Battleship: Formula, Weird Sincerity, and Meaty Aliens

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

It's not a good sign for a movie when on its opening night, in one of the largest theaters in San Francisco, it's playing in the half-sized theater, usually where they put either the modest rom-coms, or the films that are in the geriatric phase of their run.  Given that the word is they spent $200 million, and given my soft spot for popcorn films, it feels like seeing the lemonade stand with the hand made sign, and an eager toe-head kid looking up and down the street, hopeful.  I mean, what do you expect--it's lemonade made by a child.

I won't go much into the story, but it's like this:  there's a self-centered protagonist, he has the chance to lead a warship against aliens called in by the liberal scientists, triumphs by banding together with a former enemy, gets the girl, learning something about his own ability and the value of teamwork.  

Formula.  That's what these movies do.  I just scanned through the reviews and the dominant sentiment is that the film is "stupid, crass, and loud."  Wrong.  These films are like Shakespeare productions:  they're not about the text or structure, they're about the elements, framing, and flourishes.  The play, like the formula, is set, and it's the interpretation and engagement with those set structures that makes the fun.  For the smarter directors, they're like the Lars von Trier's film "The Five Obstructions," in which von Trier sets up arbitrary structural constrictions for his fellow director Jergen Leth to re-produce a film Leth had made decades earlier.  (We won't get into what an evil bastard von Trier is...)  The beauty and excitement is in the formal reenactment, not the underlying, mandated form.

Differential development of human value
structures make the use of force a necessary
possibility throughout the spectrum of advancing
integration.  Also, I like explosions.

Weird sincerity.  Heather warned me, "You know, it's going to be an advertisement for the Navy, right?"  She's useful that way, since I had not been aware.  But it doesn't bother me, or didn't with this film, because what it's (lightly) celebrating are qualities that are genuinely laudable.  I don't know if it's aging, where supposedly conservatism displaces, like a fat man settling down into a full bathtub, the liberalism of youth, or if it's the deepening of my post-liberalism, but the military doesn't bother me as much these days.  In fact, I often notice a swelling of affection and appreciation for expressions of military valor that in my 20's would have sent me gagging.  What I do react to is the lack of sincerity as applied to the military--well, actually, anything.  Cynicism and exploitation is the ugliness, not the military per se.

So what we have in Battleship is certainly a "pro-military" film, but not one which is either fetishistic about war or strategically blind to the effects.  The qualities it highlights and gives emotional weight to are those of individual integrity, intra-group cooperation, inter-group cooperation, and love of country (meaning, love of family, really).  It also is sincere about appreciating the sacrifices of former generations, when it brings on the bunch of old codgers to crew the battleship Missouri.  It doesn't get into the complexity of politics, and the politics and economics behind war, because although framed as a military virtue (lightly), "Battleship" emotionally draws forward the valor itself and leaves in the background the complexity of the expression of that valor within a war context.  If one confuses the two--the quality and the formal and contextual expression--you are going to miss the emotional truth being presented. 

And this truth is that:  we humans are deeply, deeply wired to move towards and emphasize social bonding (see "Loneliness:  Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection," by Cacioppo and Patrick), and we tell stories about what is important to us, and to our nervous systems, there's virtually nothing more important than the social.  So in these terms, "Battleship" is, within the popcorn vernacular/formula, another instance of the culture reaffirming to itself the importance of social cohesion, sacrifice, and family.

Heather and I were talking about this point in reference to the system of Spiral Dynamics (as embedded in philosopher Ken Wilber's work), which is a developmental model of human value systems.  In that model, the color blue represents the stage where values circle around conforming to an absolute/higher authority that provides structure and order.  Fundamentalism is an expression, often reactionary and sometimes rancid, of what is an essential element of human development and cultural unfolding.  We need blue values as the structural cohesiveness of a society;  a society without order, isn't. 

And even though on its surface "Battleship" looks like a piece of jingoism, which the U.S.Navy must have been very happy to participate in, it's not essentially a "blue" film.  It's not saying the obedience to a higher authority is the measure of value in a life, even though it embraces sacrifice and protecting one's group.  "Battleship" is what blue-level values look like when taken up by a much more (developmentally speaking) developed mind.  It's not simply propaganda.

