Marvel's The Avengers: an exercise (pt.1)

[petronia]

...In how much of a movie I can remember after having seen it twice in as many days. XD

That is, one of the odd things I noticed about this film is how much of it I retained afterward (I am not one of those people who have a movie quote ready for every occasion). It's well-paced, yes -- but also organized, like Whedon drew a picture and left the blue guide lines in. I find myself using the thing itself as a memory palace (which, again, not standard modus operandi at all), sticking Post-It note observations under the mental equivalent of an iMovie timeline.

What I meant when I said The Avengers succeeded qua comic book is pretty simple, actually: most superhero movies are origin stories, because you're introducing the character to a general audience. So you go for standard hero's quest archetype, bildungsroman. Statistically speaking, though, most comics aren't origin stories. You know who the supers are, there's usually a whole team of them, and at some point they beat up a supervillain with their powers which is meant to be quite thrilling and satisfying. Or they fight each other, for REASONS(tm), which is meant to be especially thrilling and satisfying but would be awful if the situation were real. A lot of the time the book is trying to be both an ongoing narrative with evolving relationships and psychology, and a reset button that gets pushed every time someone's dastardly plan is foiled. Also, superheroes don't make sense, especially if you group them together: they seem completely weird and ridiculous.

In aggregate, I can dip into comics quite deeply, but I can't ever be fully invested in them like I can be in A. Random Shounen Manga that at least moves linearly forward always. At the same time, though, the things are fuelled by paradox.

All this is pretty much true of The Avengers. It is also a very carefully tuned movie, but it is fine-tuned to take the actual comic book formula and make it succeed in a different medium. And it does! There's a formula plot that carries you through, and then in each of the "single issues," character A matches up against character B - physical, psychological. Sometimes they don't fight! And sometimes it's a three-way!

So I said I'd analyze the movie matchup by matchup. XD Maybe at the end I'll draw a chart.


INTRO: some aliens plan to attack the Earth. This is pretty hokey and (because the credits are at the end) the movie equivalent of the dead zone right as you enter the supermarket, where they don't put goods because your eyes are adjusting and you won't see them. Anyhow. There are some aliens, they will be back.

SHIELD 1/LOKI 1: Loki takes the Tesseract, Hawkeye, and Dr. Selveig. Plot setup, intro to the SHIELD characters, establishes Loki as a badass villain which is why there is a car chase and mass detonations. The car chase part is not very absorbing, actually, because he has to get away or there is no movie. XD;

SHIELD 2: Black Widow (Hawkeye vs Black Widow 1). I have got the order of this right, right? This is Natasha's intro, she is written as Whedon Action Girl rather but still 4,901 times better than Iron Man 2, in which she's hobbled by having to play a sexy secretary. Also - can I make a sidebar? - there were some weird editing choices in that movie. When Tony and "Natalie" get a moment together, they mostly just stare assessingly at each other, which is realistic but makes for poor cinema. Either Scarlett Johansson didn't mesh well with Jon Favreau's improv-heavy style, or the character didn't - I can see either.

Putting Hawkeye there because this is in fact the first character moment, laying out the relationship between Natasha, Clint, and Coulson. (The rule this movie most consistently follows is that it shows the viewer, but never tells them what they just saw - "Your arc reactor runs off the same kind of energy!" "We may seem different, but deep down we are surprisingly alike!" etc. It doesn't have time to.)

Bruce Banner vs. Black Widow 1. Tense, funny, now funny-tense. The Natasha-Bruce face-off is interesting: Natasha is terrified of the Hulk, not just wary, and she's barely holding it together here. At the same time, something about Bruce speaks to her (resigned stoic to resigned stoic?), and you get the feeling she genuinely would prefer to do well by him. Bruce thinks she is bullshit, and SHIELD is bullshit, and Natasha is right to be terrified because he is actually very angry - but also accepting that the bullshit is going to happen whether he likes it or not.

