My Review: Avengers Assemble

[Horse]

All-in-all, a bloody good movie and I'm gonna see it for the third time 
(with my kids this time :) ) at the weekend.
I wonder how Marvel are doing with the Dr Strange movie - hope they've 
still got plans to produce it in the near future.

Horse


On 01/05/2012 14:24, Mike Holmes wrote:
> I'll skip any spoilers that you couldn't get out of watching the 
> trailers.
>
> I've been waiting for this movie since I was seven years old. So a 
> little too close to five decades than I might have hoped back then. 
> You'd imagine that'd make me generous, but the opposite is closer to 
> the truth: I figured if there'd be one movie that Hollywood would find 
> it easy to screw up, it was this one. They have form too: the X-men 
> movies and the Fantastic Four films.
>
> Leaving aside Doctor Who, where so much of the movie was spent 
> acquiring him a hat, a scarf, and an assistant to actually weave in a 
> plot, solo superhero movies mostly managed to tell a good story. 
> Spiderman 1 worked very well, though the sequels didn't live up to the 
> promise. Daredevil, while incorporating some wooden acting, told a 
> story too. X-Men Origins of Wolverine managed far better than the 
> ensemble movies to tell a good tale.
>
> Ensemble movies on the other hand haven't had a good record. Fantastic 
> Four spent too much time setting up the characters and X-men spent too 
> much time setting up the better characters, Xavier and Magneto, who 
> unfortunately didn't happen, strictly speaking, to be X-men.
>
> Marvel decided to get around this origins problem by taking the main 
> four Avengers and getting their origin stories out in prequel movies. 
> They decided that the first Hulk movie was too arty, and rebooted it 
> with a different actor. Then the new actor had a spat with Hollywood 
> and refused his part in Avengers Assemble - certainly making for a 
> potential Strike One.
>
> Iron Man 1 & 2 were much more popular with audiences, probably because 
> Robert Downey Junior very much made the part his own. Thor managed a 
> partly-amusing fish-out-of-water tale of a demigod stranded on Earth 
> and was used to introduce Avengers Bad Guy #1 Loki: Thor's "He's 
> adopted" brother. Finally, in deciding to play Captain America as the 
> straight-arrow loyal and patriotic soldier, Marvel set themselves up 
> for Strike Two.
>
> Fortunately for Marvel the bats connected. Borrowing heavily from Sky 
> Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Captain America was handled fairly 
> well. Meanwhile Ruffalo has almost stolen the show in making The Hulk 
> the best character in Avengers Assemble.
>
> Hiddleston's Loki brings the most malevolence to sibling rivalry since 
> Cain and Abel. Mostly new character The Black Widow's entrance is made 
> with much aplomb, and the tightest leather pants in any Avenger since 
> Emma Peel - though it has to be admitted that Cobie Smulders' Maria 
> Hill gives her competition even in those stakes.
>
> Sixth member Hawkeye's character explication is delayed for reasons of 
> plot, and afterwards only a few hints are dropped as to his, 
> thankfully non-romantic, history with Black Widow. It'll be 
> interesting to see whether there's subsequent audience demand for a 
> backstory movie incorporating those two, possibly with Jackson's Nick 
> Fury.
>
> Not that the plot is held up any for introductions, which are very 
> much done on the move. Loki has bad intentions, an all-powerful Cosmic 
> Cube, and Nick Fury forms The Avengers to stop him.
>
> It goes without saying that, as with the comics, the sundry 
> superheroes find it hard to get along. For anyone who wants to know 
> what happens when superhero X fights superhero Y, we do discover that 
> it's not very good for trees.
>
> Finally the guys assemble at SHIELD's secret base, which owes a tip of 
> the hat to Captain Scarlet, and argue some more. If anyone wonders 
> what the Buffy guy is doing directing here, then the dialogue shows 
> that "Experience in writing witty banter amongst gods, humans, and 
> other entities", must have in bold letters on his resume.
>
> Ultimately of course the team has to finally get together and fight 
> the bad guys, So there's a little pathos, as they acquire something to 
> avenge, and, shades of The Hellmouth opening, Loki fetches an army 
> from outer space.
>
> It's at this point that I wanted there to have been a little more 
> prior engagement with Loki's army. There hadn't been much time spent 
> establishing what they were after on Earth, other than to kill humans, 
> or why they stopped off at Transformers Planet on the way. So they 
> just get mown down like comsic cannon-fodder in the final scene. But 
> the final scene sets a new standard for movie spectacle. It is 
> completely absorbing and the superheroes do manage to make all the 
> mowing down seem like actual hard work, while the final showdown 
> between one of them and Loki produced the loudest joint laugh I've 
> ever heard from a movie audience. That is though in a good way that 
> they're going to share with their friends, just as soon as their 
> friends have seen the movie - or perhaps some are going to ruin what 
> will become a much-replayed movie comedy moment.
>
> I wonder how many wives and girfriends have been subjected to revising 
> the various prequels in the last couple of weeks. I headed out for a 
> repeat IMAX showing last night as a pal's girlfriend (after Thor, 
> Captain America and the two Iron Man movies) drew a line in the sand 
> and refused to accompany him. I would say though that Whedon has 
> managed to make a movie which will appeal far beyond the fanboys and 
> the nostalgic, though it's set a new standard for them. It's headed to 
> making the studios so much money that they'll be under pressure to get 
> more out faster. If this kind of quality is what waiting produces 
> though, I'd counsel them to stick to it.
>
> As always, there's an Easter Egg during the trailers. I assume that 
> this tells us who the bad guy is in the next movie, but I can't figure 
> out who it's meant to be. Answers on a postcard...
>
> FoFP
>

-- 

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