Rather, it implicitly believes in, and presents, a complex and more-or-less integrated set of values in which the individuality of members of a group is not suppressed in the service of the group, but rather in which the self needs are augmentative of, and augmenting to, the strength of the group.  And as part of that, the strength of one group is seen as being dependent on its cooperation with, while respecting the integrity of, other groups (in this case, different nations, represented by the American protagonist and the Japanese antagonist who turns into co-protagonist).  These are, again in Spiral Dynamics terms, orange and green values, being those that focus on individual success (orange) and the equality of individuals and groups (green).  Go look at the Leni Riefenstahl's film of the Nuremberg rally and compare the values side by side with those in Battleship.  This is not jingoism, but rather a contextualizing of those blue values within higher levels of value.

It's in that sense that I can feel the warm flush of post-nationalism in such a film.  Yes, it's the military, and there's huge problems in multiple dimensions with both the American military and militarism in general.  But there's also the truth that, until there's a serum that up-levels all sentient beings to their highest potential--maybe what would happen if everyone watched all of Star Trek while being injected with Ken Wilber's blood--there's going to be divergent value systems, some of which are not going to be interested in resolving conflict through measured rationality, and a willingness to compromise.  To avoid this truth is actually really, really dangerous, and not in the Bush area paranoia sense (the latest version of the commie under the bed phenomenon), but in the observable truth sense.  This is what we have to all deal with;  it's apparently part of the structure of the universe that sentience has to unfold in stages, and until that's changed, we're going to have conflict, and at the "conflict plane" there's going to be choices about how to resolve that conflict which will substantially be determined by value systems.

Thus, like it or not, force must not be taken off the table, at any level.  At higher and higher levels of development, it takes on more and more sophisticated forms, in which the use of force is contextualized by intelligence, discrimination, and love.  But, given the nature of development as expressed in human life, even at the higher levels, as Wilber puts it, "If you run into Hitler in a bar, you whack that boy [i.e., in the mafia sense]."

Meaty!

OK, aliens.  I love-d  the aliens!  They are so meaty!  The science is ridiculous, of course, but that's not the point.  Again, what's going on here is genre:  its work is to interpret and novelly present an existing narrative structure, not create a new wheel.  The "aliens attack" subset of science fiction is tried and true, and it's the how you do it that counts.  It's the costume choices that draw the eye and the "oohhhhs!", not the set dances of the ball.

Here, director Peter Berg (who did the won-der-ful film with The Rock, "The Rundown") chooses something that you don't see often, which is the space alien that you can image having to take a shit.  There's no super-duper-high-tech energy forcy gizmo thingy (well, there is, but you can blow it up!), but rather flesh and blood and (alien) steel, and the aliens have to actually plug machines together!  When do you ever get to see aliens having to do the shit-work of conquest?

There's actually an analogy here with film making.  Have you ever made a film?  I made a 10 minute film with my uber-friend James called "The Norwegian Draftsman," which we shot in one night on a single chip camera, and then spent months editing.  There was one actor (to stretch that word), found props, on-hand equipment, a crew of one, no money, and it took us months to finish (albeit, with other things like jobs and wives soaking up time).  Now, here's a $200 million production, probably five thousand workers all told ("The Lord of the Rings" had something like 25,000 workers throughout the whole production), with vast infrastructural needs and resources, and though the result is a seamless two hours of story telling, the shit-work that has to go on behind it to make it seamless is staggering.  (As a crystalline example of this--though all the making-of material points to this--is the documentary of how a one minute sequence of the last Star Wars movie is made.)  You hear films being compared by directors to going to war, and here you see it, that conquest of another species and planet requires tedious grunt work...like setting up an alternative communication system, using found parts, because some asshole didn't calculate the vectors properly and crashed your own unit into an alien satellite.

Clanky and bangy!

