The Avengers

No, NOT the British TV series from the 60s (Emma Peel – Diana Rigg – schwing!). 

 I recently saw the new Marvel movie, “The Avengers” – IMAX, 3D, etc.  Very impressive, very intense, a rocket ride.  Well done.  Remarkably, the 3D didn’t give me a headache, nor was it an overload, but it was certainly entertaining.  I have to admit, yet again: I’m not into comic books and have scarce knowledge or experience with any of the original source material for these superheroes, aside from actually being aware of most of them as comic book characters and having seen all the recent movies.

 The Avengers are a superhero team, centered around the nucleus of 4 superheroes: Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, and the Hulk.  Each character has had movies done before (two for Hulk and Iron Man) relatively recently; now they are all wrapped up together, very much a sequel to “Thor” as the villain is Loki.

 Captain America (Chris Evans).  Steve Rogers, previously a draft-exempt weakling, became the guinea pig for an advanced “super serum” which turned him into a bulked up fighting machine in World War II.  He defeated the Nazi villain Red Skull (played by Hugo Weaving, also known as Elrond from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and Agent Smith in the Matrix trilogy) only to be trapped in a block of ice after the captured Nazi wing-plane (precursor of our own B2 bomber) crashed in the Arctic – a plot device to explain how he can wind up in contemporary time with the rest of them.  (Who knows what effect, if any, the super serum has on longevity.)

            Aside from super strength and agility, CA’s “superpower” is an incredibly strong round shield with the patriotic colors and star of America.  However, I’ve always thought the shield without an accompanying weapon was a bit lopsided.   He defends, but can’t attack – except to throw the shield at people.  He’s also the least imaginative member of the team – very “old school.”  To be honest, I’m not sure what “job” Rogers had as a young man before his scrawniness qualified him to be the test subject.  Then he was simply a super soldier in WWII; then thrust into the early 21^st century to be a superhero in a Nazi-less future society he doesn’t quite understand.  He’s very agile and bright within a limited framework, more of a generic combat guy, though not nearly as brutally aggressive as The Hulk, as medievally articulate as Thor, or as annoyingly witty as Stark.  I suppose Captain America simply serves as a baseline for the group.

 Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.).  Tony Stark returns, wearing a vintage 1978 Never Say Die tour shirt from Black Sabbath.  He’s just as impetuous and “think-outside-the-box” as ever, but fortunately his armored suit is just as implausibly powerful as his arrogant personality.   I understand that Stark is a defense contractor, but his snazzy, high-tech, sophisticated, presentations of the Iron Man outfit in the prior films didn’t exactly clarify this minor point: was he expecting to mass-produce it, or simply have ONE guy replace the entire US Army, Air Force, and Navy?  Or have a team of guys wearing this thing?   At least with the super serum, if Dr. Erskine hadn’t been killed, they could possibly have mass-produced it and injected a whole army of US men with it; or at least as many as could pass the same psychological tests they gave Rogers.  Anyhow.   

            Iron Man flies; shoots “repulsor rays”; and can push stuff around (like huge propeller blades on a flying aircraft carrier – that’s a concept, a flying container for other flying objects).  Like Spider-Man, part of IM’s charm is his wit, but unlike Peter Parker, who seems rather dull in his normal alter ego form, Stark seems to display most of his wit and arrogance outside the suit.  Inside, he’s more or less just a flying red and yellow robot.   

 Thor (Chris Hemsworth).  I don’t get it.  Is he really a Norse deity?  My guess is that the Asgardians are merely aliens from another dimension we would call “Asgard”; the Vikings worshipped them as gods because they didn’t know any better.  He’s buff and strong, but talks in an affected manner.  His “super power” is Mjolnir, his special hammer which only he can wield, and which comes back to him like a boomerang when summoned.  He also seems to be virtually indestructible.  For a god, he’s kind of boring.

