Waking up bleary-eyed with my contact lenses still firmly affixed to my eyes, Mike & Ike’s in my belly and an irrepressible desire to save the world from evil aliens, I started to reflect upon the event that was The Avengers.
The fervor surrounding this movie matched that of The Hunger Games, except instead of screaming 12-year-old Peeta fans, there were screaming 35-year-old Marvel geeks. It took about half a dozen screens to accommodate eager moviegoers at the Century 12 theater in downtown Evanston on Thursday night. And although a majority of the crowd was familiar faces from school, legions of older fans came out for the opening as well. I guarantee many bosses saw empty cubicles on Friday morning, vacated for post-Avengers rest and relaxation.
Before the Marvel logo even appeared to announce the arrival of the superhero team onscreen, the tension and anticipatory giddiness of the crowd was an unforgettable experience all its own. After what seemed like half of an hour of previews, the trailer for The Dark Knight Rises began, tempering the raucous audience. A collective gasp from introduced the grizzled face of Bruce Wayne. The silence that followed was absolutely deafening, the entire audience (including myself) holding its breath as more chilling, awe-inspiring footage of Nolan’s newest creation was revealed. The price of The Avengers ticket was well worth these two minutes of revelatory heaven alone.
But I didn’t go to the theatre for Bane, Batman or Nolan. This is Joss Whedon’s moment. He has crafted an intelligent, thrilling and frequently funny superhero movie that will stand as one of the greatest Marvel adaptations of all time. The assortment of personality and character amongst the cast of The Avengersis a joy to behold.
Based on the previous Marvel films, we have come to anticipate the nuances of each hero, but watching them interact is unadulterated glee. Each of them benefits from the company of the others. When Thor (Chris Hemsworth) gets boring in his steely idealism, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) rains on his parade with snarky one-liners. The interplay is gorgeous and everyone gets in on the fun, particularly Dr. Bruce Banner (or the Hulk played for the first time by Mark Ruffalo) who steals many scenes with his off-kilter humor. Whedon’s strength as a writer and storyteller has a lot to do with his ability to lighten moods and inject humor into even the gravest moments.
The story is not so important here, and for the people familiar with the comic series, I’m sure they were well aware of what the Avengers were going to face. Basically, Loki, the badass Norse brother of Thor, comes to Earth through a portal torn in space by a shiny thing called the Tesseract. With the assistance of some alien regime, a group that has big Transformers-like worms that tear holes through skyscrapers with reckless abandon, he attempts to enslave the human race. That’s when Nick Fury (the impossibly awesome Samuel L. Jackson) gathers his superhero squad to bring the reckoning down on the invaders.
It’s pretty damn difficult to find any faults with a movie like this that revels in its own excess, has monumental action set-pieces and never takes itself too seriously. If I had to pick a bone, it would be the fact that the villains were not all that compelling. Superhero movies live and die based on their villains as much as they rely upon the strength of their heroes. Bad guys are the most interesting when they are human and relatable, corrupted by something that drove them to madness. It was difficult to find the robotic, faceless alien horde all that interesting, as they served as fodder for the Avengers’ severe ass-kicking.
But then again, this is not a superhero movie that preaches any themes or attempts to reflect anything about human nature. I can’t help but reference that Batman director again. The expectation going into a Joss Whedon film should rightfully be quite different than that of Nolan’s work. Whedon strives on adventure, whimsy and fun, while Nolan broods and forces us to face psychological demons. They are each stylistic choices that benefit the director’s films in different ways. What it means for Whedon’s Avengers is that there is less of a focus on character development and exploration of villainy as in something like The Dark Knight. That being said, there is no better person on this planet to have taken on the task of bringing us The Avengers than Whedon. He understands the magic of superhero stories and doesn’t waste time pretending this movie is anything other than pure childlike indulgence.
It is a talent to make someone feel like a kid again. In the third row of a packed theatre in the wee hours of Friday morning, I remembered every time I had picked up an action figure, read a comic or dreamed of flying over a city with a jetpack strapped to my back. I have Joss Whedon to thank for the memories.