The aliens in "Battleship" have to live in the same meat world that we humans are stuck with (though, apparently, they have faster-than-light technology, because they get here in what seems like a few years, from 20 light years away, but we'll let that go...).  Their ships are these clangy, bangy hulks, whose weaponry is as material as the bullets and rounds on the human navy vessels.  When they shoot at their foes, they fire explosive canisters, not laser beams, and when they lunge and hulk around the ocean, they take time to move from one place to another.  Just like us!  And when they hit the satellite that notified them of our presence (why they can't navigate around an object the size of a semi-truck after flying through the galaxy of space crap, well, we'll let that go, too...), their ship does what it should as a constructed object.  It breaks up into fiery debris and crashes into Hong Kong and elsewhere.

Then the aliens themselves, a humanoid species who does fine on Earth except the sun's a bit bright (their helmets act, essentially, as sunglasses), are fleshy, seemingly have emotions (there's a fist fight between one and our disabled Gulf War veteran), and are vulnerable.  And apparently they're not just out for genocide, but rather are having trouble with their own planet, apparently some destructive war.  Or maybe they conquer worlds, or something.  Whatever.  But the upshot is that they think and have motive.  That's so great!  And my favorite part is them setting up comm station on Oahu, having to schlepp in a bunch of alien tech units, and them connect them together with hoses that can be broken by a rampaging Jeep, and then have to scurry around semi-frantically trying to get them up and going again.

In other words, you can really identify with these guys, and their technology is not just at a similar level to ours, but actually functions on principles and rules that they are subject to.  The comm machine gets fucked up by the natives, and you just have to deal with it.  No near-magic tech here. It's bolts and couplings for these guys.

And that's true at the mental level, too.  This is essentially a scout party, so they're not there to burn everything to the ground (again--read my past reviews--ground combat is a stupid way to destroy a culture of 7 billion beings, so go for the toxic mold, I swear it will work much better) but to gather information to beam back to their folk.  Thus, they are on defensive status, and only destroy and kill in service of their mission.  They're rational, not like the emotionally unbalanced aliens of so many films.

So, for all those reasons, that's why "Battleship" is not the drek that the reviewers say, and can be enjoyed and appreciated at multiple levels, not out of some prissy academic exegesis that's meant to get the professor's attention for either a good grade or getting laid, but because it's all actually there. Enjoy. 

The Darkest Hour: C'mon, give it up for the B movie!

Click here for trailer.

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

I liked "Skyline" (2010) and I like "The Darkest Hour" (2011), and fuck off if your one of those prigs who doesn't like a good B movie. And these movies are both definitely B movies, without pretension to be otherwise, and are clever uses of small budgets. You don't go to Disneyland expecting the Louvre, and you don't expect funky, cheapie alien invasion flicks to be Masterpiece Theater. Unless you're a dick. Don't be a dick.

The Darkest Hour follows two American friends, two found American girls, a German asshole who steals the boys' website, and a cute Russian chick, through the eradication of human race by bad aliens. It's a formula, and it keeps getting repeated over and over. In "Skyline," you also have a small bunch trying to survive a bunch of invading aliens, holed up in a highrise, which itself is an admirably scrappy way of milking a whole movie out of aliens without having to spend a lot of money (they spent $500,000 on shooting, and $10,000,000 on visual effects). Darkest Hours goes a bit more upscale at $30,000,000 (probably because it was produced by that crazy Russian director of Day Watch, Bekmambetov), and actually shot in 3d, which I don't hate as much as the Cohen Brothers, but really, that would be hard to do. Thank the divinity of your choice that I could watch it in 2d.

Aliens as unintentional solution to
energy crisis?

