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.