Whedon Anonymous

Rating: Null/10 (24 August 2013)

Joss Whedon's "The Avengers" opens with the arrival of Loki (Tom Hiddleson), Norse God of Mischief, on the planet Earth. Here he encounters Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), leader of a superhero law enforcement agency. This introductory sequence is designed to show off both Loki's ruthlessness and the manly coolness of Nick Fury, but it achieves neither. It's an over-long sequence, filled with bad CGI and second-rate action.
The film then offers a series of vignettes in which Fury assembles a group of superheroes, including Captain America (Chris Evans), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr), the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson). Their task? Stop Loki and his giant CGI army. The problem? All these superheroes are too busy bickering to band together, organise and efficiently kick butt.
Your typical Whedon tale centres on a Scooby Doo gangs of likable heroes ("Serenity", "Firefly", "Buffy The Vampire Slayer", "The Astonishing X-Men" etc) and ends with a hero sacrificially dying for the greater good. Whedon's heroes are also never able to prevail without a little help from their buddies, and there is always some tension between being the sole saviour and having to work with others to accomplish a goal. As he typically has only tiny budgets at his disposal, Whedon also relies heavily on clever writing, witty banter and comedic irreverence to generate excitement. With "The Avengers", however, he has been granted zillions of dollars and has been unconsciously domesticated by the demands of the summer blockbuster. The result is a film which is continually pulling in two directions, wanting to be huge, bloated and filled with generic spectacle on one hand, and wanting to be clever, small and intimate on the other. In the end, the vulgarity of money wins out over good prose.
Still, a number of classic Whedon moments do survive. One cleverly written vignette has Black Widow tied to a chair, seemingly being interrogated by a gang of villains. We then learn that it is she who is in control of the situation and that it is SHE who is interrogating THEM. Another clever moment sees Loki imprisoned in a glass cage at the heart of our heroes' stronghold (yes, that cliché again), no one realising that Loki has designed his own capture, the God of Mischief attempting to live up to his namesake and sow discord within his enemy's own home. Most of the film's other good scenes revolve around the Hulk, who's imbued with much pathos by Mark Ruffalo, an actor renowned for his many melancholic-man roles; Ruffalo elevates everything he touches.
The rest of "The Avengers" unfortunately degenerates into CGI fisticuffs, Michael Bay styled mayhem, exploding cities, CGI aliens, errant missiles and sequences which feel like an angry kid bashing action figures together. Here's a film which spends zillions of dollars bludgeoning us, when a guy like Whedon can cook up infinitely more excitement with a simple rope, chair or the sheer possibility that the Hulk might go schizoid. Like most Marvel projects, "The Avengers" mistakes excess for excitement.
Whedon's never been a good visualist. Even his stint writing for the "X-Men" comics ("The Astonishing X-Men", a series arc which plays almost exactly like Whedon's "The Avengers" movie) relied more on words, banter, and the energy of his prose than well drawn panels. In this regard, most of "The Avengers" is slow and generically shot, though it does contain a few great visuals. A brief shot of a SWAT squad advancing on the Hulk's tiny shack is particularly cool.
Beyond this, the film offers the usual super-hero subtext. Here the enemy hopes to invade America (New York) and obtain the Tesseract, a much coveted cube which can provide endless energy and which was placed on Earth thousands of years ago by Gods. Our heroes, of course, band together to stop the theft of the Tesseract. In a previous Marvel film, "Captain America", a Nazi figure called Red Skull also attempted to acquire this energy source. In Marvel lore, it's always our squeaky clean, white Western ubermensch who decide who gets to keep Earth's resources. Same as the real world, though the Pentagon rarely wears spandex when it's nuking for oil grids.
Incidentally, Whedon's Loki is one of the most pathetic super-villains of all time. He's a whiny dude, with all the menace of a high school chemistry teacher. You'd think The Avengers would assemble only for big fish, but no. They apparently take on wimpy Norse Gods as well.
7.5/10 – See Josh Trank's "Chronicle".