Okay so it was not my intention to start with a rereview. But here we are, so let’s just move on.
What happened was I sat (lay) down (all over) on the couch on Christmas night and figured I needed something to help my mind escape the rest of my body that was focused on digesting. The Avengers was available to download, and why not. I had enjoyed it to a degree when I saw it earlier in the year, and there was no fear of anything untoward stifling the creative process that my stomach was busy with.
When I had originally watched the film, it was after all the cockahooping that had gone on when the film was first released. I avoid these things. I hate being caught up in bandwagon events with films. Unless I’m the one doing the cockahooping. We had decided to go and see it at The Astor – a grand old Art Deco cinema that was hosting a fundraising day to save it from redevelopment and redeployment. The night of the screening was immediately after the fundraising (prizes! Labyrinth! jaffa rolling!) and the mood was rife with enjoyment. A packed house. Vintage previews of Predator and Die Hard preceded the screening, and set everything perfectly up for one damn fine enjoyable evening. The crowd laughed, the crowd cheered, the crowd sat captivated through all 140 minutes of Joss Whedon’s huge film.
And it is was huge. Everything was huge. It was huge stacked on huge. Which works great on The Astor’s enormous screen.
So back to Christmas night and rewatching The Avengers.
It was everything I wanted from my viewing experience. But that was about it for me. As a disclaimer, I’m not a Joss Whedon fan. I (similarly) avoided Buffy, was not interested in seeing Firefly or Serenity, and the only one of his that I’m rather keen on is The Cabin in the Woods, so hopefully we can get to that at a later date. But I did want to enjoy The Avengers continually, not just once. My problem is that it’s just pandering, and this became patently obvious on watching it at home on a much smaller screen without a couple of hundred people around me. Isolated, and fending for itself, the film is just stale and hollow.
Yes, I know it’s a comic book thingy and Marvel and so on. Hollow is okay, so long as it’s fun. And it is fun. Sort of. It’s fun if you want to laugh along at all the glib jokes, especially from Robert Downey Jr. But shorn of that virtue, it’s just glib without the fun. The villain is also played for fun, and done well as such, but as so many of the heroes question during the film, what is his motivation? What is his endgame, when all’s said and done? We’re never really given an answer, and it becomes booming crashing spectacle for the sake of conflict.
The story, really, is mediocre. It’s done, seen-before, and uninspired. What is inspired is all the manoeuvring that Marvel and Disney must’ve done behind the film to get all these actors and all their prequel-y films lined up for this one film to land. That is impressive. And it’s handled with flair and panache and glib one-liners. But if we take away all our ooh-ing and ahh-ing at seeing them all on screen together there’s not much left. So what is the point? It’s film as show-and-tell. Look at what I can do! Here’s me bringing all these stars on to the screen! In the same film! Playing characters that know each other! Even if one’s from Norse mythology! Yes it’s silly and doesn’t try to hide that, which is fine if it wasn’t for the rampant pandering show-offiness that dominates everything else ahead of a compelling story.
Huge space alien monster thing definitely not flying.
Case in point is in the climactic battle scene with RDJ’s “I’m bring the party to you” line. Glib, check. Huge space alien monster thingy from somewhere arrives. Huge, check. Explosions. Reference to Jonah and the whale. Boom. And all the while I couldn’t help but wonder why this thing was flying through the sky. How. I mean, it’s a bloody huge space alien monster thingy. It has no wings. It’s defying all logic. And, before you start, I know. But still. There has to be some logic at play. What is it’s biology? What does it suspend itself in the air on? All the other aliens have little space rocket-y things, so that’s fine. Even whilst they’re blowing up all of Manhattan for some reason other than it looks cool. Or maybe that’s just it. Blow things up! Look cool whilst doing it!
Phew.
What I did take away, more than the first time I saw The Avengers, was the quality of Chris Evans as an actor and in playing his role. He is the straight man, but similarly he’s the only one not winking at the camera throughout, and it gives integrity to his performance. This, on top of a similarly underplayed number two role in Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, shows how good he is.
In the end, I don’t want my rereviews to become revisionist in appraisal, but in all our looking over the year that was this did provide an interesting coda for what has been an odd year in obscenely budgeted, highly hyped, anti-climactic blockbuster genre films.
(That, and I’m trying not to choke on the $1.5 billion in revenue this film has made.)
Merry Christmas.
– Macguffin
Macguffin & McGuffin 