THE AVENGERS

Talk about a waste of hype! Let’s be fair, though, The Avengers had a lot to live up to. Comic books are the most anticipated entertainments of the summer and a Marvel superhero mêlée was just asking to have more expectations than usual heaped onto its shoulders. Certainly the marketing, which really started in 2008 with Iron Man, was ingeniously innovative.

The possibilities of viral marketing had already been exploited early that year with Cloverfield and again by Warner Bros. that summer with The Dark Knight. Iron Man, however, started a new concept in marketing in which the movie itself was the beginning of a long lead-up to The Avengers. Each of the linking movies that followed (The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Captain America, and Thor) brought a prize post-credits hook that became almost anticipated as the movie itself.

We could see the result of the culmination for some time and then in May of 2012 it arrived with surprisingly less fanfare than one would imagine. Dark Knight Rises proved to draw more crowds, but the real reason behind this less than stellar performance was that The Avengers crashed under its own hype.

It’s big, alright, with plenty of flashes, explosions, and action, but it’s all noise; zaps without direction. The Avengers foregoes the principles of filmmaking to operate on two levels, as a series of visual stunts (most done by computer) and, paradoxically, the one thing that a super-hero movie should stay away from above all, stretches of aimless chatter and boredom. Perhaps goofy fun, the one thing even the most ardent detractors of action movies can count on, was one more casualty of Joss Whedon’s reckless trampling over everything fun about movies based on comics or comics themselves for that matter. He drives over the source material with such speed, he can’t see what he’s squashing.

Comic books never shied away from politics and the best of them were born out of heated social climates, but the story and the heroes were the centerpieces to the social backdrop. The Avengers lays the parables thick.

S.H.I.E.L.D, a government agency depicted in those depressing blue hues movies have moored to cold secret institutions, is harboring a powerful cube, the Tesseract, in a heavily guarded location. This little piece carries the promise of a future of endless sustainable energy. It’s coveted by many, but the real threat is the Other, a demon from the planet Asgard. He wants the Tesseract at all costs, and strikes a deal with Loki (Tom Hiddleston), evil brother to Thor (Chris Hemsworth), who has his own intentions of global domination. He sends Loki down to earth and in exchange for recovering the power box he will help him take over the planet. Here enters Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the patch-eyed leader of the underground team of heroes who was developed in Iron Man 2 but here is sadly demoted to extra. With some difficulty he assembles the gang of super-heroes he needs to recover the Tesseract and save the world.

Most of the movie’s first half involves getting the gang to work together, but the premise also offers an entry way into a debate as to what the government was doing with such a perilous piece anyhow and why it was keeping it secret from the people. This escalates into an accusation party where even Tony Stark’s livelihood is scrutinized.

There is nothing inherently wrong with The Avengers commenting on the current state of distrust in our leaders except that it does so only to fit into the new school of action movies that feel a need to say something of importance. In some the implications are subtle. In other, like Dark Knight, less so, but there they fit well into the ethical conflicts of the hero. The Avengers is the clumsiest of all in its handling of weighty material. Its metaphors are obvious, but just there to be noticed.

            Not that Whedon does much with anything else, as the story is merely a springboard for a lot of ka-booms and dull chatter. The careful construction of excitement was never a concern for movies based on comics, but the best of them could get away with it thanks to the clever handling of kinetic thrills. In The Avengers the excitement stems from a mere gimmick. All of the Marvel heroes we’ve seen at the movies thus far (minus Spider-Man whose cinematic rights are held by Sony) form a reluctant union to fight a super villain. But they are thrown into this cacophonous mess and lumped together so tightly that they cancel each other out. Each one tries upstage the other (a deliberate direction of the movie) resulting in none of the characters getting a chance to neither shine nor bask in their own moment of glory.

            Thor and Captain America (Chris Evans) are dull heroes in themselves.  It’s their context that can make them interesting. Nothing worked in Thor, but Captain America got by thanks to style, imagery, and clever play on time travel. But the WWII soldier brought to modern times with the use of suspended animation is out of context here and so becomes simply a solider with super powers and just another Avenger. Thor is a bore no matter if he is back home in Asgard or on Earth defending it from his evil brother. Inexplicably, the movie devotes an inordinate amount of time on these two stiffs, practically freezing its midsection.

            On the other hand we still don’t know who Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) really is and nether does Joss Whedon. We like what we see and want to know more. The Hulk, in human form a lonely figure hiding in Calcutta while performing humanitarian services has the lion’s share of glory, rehashing the best moments from The Incredible Hulk and Ang Lee’s 2003 misstep.

            As Dr. Banner Mark Ruffalo is as fine a replacement for Edward Norton as any, though there is a change in tone. By 2010 it was announced that Norton would not be returning as the Hulk for The Avengers or any subsequent Hulk movies. Marvel sited creative differences with the actor as the cause of the split, a strange choice for a gloss over as Norton was given much control over the project. One of his first moves was to detach it from Lee’s work, closing out any possibility of the new version being interpreted as a continuation. Be that as it may, Norton gave Ruffalo his blessing and the Hulk is the best thing in the movie.

            Banner’s first transformation is a brief high-point but his final battle against Loki and his space minions is a resounding disappointment if only because the flying monsters Loki summons from Asgard are the most unimaginative of demons, mere mechanical robots, albeit huge in size. They are devoid of intelligence or even the sadism necessary to make them formidable opponents. They may as well have been airships run amuck. Even the indiscriminate destruction in Cloverfield was more fun than this. But what really cripples the Hulk’s performance is that without his backstory telling the tragedy of his condition he is just a green wrecking ball.

            Most disappointing of all is Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man. There is little to say about him, a glimpse at his life with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow in what amounts to a cameo) in Stark Tower says it all, except that there is much too little of him and of Downey’s wit. He gets a few one-liners but they are salvaged pieces from the wreckage.

            Even laboring them as a cluster, The Avengers doesn’t do much with its cast. Half of the film is set in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s flying Helicarrier, a sort of floating military base where little of interest goes on. The Avengers quarrel and throw accusations much like ordinary politicians, but there is no drama to what they say. It’s the dullest of chatter; voices are never raised nor are drastic actions ever threatened. Watch CNN for that.

            The Avengers will doubtless go on as a franchise, the next installment slated for 2015. By then Disney will be turning most of its attention to its newly acquired Star Wars bonanza. Meanwhile, Warner Bros. is assembling its own superhero mash-up starting with 2013’s Superman saga Man of Steel and talks for a Batman and Catwoman reboot for a future Justice League movie. This is just as well for the cast of The Avengers as they will be seen to their best advantage in the solo movies released between now and then. Each character will be given their own story where they share their spotlight with no one but their enemy. This is where they are the most fun, because when you pair up your heroes side by side none of them seem all that super anymore.