So. The Darkest Hour has the boys fly into Moscow to pitch a website (or app, maybe?), which gets ripped off by a German kid (Dutch? Czech? Anyway, some European douche bag), presumably their former partner, who they then re-meet up with at a swank Russian disco. They meet up with two American girls (one looking like the sister of Anne Hathaway), and without much ado, the aliens attack. Sorry, the aliens attack! And part of the fun (if you're not a dick) of these movies is to see what kind of aliens they inflict on the human race. Here, the aliens are "wave" creatures, electrical somehow, who walk/fly/float around in inviso-shields and microwave the humans, sometimes directly and sometimes grabbing them with electrical cords and then pulling them into the appropriate microwavable distance. The coolness factor here is in the contortions that the dying do enroute to being powdered. It looks like the wire-work guys and stunt people had a lot of fun whipping through the air, to be CG'ed into glittery powder. ("Skyline" had people getting yanked into the sky, or sucked, vacuum-like, into the sky, and then having their brains litterally extracted. The aliens were litterally after their brains. Their brains! That's fucking funny.)

Ok. Many hip Muscovites get twistilly fried, while our heroes hide in a basement for several days, until emerging into a silent and ash-strewn city. The white ash is PEOPLE! (Soylent Green reference, what what.) They then do what all such heroes have to do, being, they must learn the new rules of the game. This they quickly do, noticing (humans are clever) that the aliens turn on electrical devices, and thus, like a light-stench, announce their presence. For unknown arcane reasons, they can't see through glass. Yeah, I know, but don't be a dick.

European douche bag, redeemed!

My wife and I watched it and tried to guess who gets sacrificed first. Yup, the European douche bag! Stupid and venal probably-German guy goes wandering out with a machine gun, then sacrifices himself in touching redemption for douche baggery, allowing our heroes to escape. Then out they go, find a Russian mad scientist type who informs them on more Rules of Game, and gives them a magic wand to stop the aliens (a gun that shoots microwaves). Mayhem ensues, they flee, find Russian soldiers who have learned how to wound the bastard aliens, then they all go through the subway, we lose a hero, then another hero (oh, wait, that was back with the scientist), onto safety, then rescue mission, then heroic destruction of several aliens, then off on a submarine as news of fighting back comes to them. Hurray, humans!

Today's Tom Sawyer, with mineral theft
in background.

Oh, and we learn that the aliens are here to mine the Earth's mineral resources.

Ok, here's the alien quibbles. And this does not mean that I don't like the movie. If these kind of movies made too much sense, then there would be a very short movie with little tension, because the More Advanced Species would simply drop toxic mold into the atmosphere and go have mohitos until all humans were dead. A little ridiculousness is necessary for conflict, but having them just be butt-fuck stupid, like the water-toxic aliens in Signs, that's just criminal behavior. Don't do that.

So, quibble one, which is the same as in my Avengers review: don't attack a whole species with foot soldiers. If your intention is to wipe out the species, as opposed to strategic political control, it is terribly inefficient to send in individual troopers. Like, hello aliens, there's 7 billion of us! It makes good screen time, but c'mon, if you made the trip all the way from timbuktu star system, didn't you have time to think through your attack plan better?

Quibble two: why does such an advanced species not have walkie talkies? When one of their members is attacked by the Russians, given how many of them we see falling from the sky onto Moscow, why don't they, like, call someone? "[Static radio crackle] This is Gor Formore, soldier ID#45678. I'm getting my ass shot off here by some of these buggers. Could maybe all you local fellow attacking alien comrades, who I know aren't fucking busy because the whole population is floating around like super-zapped popcorn--could you come swarm these bastards before I pop like a zit?" You know, our soldiers invented such strategies, uh, I'm pretty sure back in Egyptian days, so maybe better strategic protocols might be in order.

Quibble three: wouldn't it have been easier extracting Earth's mineral resources somewhere in the Australian outback, instead of all over Moscow and other major cities. I'm pretty sure the molten core/mantle/whatever (Heather said that's what they were after) exists all over and under the crust (our little scab of home...). Seems like that would have precluded some of the angry monkey reactions.

Limited sensors.

Ok, end of alien quibbles. Oh, wait, fourth quibble: again, being all advanced and shit, why haven't they developed better sensors, like ones that can see through glass, or can switch from electromagnetic to (human) visable light spectrums, and beyond that? We're vulnerable fleshy apes, easy to flash-cook, and yet we developed that tech a long time ago. Get with the times, aliens.

