"Avengers Assemble" Review
Avengers Assemble (2012)
Spoiler-free review, as always. (Though there may be some mild spoilers for Lord Of The Rings.)
I must admit that I was initially rather sceptical about this one. How hyped people were for this film must have some relation to how familiar they are with the comics and how much they enjoyed the past five Marvel Studios movies. For me that comes to "not at all" and "middling to good levels of enjoyment", so I wasn't exactly buzzing with excitement. When everyone else started raving about it though, you can be damn sure I was keen to see what I was missing.
I'm much more familiar with the comics for "Spider-Man" (who looks like he might finally get a movie suitable to my era of the comics). Also, while I've not read much in the way of Batman comics, I've grown up with the Burton and Schumacher's movies and Christopher Nolan's take on Batman has generally seemed the nearest to taking on what I view as the greatest superhero movie of all time: "Superman - The Movie" (1978).
It seems like I must be one of the few people for whom Avengers was the least exciting prospect out of the three big superhero movies being released this year. I'm not familiar with the comics and the movies have sometimes been under-par. The Incredible Hulk mainly bored me, with Liv Tyler's performance being characteristically bland. Edward Norton's performance seemed quite impressive, but whenever he turned into the Hulk I found I lost interest. After hearing some pretty lacklustre reports on "Iron Man 2" I found it remarkably entertaining on DVD. In the cinema I found Thor to also be a pretty entertaining film, but once again it was just light entertainment and "Thor" seemed undermined by the release of Matthew Vaughn's "X-Men: First Class". I intended to see "Captain America" in the cinema, but when I tried they were only showing it in 3D. I'm glad I waited til DVD because I found it be a big disappointment.
Thankfully it seems that, of all the five preceding movies, you don't really need to see the Captain America one. His backstory is fairly thoroughly recapped through flashbacks. On the other hand, without the Thor movie you are probably going to be a bit lost. I was VERY surprised how true this movie was to the Incredible Hulk movie, even filling us in on a scene that was cut from that film (which you can see here). In spite of the change in actor and the poor reception of the Incredible Hulk movie, this doesn't appear to be a complete ret-con.
The opening of "Avengers Assemble" (that's the UK title of the Avengers movie. That's the title I had thrown at me when I watched the film, so you must suffer the ridiculousness of it too) is rather cool with some strange aliens making their evil designs on planet Earth known before the film cuts to some more familiar characters. Sadly after that the opening begins to feel a bit rushed. Having a scene at the beginning which is best described as "all hell breaks loose" isn't the best way to start a film. Also, I'm still not entirely convinced that Samuel L. Jackson really feels at home in these films, with this opening scene being the first time when he's really had anything to do. I found myself feeling Whedon (as both director AND writer) would have better off leaving this scene to the now beloved Agent Coulson. (The only films he hasn't been in are Incredible Hulk and Captain America, my two least favourites. Coincidence? I think not!)
After the initial scene though we are gradually re-introduced to our superheroes from the previous films. Iron Man seems to be written specifically so that he doesn't end up hogging the screen, but Thor is absolutely fantastic and becomes my favourite element of the film. While all the characters are from such diverse backgrounds, no one is more out of place than Thor. This makes it absolutely perfect that it is his brother who is causing all the trouble, making him not only an outsider but an indispensable part of the team. The way Whedon plays with the connections and conflicts between the characters is part of what makes the film so much fun.
My other favourite however, was Black Widow. Now this shouldn't be too much of a surprise seeing as I reckoned that Black Widow's fight scene in Iron Man 2 had been possibly the most exciting action scene from the Marvel Studio movies so far, outdoing anything from "Thor" or "Captain America". However, Whedon manages to use very little time to build up a very intriguing background for her character. This is particularly impressive considering that this film centres around four different well established superhero protagonists while she previous had very little revealed to her in a movie about just one. Still, to give credit to the creators of Iron Man 2, she was intentionally left enigmatic in that film. Now that the gaps have been somewhat filled however, we can tell that she's not only a kick ass hero in her own right but also a pretty complex character which I, for one, am pretty eager to see explored in her own specific movie now.
All the best heroines are ginger. Clearly. :)
Perhaps what makes this movie great, however, is Loki. Thinking about this, I think "Avengers Assemble" actually outdoes Lord Of The Rings here. Now I definitely need to qualify this. I think the "Lord of the Rings" movies were overrated, but that's not the point. The point is that the character of Saruman in the books has a quality not unlike the main power of Loki in "Avengers Assemble". Saruman's power lies in his manipulation of words. That is why Wormtongue turns out to be his sidekick. Even when Saruman finds himself trapped in the tower with his armies defeated, he is still undefeated because with the right choice of words he can still turn his aggressors into followers. It takes Gandalf winning a war of words with Saruman for his defeat to be complete. This was clearly seen as too ambitious for the movie so that aspect was left out.
Here in "Avengers Assemble" Loki's schemes no longer feel back-to-front and convoluted like they did in "Thor". Instead every single thing Loki says is manipulative and calculated and there's a sense that at any point Loki is always directing the flow of emotions or events, even when (or perhaps especially when) another character begins the conversation believing that they have the upper hand. Loki in "Avengers Assemble" uses language in the way that apparently Saruman in the "Lord Of The Rings" movies could not. That should be a real source of pride for this film.
Loki is also responsible for a term of abuse that puts the movie's age rating somewhat into question. It's in somewhat archaic language but with the two Asgardian brothers speaking in semi-Shakespearean language anyway, it didn't fail to shock me. On the one hand it was good to see that the bad guy could genuinely repulse me in a way that superhero bad guys rarely do, but on the other hand this level of bad language from Loki made all the more obvious the lack of any bad language from the central band of misfits. Sam L. Jackson as Nick Fury in particular feels like he should occasionally refer to something with the word motherf---er.
While the character interactions were fantastic, I don't think the overall plot was particularly stellar. This is a fantastic piece of silly fun and it's finally returned us to the quality level of "Iron Man" only this time with a much bigger budget and some absolutely breathtaking CGI (including by far the best CG-animation for the Hulk). However, I still don't think this is on the same level of Nolan's Batman films and, I must admit, out of the two recent Whedon writing credits, I definitely preferred "Cabin In The Woods". Still this was a fantastic bit of silly fun escapism and it had all the elements to be fully enjoyable film. The different elements of the film tied together well, the characters were well-defined, the action always made clear what was at stake and kept me invested and I was certainly never bored.
Is this the best superhero movie so far? Frankly... no. That honour still belongs to "Superman - The Movie". Is this better than the Nolan Batman films? Once again, I don't think so. (That said, I wonder whether a more memorable theme helps those films feel weightier for me. While I didn't think of it at the cinema, a number of critics have noted not being impressed by the theme music for "Avengers Assemble" and I have to say that it did give the film a bit of a generic-superhero-movie feel.) But outside of those? Yeah, I think this is probably the next best superhero movie after those. And that's no small feat. :)
A+