SHIELD 3: Nick Fury vs. SEELE (ok no but...). The first dismissal of sentiment ("War is not won by ____"). It's an interesting leitmotiv in the script, because it's set up to be contradicted but isn't. Thor can't save Loki with affection, and Nick Fury is unapologetically grey hat and spends the rest of the movie Gendou Ikari-ing it up. If there is a conclusion implied there, it's "...nor is it won by cutting yourself off from sentiment, because true conviction is of the heart."

(Nick Fury vs.) Captain America 1. Both Nick Fury and Loki define Captain America as a soldier. They're not wrong, if primarily because soldiering is (as Steve states himself) the only aspect of the world that seems comfortingly familiar, and in between the end of the last movie and this one, Fury got himself accepted as his commanding officer. He shows up with a mission, playing the HYDRA tech angle, also for maximum familiarity. But watch that leitmotiv.

An interesting device: all the Avengers get a full briefing packet on all the other Avengers, so in most cases they meet each other not only with preconceived notions (or careful lack thereof), but with preconceived angles of approach. Again, you're not told what these are, but you see them in action.

Coulson vs. Tony Stark 1 / Tony and Pepper 1. Tony is the one who does this the most. Tony over-prepares, because SHIELD's negging really, hilariously worked. Possibly it's a meta-callback to RDJ's strategy for getting the Iron Man role -- "Over-prepare to a ridiculous extent, then bowl everyone over with the unstoppable force of my personality."

(Another sidebar: RDJ doesn't show up as Tony Stark to red carpets, so much as he shows up as "Tony Stark" - in the same sense that Tony Stark shows up to events as "Tony Stark." I find this entirely sensible of both of them: any intelligent person would need to develop an alter ego, not to get through these things, but to enjoy them. You have to become a person who enjoys them. If you already have an alter ego tailor made for the purpose, why the hell not? Remember this about Tony Stark: there is no such thing as an extroverted roboticist.)

Part 2.

Comments

[l_elfie]

ooooh yes, i see what you mean!

as kid, i only ever got into origin stories very rarely, and then only if my brothers happened to have the issue lying around. (with the fantastic four, i've read their origin story because we had a book about stan lee that included it.) but most of the time, even if you are getting the origin of the hero, the world already exists--or maybe i say that because i was largely only interested in the x-men anyway, and there's thousands of new mutants but the idea of the x-men has been around for a while. XD

[brooms]

and the x-men are kind of singular because their origin amounts to "born this way". it's one of the reasons joe quesada apparently dislikes them, because he thinks it's lazy.

[l_elfie]

I suspect "born this way" might work better as an origin story for a reader if said reader is, for example, a weirdo queer kid?? being born different doesn't seem so lazy when one always feels super different anyway. XD though it does bring up the interesting point about what popular origin stories say about a population.

[petronia]

Which is why the YA queer subtext angle gets played up in the movies - Rogue is "born that way," strictly speaking, but her origin story is that at adolescence she traumatically discovers that she is "different" in a way that precludes her from having a "normal" sexual/romantic relationship. And then she runs away from home and gets picked up by gruff trucker Wolverine as a charity case.

All this can be derived from the comics, but it is a far cry from the plot of your average X-Men comic involving Rogue.

[brooms]

but what happens in the following 2 movies of the original trilogy isn't a far cry from the plot of your average x-men comics.

the avengers may not be a sequel, but it's not a stand-alone either, it was set up by several origin stories, just like your average sequel.

[petronia]

Yes, that's very true; it's pretty much what I'm saying. XD Your average comic book was set up at some point in the past by an origin story the reader is supposed to be aware of, but in itself does something quite different, and The Avengers falls into that mode. My response was to what you were saying about the X-Men's origins being "just born like that" - to point out that that is why the first X-Men movie adopted a specific angle on the universe/characters that made it more of a classic bildungsroman. Because the first movie always has to be an origin story.

(And I would actually switch the terminology - The Avengers works well as a standalone, according to ppl I know who've seen it without watching the previous movies, but it definitely acts as a sequel to the other movies.)