Now quibbles have ended. It's fun, these films, just that. Not highbrow, not sophisticated, but regurgitations of formulas that speak to basic archetypal fears and hopes of humans, much broader and deeper themes than some bio-pic or Emotional Human Drama. These films speak, crudely, loudly, often quite unconsciously, to some of the archetectual sub-structures of the human psyche, and in a way that's not all cluttered up with detailed personalities and relationships. Those simply are not the point. The point is to fill in the mold and let you experience that level of the human mind in a more obvious form.

And I love that. In this setting, the lack of "human detail" actually allows a clearer experience, in this case, of the fear of loss of control and relationship, and then the restoration of control and relationship. Aliens, volcanoes, invading Mongol hordes, viruses, doesn't matter and shouldn't matter to the watcher, because they are just the foils or forms.

So come to these movies in all their B glory, like one of those x-rays that shows a man walking, but only in his skeletal structure. Don't expect him to be all fleshed-up and anxious about upcoming taxes. Leave that to PBS and don't be a dick.

The Avengers: Dumb Aliens, Smart Film

Click here for trailer.

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

Ok, I'm going to get the quibble out of the way before reflecting on what otherwise is a decent and entertaining popcorn movie, with Whedon-esque flourishes.  


Here's my complaint: it's that when the aliens come to invade, they attack the whole world as if laying siege to a village.  Why are alien beings, 1) so aggro, 2) so tactically stupid, and 3) incompetent in doing their research?  First, what's with all the conquest, anyway?  E.T. may have been the liberal's version of a space alien (and frankly, much more my preference, all things considered), but why do the aliens so often just want conquest?  I mean, what do they think comes after conquest?  If you don't exterminate everyone, then you have to rule them, meaning beaurocrats, managing squads of quizlings, battling insurgents, etc.  Which brings us to two:  why so tactically stupid?  Aliens, when they attack, are attacking humans, as a race.  That means 7 billion and counting.  Most with a strain of nationalism that can easily transfer to the species en toto.  And yet the aliens come with what essentially amounts to a conventional army.  They pop out of a portal over New York, with laser thingy weapons, with armored flying worms (tanks), and little "manned" flying skiffs (humvees with guns).  And then they commence to attack, with that, the whole human race.  C'mon, "people," think it through!  Be smarter than your biceps (thingies)!  Do some research (third point):  at least watch the movies.  Even just the ones about New York, because that's the most cinematically destroyed city in America (my wife, caringly, just warned a couple friends of this, as they plan their move to Brooklyn).  But for a cheap subscription to Netflix, they can look over what their brethren have already tried and can quickly see that the frontal assault on a whole species is not very good planning, and does not speak to even cursory background research (I mean, look at "Signs":  can't aliens for whom water is toxic not attack a watery planet?  Wouldn't such stupid creatures have failed the galactic gene-weeding process by now, before reaching Earth?).  
Lesson for future alien attacks:  use a toxic mold.  Cheap to produce, hard to defend against, does not require a gazillion soldiers, and not subject (because alien) to terrestrial sanitation laws.  It's not that hard "people"!

Ok, other than that convention, The Avengers is a fun movie.  Not particularly deep, not revolutionary, not radically innovative.  But enjoyable and with beats in which the director, Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Serenity, Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog), gets to poke his head out from inside the big budget blockbuster cage and go all, "nerd joke!"  Not that it's a particularly processed, Velveeta-like production, and it makes me once again goggle at the effect one human can have on a film that gathers and organizes more resources than the annual civic budgets of many cities.  Because the film throughout has a subtle, but noticeably tone of not-so-Hollywood.  The pacing is a little unusual, not because it doesn't follow the three acts, the buildups and releases, but because it does it like a drummer playing a conventional rock beat, but then dragging just slightly the last measure.  You feel it more than see it, but it's there.  

Loki.