 The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo + CGI).  Mild-mannered gamma tech scientist Bruce Banner becomes “THE HULK” when he gets angry (Banner: “the secret is….I’m always angry”).   In the prior two films Banner was portrayed by Eric Bana and Edward Norton (“the first rule of Fight Club is…never mention Fight Club”).  I’ve never liked the Hulk – all he does is get big and green and smash things; he’s a bit like Mr. T from the A-Team, not nearly as useful as his bulk and strength would imply.  Here his first target is Black Widow (!).  Fortunately they eventually manage to channel his aggression to the enemy aliens.  Ruffalo has a fairly easy job acting: just behave like a nerdy scientist.  It’s close to a rip-off of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, with Hulk being somewhat less articulate than Hyde.

 Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson).  She was a secret agent for the KGB, before defecting to the US.  She has a Russian name and speaks fluent Russian, though oddly has NO Russian accent when speaking English.  She can fight pretty well, shoot well too, and she’s damn pretty.  With the leather catsuit and spy angle she does have an Emma Peel thing going there…so there’s the OTHER Avengers giving an influence to this after all.

 Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner).  His schtick is explosive arrows…and of course, he never misses.  From his accent (American) and comment to BW (“we both remember Budapest differently”) the movie suggests that he was a CIA counterpart to BW, but according to Wikipedia the character’s background was as a trick shot circus performer (though he did have a connection to BW).

 Nick Fury (Samuel L. M-f**kin Jackson).  I seem to recall Nick Fury was around during WWII and looked like J. Jonah Jameson, Peter Parker’s editor at the newspaper (“Nick Fury and His Howling Commandos”) though with an eye patch.  Of all these comic book characters, this is about the only one I had actually read - as well as “Sgt Rock” - back…eons ago, purchased from the Stars & Stripes bookstore at SHAPE and read on the 3 hour drive back to Paris. 

            As recently as 1998 he was played by David Hasselhoff.  Now he’s Jules from “Pulp Fiction” minus the jerri curls and plus the eye patch (harrr!).   Fury is the de facto head of S.H.I.E.L.D., a shadowy intelligence agency originally formed during WWII to oppose HYDRA (the Nazi-type group set up by Red Skull).   It’s not quite clear what relationship S.H.I.E.L.D. has to the Pentagon, the CIA or the NSA, or if it has multinational jurisdiction and thus some UN angle.  While Captain America’s “longevity” is explained by his freezing, Fury received a longevity serum.  The mysterious cabal which actually runs S.H.I.E.L.D. (Howard Stern, Simon Cowell, Blake Shelton, etc. – JK) gives Fury his orders but he seems to do as he pleases anyway, especially if they give him nonsensical orders like “nuke NYC”. 

 Movie plot.  Loki (evil god from Asgard) comes down to Earth and captures the Tesseract, a glowing cube of immense power, previously seen in the Captain America movie.  With the power of his magic wand, he converts Professor Selvig and Hawkeye to his side.  Fury escapes and summons the other heroes, one by one, to the cause of retrieving the Tesseract and defending Earth from an alien army Loki summons from another dimension using Tony Stark’s own NYC tower (itself very similar to the newly rebuilt single-tower World Trade Center Building, except this one is uptown next door to the Chrysler Building).  Hawkeye is reprogrammed; even Robin Scherbatsky from “How I Met Your Mother” (Cobie Smulders) gets a role in here among the crew on the flying ship.  The Avengers eventually wind up together and fight off the alien monsters until the grand finale.  (Sorry to spoil the surprise, people, but the good guys win.)

 Naturally, getting these headstrong guys together isn’t easy.  Everyone argues with everyone else.  In particular, Tony “Think Outside the Box” Stark and Captain “Old School” America don’t see eye to eye, Stark also bumps ugly with Thor, and everyone seems to argue with Nick Fury, who they suspect is hiding relevant information which they might actually need to know (e.g. is S.H.I.E.L.D. trying to use the Tesseract to build weapons of mass destruction?).  As you can imagine, after some macho bullshit the heroes put their differences aside and get the job done.   Naturally, they set up the movie for a sequel with a new villain, so we couldn’t bolt out of the theater quite yet.