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I saw a review of The Avengers that described as being Transformers with brains and a heart, and I think that's a really apt way of describing what it does right. It's a movie based on a franchise and characters that many viewers grew up with, it has a large and potentially unwieldy ensemble, and it has a giant running/city-destroying battle making up its final act.
Transformers dealt with the problem of the ensemble by making them sort of a collective deuteragonist to Shia LaBeouf, which disappointed a lot of the people who were going to see it because of childhood love of the characters as... well... characters. Its action sequences were frantic, frenetic, and frequently muddled, because they had no ambition beyond being impressive as action scenes.
Joss Whedon's Avengers, on the other hand, deals with the ensemble largely by breaking them down into manageable microcasts. Rarely does he put everybody on screen at the same time until the end. Thor reaches out to stop or save Loki. Black Widow and Hawkeye share a history and an on-screen dynamic. Tony Stark courts Bruce Banner in the lab and thumps his glowing chest against anybody who will give him a reason, but mostly one person at a time.
There's a lot more cross-mingling than the preceding paragraph might suggest. The lines aren't rigid. While it takes the team some time to really cohere and pull together as a team, it's not a situation where we were promised a great superhero crossover and team-up only to see two or three clusters of characters stuck doing their own things completely separately from each other. And when they do come together just in time for the action finale, things are glorious.
It's that protracted fight scene at the end that most separates The Avengers from movies like Transformers. The characters don't stop being themselves just because they're fighting for their lives. The story doesn't become "spend xty minutes fighting to pad out the film until we can have the victory ex machina" just because the army of evil shows up.
And if Avengers the movie never forgets while we're there, then one of the more gratifying things about the final battle is that the Avengers themselves, on screen and in universe, also don't. When a city is being trashed, our heroes remember that a city isn't just a lot of buildings that explode into satisfying chunks when you blow them up, that a city is by definition a population center, and that means people live and work there.
In other words, this is a movie that gives us heroic characters behaving as heroes and not merely hyperefficient soldiers mostly arbitrarily established as good because they're battling against the forces established as evil.
I saw The Avengers with two people. One of them is a comic geek, and she said that it was the comic movie she's always dreamed of seeing. The other is not at all a fan of action movies, and he said that despite feeling like it was about 50% fight scenes, it worked for him because the characterization didn't stop.
I personally think Whedon's success in bringing this movie to life can be laid at the ground of his history in television and more recent successes in the world of comics. He's used to not having a whole separate hour to spend on punching, bullets, and spectacle... shows like Buffy, Angel, and Firefly had to use fight scenes as vehicles to deliver quips, punchlines, and moments of character-building or character-revealing emotion or else it wouldn't have had time for them. Writing a comic book like Astonishing X-Men required him to juggle large casts of characters who all have their own important role to play and their own fanbase to please. There really are no background characters in The Avengers... the star is whichever character or characters you enjoy seeing the most, the B-Plot is whatever character's storyline you find the least interesting.
And that's really it for my non-spoilery review. I'll break things down further, character and story-wise, in a later post
Transformers dealt with the problem of the ensemble by making them sort of a collective deuteragonist to Shia LaBeouf, which disappointed a lot of the people who were going to see it because of childhood love of the characters as... well... characters. Its action sequences were frantic, frenetic, and frequently muddled, because they had no ambition beyond being impressive as action scenes.
Joss Whedon's Avengers, on the other hand, deals with the ensemble largely by breaking them down into manageable microcasts. Rarely does he put everybody on screen at the same time until the end. Thor reaches out to stop or save Loki. Black Widow and Hawkeye share a history and an on-screen dynamic. Tony Stark courts Bruce Banner in the lab and thumps his glowing chest against anybody who will give him a reason, but mostly one person at a time.
There's a lot more cross-mingling than the preceding paragraph might suggest. The lines aren't rigid. While it takes the team some time to really cohere and pull together as a team, it's not a situation where we were promised a great superhero crossover and team-up only to see two or three clusters of characters stuck doing their own things completely separately from each other. And when they do come together just in time for the action finale, things are glorious.
It's that protracted fight scene at the end that most separates The Avengers from movies like Transformers. The characters don't stop being themselves just because they're fighting for their lives. The story doesn't become "spend xty minutes fighting to pad out the film until we can have the victory ex machina" just because the army of evil shows up.
And if Avengers the movie never forgets while we're there, then one of the more gratifying things about the final battle is that the Avengers themselves, on screen and in universe, also don't. When a city is being trashed, our heroes remember that a city isn't just a lot of buildings that explode into satisfying chunks when you blow them up, that a city is by definition a population center, and that means people live and work there.
In other words, this is a movie that gives us heroic characters behaving as heroes and not merely hyperefficient soldiers mostly arbitrarily established as good because they're battling against the forces established as evil.
I saw The Avengers with two people. One of them is a comic geek, and she said that it was the comic movie she's always dreamed of seeing. The other is not at all a fan of action movies, and he said that despite feeling like it was about 50% fight scenes, it worked for him because the characterization didn't stop.
I personally think Whedon's success in bringing this movie to life can be laid at the ground of his history in television and more recent successes in the world of comics. He's used to not having a whole separate hour to spend on punching, bullets, and spectacle... shows like Buffy, Angel, and Firefly had to use fight scenes as vehicles to deliver quips, punchlines, and moments of character-building or character-revealing emotion or else it wouldn't have had time for them. Writing a comic book like Astonishing X-Men required him to juggle large casts of characters who all have their own important role to play and their own fanbase to please. There really are no background characters in The Avengers... the star is whichever character or characters you enjoy seeing the most, the B-Plot is whatever character's storyline you find the least interesting.
And that's really it for my non-spoilery review. I'll break things down further, character and story-wise, in a later post