[brooms]

and i was responding to something you said in the previous post - The Avengers is, I think, the first comic book movie I've seen that succeeds for reasons that comic books succeed. i thought the origins thing was an elaboration of that.

the dark knight also succeeded for reasons comic books succeed.

ppl I know who've seen it without watching the previous movies

but they knew these other movies existed, correct? they knew these characters weren't coming together out of nowhere, they had an awareness of them, right? that's kinda all it takes.

pretend the team-up for the avengers movie had actually been scarlet witch, vision, wasp, doctor strange, ms marvel, hank pym and luke cage. it would have flopped, even if whedon had worked it all more or less the same way.

[brooms]

... and i wish i could edit this, because i've had so many "i'm sick of ~origins movies" discussions that i'm never replying to the actual arguments at hand anymore, i'm always replying to all these pasts discussions.

[petronia]

I did kind of feel like you were responding to something I didn't actually say. XD; I didn't say I thought the makers of "origins"-type comic book movies were doing it wrong, or were turning out unsuccessful product, or that I was tired of them -- as far as I'm concerned, a movie's job is to succeed at being a movie, not to copy the comic. And it's a lot easier for a movie to succeed as a single hero's origin and journey, if the audience comes in as a blank slate.

I am complimenting Whedon because I think he's pulled off something tricky: to make a successful movie that actually uses the usual comic book formula. It really is the first one I've seen that does that. (I haven't seen the second Nolan Batman, and the first one was, well, an origin story. XD; I think both it and the first X-Men succeed as movies, though I do like The Avengers best of those particular three.)

[flamebyrd]

So why is Natasha so terrified of the Hulk? This is something that has me vaguely puzzled. (I mean, completely justified, but... It just seems a little inconsistent with the characterisation they seemed to be going for? idek)

[petronia]

I think the logic of it is that Natasha is a rogue, and a master manipulator, and part of her modus operandi is to play on psychology, her femininity/sexuality etc., getting her opponent to underestimate her. None of that would work on the Hulk, and she can't take him physically. Even shooting him in the head won't work.

If you asked me how ScarJo's performance comes across, though... I would say, as if something about Bruce and/or the Hulk was really triggery for her, calling back to a past experience. I have no idea what the canon (or Whedon head canon) for Black Widow would say about that.

[flamebyrd]

When you put it that way, I agree with you on both points. Particularly the second.

(...I should put all my random Avengers characterisation questions to you! orz)

[petronia]

I love the characterization in this movie, it is super-deep. I don't always want my canon to be like plotty fanfiction (where the plot exists so the writer can delve into the characters), but I can't complain when it's done this well.

[petronia]

Like, another tiny touch in that scene: Bruce says he doesn't always get what he wants, and gives the empty cradle a rock while he does it.

[ayalesca]

but they knew these other movies existed, correct? they knew these characters weren't coming together out of nowhere, they had an awareness of them, right? that's kinda all it takes.

I think I'm one of the people Sabina meant *g* and not entirely, actually. Husband had to whisper into my ear OH BY THE WAY HE'S THE HULK and so forth as the movie went along and I merrily rolled with it.

I should admit did require my possessing the meta-knowledge that I missed SOMETHING, but that's all it requires XD specific knowledge not needed! In that sense it's almost like watching any movie series out of sequence?

[flamebyrd]

That reminds me of something else you mentioned above - the movie takes "show-don't-tell" to heart, something I am not used to seeing in cinema.

The only problem with this is that I think many of us have been trained to only pay attention to dialogue in movies...

[flamebyrd]

;_;

[petronia]

Then you have a movie like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which not only shows without telling, but tells without reinforcing the dialogue's content with images. And was too complicated on first watch for nearly everyone. XD

I actually don't think the casual viewer will pick up on the more subtle aspects of The Avengers' characterization, but they also don't have to for the movie to work.

[brooms]

In that sense it's almost like watching any movie series out of sequence?

in my opinion, yes. truly *any* movie series, comic book based or not, with the exception of the bond franchise. that one really is all about standalones.

many people (mostly comic-book fans) seem to be using this movie as an example of how we can now skip the tedious origin stories (and go forward with a justice league movie, for instance). but i don't think the avengers (or TDK, or X2, or SM 2) would have worked at all if this had been those characters' first time in the cinematic brodeo. one could argue people would just assume they missed SOMETHING in the comics as well, but seriously. comic book readership nowadays around the world barely breaks the half million barrier, this is the wrong way to ball.

