against character B - physical, psychological. Sometimes they don't fight! And sometimes it's a three-way!
So I said I'd analyze the movie matchup by matchup. XD Maybe at the end I'll draw a chart.
INTRO: some aliens plan to attack the Earth. This is pretty hokey and (because the credits are at the end) the movie equivalent of the dead zone right as you enter the supermarket, where they don't put goods because your eyes are adjusting and you won't see them. Anyhow. There are some aliens, they will be back.
SHIELD 1/LOKI 1: Loki takes the Tesseract, Hawkeye, and Dr. Selveig. Plot setup, intro to the SHIELD characters, establishes Loki as a badass villain which is why there is a car chase and mass detonations. The car chase part is not very absorbing, actually, because he has to get away or there is no movie. XD;
SHIELD 2: Black Widow (Hawkeye vs Black Widow 1). I have got the order of this right, right? This is Natasha's intro, she is written as Whedon Action Girl rather but still 4,901 times better than Iron Man 2, in which she's hobbled by having to play a sexy secretary. Also - can I make a sidebar? - there were some weird editing choices in that movie. When Tony and "Natalie" get a moment together, they mostly just stare assessingly at each other, which is realistic but makes for poor cinema. Either Scarlett Johansson didn't mesh well with Jon Favreau's improv-heavy style, or the character didn't - I can see either.
Putting Hawkeye there because this is in fact the first character moment, laying out the relationship between Natasha, Clint, and Coulson. (The rule this movie most consistently follows is that it shows the viewer, but never tells them what they just saw - "Your arc reactor runs off the same kind of energy!" "We may seem different, but deep down we are surprisingly alike!" etc. It doesn't have time to.)
Bruce Banner vs. Black Widow 1. Tense, funny, now funny-tense. The Natasha-Bruce face-off is interesting: Natasha is terrified of the Hulk, not just wary, and she's barely holding it together here. At the same time, something about Bruce speaks to her (resigned stoic to resigned stoic?), and you get the feeling she genuinely would prefer to do well by him. Bruce thinks she is bullshit, and SHIELD is bullshit, and Natasha is right to be terrified because he is actually very angry - but also accepting that the bullshit is going to happen whether he likes it or not.
SHIELD 3: Nick Fury vs. SEELE (ok no but...). The first dismissal of sentiment ("War is not won by ____"). It's an interesting leitmotiv in the script, because it's set up to be contradicted but isn't. Thor can't save Loki with affection, and Nick Fury is unapologetically grey hat and spends the rest of the movie Gendou Ikari-ing it up. If there is a conclusion implied there, it's "...nor is it won by cutting yourself off from sentiment, because true conviction is of the heart."
(Nick Fury vs.) Captain America 1. Both Nick Fury and Loki define Captain America as a soldier. They're not wrong, if primarily because soldiering is (as Steve states himself) the only aspect of the world that seems comfortingly familiar, and in between the end of the last movie and this one, Fury got himself accepted as his commanding officer. He shows up with a mission, playing the HYDRA tech angle, also for maximum familiarity. But watch that leitmotiv.
An interesting device: all the Avengers get a full briefing packet on all the other Avengers, so in most cases they meet each other not only with preconceived notions (or careful lack thereof), but with preconceived angles of approach. Again, you're not told what these are, but you see them in action.
Coulson vs. Tony Stark 1 / Tony and Pepper 1. Tony is the one who does this the most. Tony over-prepares, because SHIELD's negging really, hilariously worked. Possibly it's a meta-callback to RDJ's strategy for getting the Iron Man role -- "Over-prepare to a ridiculous extent, then bowl everyone over with the unstoppable force of my personality."
(Another sidebar: RDJ doesn't show up as Tony Stark to red carpets, so much as he shows up as "Tony Stark" - in the same sense that Tony Stark shows up to events as "Tony Stark." I find this entirely sensible of both of them: any intelligent person would need to develop an alter ego, not to get through these things, but to enjoy them. You have to become a person who enjoys them. If you already have an alter ego tailor made for the purpose, why the hell not? Remember this about Tony Stark: there is no such thing as an extroverted roboticist.)
Part 2.
I have figured out how to add the footer on a crosspost! Go me! /rollsalot (Original post is here: http://petronia.dreamwidth.org/40923.html)