The story is, apparently, old hat to comic geeks, having been originated in the Marvel-verse back in the 60's.  I don't understand comic books, really.  My wife bought all the "graphic novels" of The Walking Dead, after getting turned on by the cable show, and now she reads me them as we're driving and fills in the visuals in her own inimicable style ("And then the one zombie is, like, 'argh!', and Rick is all, 'Pow," and then the woman--which one is that, this new artist sucks?--goes 'ack!'").  I think it's that the discord between the writer and the graphic artists is too jarring for my system, as well as the artwork generally being too histrionic for my tastes.  Frozen panes of scowling, I just can't take that for too long.  Given my reaction, it somehow, inexplicably, is still a popular medium (self-effacing joke, what what!).

Story:  different characters from different lines of comics come together, as organized by the Super CIA organization, SHIELD, to battle super bad Loki, who comes out of the Thor mythos (and the movie from last year or so).  He's made it back from the abyss, allied with the afore castigated aliens (who look a bit like chitanous humans, with some vague S&M overtones, and depersonalized, like they were assembly-lined rather than born--you just can't imagine them being rocked by mother alien, and later, being scared about monsters under the bed and being soothed by their parents.  Maybe that's the point, that these types of aliens are the adult equivalents of Romanian orphanage children, with kind of a species-wide brain damage derived from profoundly poor parenting and a deep misunderstanding of the neurological needs of infants for what in the imagistic realm is experienced as an archetypal Mother.  Because in humans, like the profoundly deprived orphanage children, you see deep disruption in ability to make connection, to see others with empathy, to modulate aggressive impulses through social connection.  As fascists know, you have to start beating the children early, and as all militaries know, non-conformity is dangerous.  If we look at the literature on adult attachment styles...uh...um...but I digress...)


Ok, Loki teams up with these presumably insecurely attached aliens to attack the Earth and become its ruler (and then what, Mr. Man, you want to have to deal with zoning issues?)  So he comes to Earth via the tesseract (super powerful, super high tech blue cube of power energy thingy) that SHIELD has gotten hold of, and promptly shoots a lot of red shirts in the SHIELD mega base, converts the physicist (who was in Thor) and Hawk Eye (Jeremy Renner's super archer character, who, ironically, in style and posturing, is the most super hero-y character even though his main talent is a very good aim, while the demi-God Thor is looser and funnier--my wife is all gaga over Renner, so she gave him a pass, "Because it's Renner!") via his glowy blue sharp pointy stick, and then takes off leaving the base to blow up and collapse on itself.  The growly one-eyed Nick Fury (Samual Jackson) makes it out, as does his lieutenant (cute girl).  The bad guy and unintentionally now-bad minions drive off to fix up the tessaract to create a Big Portal for the poorly parented aliens.  

he love-starved aliens.

Meanwhile, we get reintroduced to the Avengers, who consist of:  Captain America (Chris Evans), The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Iron Man (Robert Downy Jr.), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and Hawk Eye ("Renner!!!").  I think that's it.  So they all come together onto a flying air craft carrier belonging to SHIELD (which is super cool to watch, and then when you imagine how much that costs, it's a bit of a metaphor for a blockbuster film, utterly outrageous and awesome at the same time), while Loki n' Friends are plotting the end of the world.  Loki manages to get himself captured (by Thor, who fights with Iron Man and Captain America, tres cool), but it's a trap, as Loki is trying to goose David Banner into going all Hulk and destroying the SHIELD ship (I think that's his plan).   But they save the ship, turn Hawk Eye back to the the non-dark side, and have a big fight in New York after the portal is open and the sad-products-of-fascistic-love-deprived aliens come pouring out with their tank-worms.  Iron Man/Tony Stark proves he's not a narcissistic dick by nuking the alien ship out on the other side of the portal, but falls back through before his comrades shut down the tessaract. Order is restored (although it's going to be unfathomably expensive to repair New York, again), and the after-the-credits scene has the whole worn out troupe eating schwarma.