[petronia]

I really don't think that's true! Definitely not for the Avengers tier of characters, anyway, and not with an Avengers-style ensemble plot. X-Men is kind of different - Singer took the "Harry Potter" approach of following a kid POV into the world, introducing a whole bunch of secondary characters, then going back and doing origins as backstories. At least, that's the charitable perspective that makes it seem like there was a plan. XD

That being said, the general cultural awareness of the JL characters is way higher, but there are also correspondingly more takes on those characters, so to me the concern is more like, when the audience walks into the theatre what will they expect? Is a team movie even interesting without either a coalescing or preexisting team dynamic? At minimum you would have to 1) start with Nolan's Batman, because that is out there right now, and 2) install a Kevin Feige-type "high priest" whose entire job is to keep the vision consistent. (I will totally give it to Feige on this one, being Mr. Stereotypical Interfering Studio is better than not executing on a consistent vision.) So is that guy going to be Nolan by default? DC seems like they're going there, but Nolan's not necessarily the guy I want making the final call on Wonder Woman, you know?

Anyway, this is just shooting the breeze. XD In practice, I think you can almost make a bullshit Excel spreadsheet model that shows for every origin prequel movie you put out there in advance of the team movie, you take in another $50M from people who want to see what happens to that hero in the sequel. So why not do the brand new formula that's just been cracked?

[petronia]

That is, "I don't think that's true" = the ppl who are saying you can skip the origin stories.

[ayalesca]

I missed a lot of the char interaction stuff by NOT knowing, though, I should point that out. While I got the PLOT, I didn't get half the characterization. I didn't realize Hawkeye was an Avenger until the very end! I didn't know who Banner was and I couldn't figure out what that interaction between him and Natasha were about; I don't have enough cycles to simultaneously wonder WAIT WTF IS GOING ON and analyze what was in front of me, so, I remember the second half of the movie much better XD

Which is to say, I *should* have seen the prequels, but they wouldn't have convinced me to see them XD it took Avengers Assemble to do so.

But I do feel like Avengers Assemble IS an origin story, just look at its also-know-as-name -- it's the story of the origin of the Team instead of about the members. The the members can get a bit handwaved because when it comes down to it we care more about Their Powers Combined than about the individual bits.

[petronia]

Yeah, in the end I was going to say that too -- isn't it also an origin story, just a TEAM origin story. XD ...But I think it deviates from what you'd expect from a team-building story, in or out of the superhero genre. Like, if you do know the presumed character relationship arcs, what's interesting is that a lot of them are not carried through to the point where everyone is truly buddy-buddy. Cap and Iron Man are maybe 25% there? (In the sense that it is weird how this movie covered precisely the first 25% of any average Steve/Tony story from AO3, not to get into the slash aspect, but. I guess Whedon is that much of a fanficcer.) Thor and Hulk is just FACE PUNCHINGS forever anyway. And so on.

Anyway. I have this really horrible crawling suspicion right now because if this were a shounen manga the second installment is virtually guaranteed to be A TOURNAMENT ARC.

[ayalesca]

I REALLY have to see the prequels gaaah. Husband supported your commentary on Iron Man, so those are probably first in line. :)

[ayalesca]

Saw your other post, replying here to say that I will not be reading it for some time as I'd like to watch the prequels first XD but I SHALL RETURN TO IT.

[brooms]

DC seems like they're going there, but Nolan's not necessarily the guy I want making the final call on Wonder Woman, you know?

nolan is done after tdkr. his batman is completely unsuited for a JL movie, regardless. it's "dark" and "gritty" and "realistic" and practically a black ops with costumes trilogy. bale is done as batman as well. i have no clue what henry cavill agreed to wrt JL.

afaik, WB's plan is to reboot batman to prep the character for a possible JL movie in the future. so another origin in maybe 3 or so years. martha and thomas gotta die again for this dream to live.