As I said, it's not the structure that makes this film, although that's competently handled by Whedon and his legions of workers (I heard him say in an interview that with a film this big, the studio simply won't let you fail, though I think he meant in a technical sense, as John Carter of Mars turned out to be a black hole in that studio's ledger, although it was actually a wonderful film that should have been very successful, though perhaps they did not sacrifice the right maidens).  What makes the film is the relationships and the repartee, the same thing that makes all of Whedon's productions.  Buffy was seven years of relationship, irony, tragedy, and nerdy intelligence.  The Avengers is moments like when The Hulk and Thor are battling bad guys on the ground, and they reach the triumphant conclusion of the sequence, standing next to each other on rubble surveying their success, the Hulk suddenly punches Thor out of frame.  


Another has Loki, fighting the Hulk in Stark's new all-green tower (thanks to the granola munching Pepper Potts), stopping after getting thrown against a wall, shouting at the Hulk, something like, "Stop!  I'm a God, you are a lesser being," and then getting cut off as the Hulk grabs his feet and smashes him over and over into the floor and leaving him stunned, half submerged in concrete.  These are the little populist flourishes that come out of the essentially modernist sentiments of Whedon, where individuals get to exist very distinctly, but also struggle to build and maintain community and relationship, which they are conflicted about, but recognize they need.  So someone like Loki is held as the antithesis of these modern human values (and dilemmas), and is therefore soundly, and literally (Whedon loves his literalizations of psychology and politics) thrashed.  

Joss Whedon

But Whedon (see the review of Cabin in the Woods) also has his more unconscious, less nerdy, unstudied aspects that inevitably come out in his work, almost like they slip out of the basement and join the party while he's not looking.  One of these is the Sacrifice, which seems to be there in all his work.  In The Avengers, the overcoming of evil requires the death of the old family and the grieving through to a restored family.  Meaning, Agent Colson (Phil to Pepper Potts) gets the big zap from Loki.  In Serenity, it was the pilot and affable sidekick Wash.  In Dr. Horrible, it's Penny the girlfriend.  In Buffy, it's a lot of people over the years.  And it has punch when it comes;  the animating force is not post-modern deconstructionist fun, but rather the depth of the modern mind and its painful attempts to find, and hold onto, community in the face of manifold overwhelming challenges.


Other Whedonesque gut-punches comes in The Avengers in two forms, the 9/11 references and the Nazi references.  We see first responders helping civilians out of destroyed cars, while skyscrapers are destroyed, or ravaged by the flying worm-tanks.  There's not overt carnage shown, but we know what this means, and it's resonant with what we experienced in 9/11 that our minds (my wife says she has no reaction, but she's probably full of shit on this one--just sayin') can fill in, emotionally, the details, and flash on those memories.  OK, at least mine does, and it's a powerful, evocative thread of emotion that gives depth and resonance to what on its surface is one more urban catastrophe sequence.  The design, of course, of the New York battle is beautiful, with all the intelligent craftsmanship that the Hollywood infrastructure can bring, but the emotional power comes from those allusions and half-glances to what has been real, very real tragedy.  

The other eyebrow raising moment is when Loki extracts an eye from a doctor at a fancy pants German ball thingy, and then goes outside in front of the old German structure and tells all the terrified party goers to kneel before him.  One man stands up (Kenneth Tigar, one of a group of wonderful cameos, including Harry Dean Stanton as a security guard), an old German who must have seen the Nazi era, and says no to Loki, knowing that it will be his death.  It's the rebellion of the individual against the tyrannical meglomaniacal impulses of the virus-individual who will not be in community, but rather wishes to absorb community into self.  It's another scene in which the post-modern delights of Whedon drop away and expose, or allow to rise, another, more raw and sincere, aspect of the director and transmits an emotional power that the trappings of the scene don't really lead you to expect.  

As with Cabin in the Woods, these streams and adjacent streams--the super hero movie, the post-modern meta-commentary, and the emotionally raw statements--make what could have been another velvety construction into something much more rich, interesting, and enjoyable.  It's one of the only such films that I can think of which warrants re-watching for the details and the flourishes.  There's quite an intelligence behind what should be simply a colorful cash cow, and blessings on the producers and studios for taking the chance with the punk-nerd equivalent of an auteur.