I’ve seen The Avengers twice now and I’m trying to talk myself into a third. This is my review of Joss Whedon’s team-up movie, and why I went in sure it would collapse under five films’ worth of setup and came out thinking it works, full stop.
I talk about Whedon treating the team-up as a people problem, the clarity of the Battle of New York, Tom Hiddleston’s Loki holding it all together, and the flaws I’m happy to forgive. It’s the most fun I’ve had at the movies in years, so go see it, then see it again.
A month ago I did not believe this movie could work. I want that on the record in this Avengers 2012 review, because I’ve spent the last week and a half being wrong about it, happily.
Think about what Marvel was actually asking for here. Five films spent setting up one punchline. Two Iron Man movies, a Hulk, a Thor, a Captain America, each one ending with a wink and a promise that someday all these people would share a screen. Nobody builds movies this way, and there was every reason to expect the whole thing to buckle under its own weight, because you can’t put Robert Downey Jr.’s ego, a literal Norse god, a super-soldier out of time and a green rage monster in the same frame and expect anything but noise.
And instead I’ve seen it twice and I’m trying to talk myself into a third. The Avengers works. Not “works, considering,” just works, better than any comic book movie has a right to, and I honestly didn’t see that coming when I sat down in the theater.
Whedon treated it as a people problem
The reason it holds together is that Joss Whedon didn’t approach the team-up as a logistics puzzle. He approached it as a character problem, and he was honest that these people should not get along. Tony needles Steve. Thor thinks the lot of them are beneath him. Banner is quietly terrified of himself. The best stretch of the movie is the helicarrier, where the team is a lit fuse and everyone’s grievances come out at once, and it’s exactly that friction that makes the eventual sight of them standing together mean something.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to. The spectacle isn’t really the point, it’s what you earn after you’ve made me believe these six needed each other. Whedon puts in a full hour of people rubbing each other raw before he lets anyone stand back to back, and I can’t think of another superhero movie that’s had the nerve to wait that long, and it pays off completely when it finally comes.
It helps that nobody in that room is written as a pushover. Tony’s needling of Steve isn’t just a joke, it’s two very different ideas of what a hero is rubbing up against each other, and Banner’s fear of himself gives the scenes a nervous edge that keeps the humor from getting too comfortable. You’re never sure whether the next argument is going to end in a punchline or in somebody turning green, and I think that uncertainty is a big part of why the helicarrier works so well.
He also wrote the funniest script this genre has produced. “Puny god.” Coulson’s fanboy stammer around Captain America. Hulk swatting Thor across the frame right after they’ve won. The jokes aren’t decoration, they let a movie about an alien invasion breathe without deflating the threat, and I laughed harder here than at most actual comedies I’ve seen this year. Kurt Loder’s review at Reason calls the whole thing a triumph for Whedon, and I can’t really argue with that.
The Battle of New York is the best action of the year
The third act is going to be the sequence every studio spends the next few years trying to copy, and the reason it lands isn’t the scale, it’s the clarity. Whedon shoots the finale so you always know where every Avenger is and what job they’re doing. There’s a single sweeping shot that swings from Iron Man to Cap to Thor to Hulk to Widow to Hawkeye, and it plays like a mission statement: everyone is visible, everyone has a role, the geography makes sense.
I’ve sat through plenty of blockbusters this year where the climax turns into digital soup and you lose track of who’s punching what. This is the opposite. The stakes are one city, not a galaxy, and the film is stronger for keeping it that small and legible. You care more about a street full of people you can actually see than any amount of stuff exploding in the abstract, and I think that’s the smartest decision in the whole movie.
I’ll admit I went in expecting the usual end-of-movie noise, where everything blurs together and the only way to tell who’s winning is the music. Instead I came out of the theater able to describe what each of them did, in order, and that almost never happens with a big action finish. It’s the kind of thing you only notice when it’s missing, which is why so many other films get away with ignoring it.
Loki is the glue
Tom Hiddleston is doing more quiet work than he gets credit for. A team movie needs an antagonist strong enough to unite six egos, and Loki is personal to at least one of them and theatrical enough to draw the rest. He isn’t asking for sympathy here. He’s a preening, wounded narcissist who wants the world on its knees, and Hiddleston plays him with just enough charm that you buy everyone taking him seriously.
He gives the movie a face worth punching, and the “puny god” beat exists precisely because he earned it. Without a villain who’s this much fun to hate, the whole team-up would have felt like a bunch of heroes with nothing to push against, and I think that’s what a lot of people expected the movie to turn into. It didn’t, and a lot of that is down to him.
It also helps that Loki’s scheme gives each of the heroes a reason to be there. Thor has a brother to deal with, Tony has a city to protect, and Steve has a team he’s still not sure he wants to be part of, so by the time the sky opens up nobody is in the movie just to make up the numbers. That’s a tricky thing to pull off with six leads, and Hiddleston’s villain is the thread that ties it together.
It’s not perfect, and I don’t care
I’ll be honest about the flaws, because they’re real. The plot is thin: a glowing cube, a portal, a hole in the sky. Hawkeye spends most of the runtime mind-controlled and benched, which is a waste of Jeremy Renner. Black Widow gets the film’s best scene, the interrogation, and then a bit less to do than she deserves once the fighting starts. The Chitauri are faceless cannon fodder with no personality at all.
The thin plot is the easiest one to wave off, because the cube and the portal are really just an excuse to get these people into the same place, and the movie never pretends otherwise. Hawkeye is the one that bugs me more. Being mind-controlled for most of the runtime means we hardly get to see what he’s like on our side, and for a character who’s been waiting for his moment since the end of Thor, that feels like a missed chance. Black Widow’s interrogation scene shows how good she could have been all the way through.
None of it matters, and that’s the interesting part. The things that count are all firing. The chemistry is genuine, the action is coherent and the tone is confident without being smug. Whatever this movie is missing on paper, it more than makes up for in the sheer pleasure of watching it happen.
That’s what the Chitauri are really there for. They give the Avengers something to fight that nobody has to care about, so that the movie’s attention can stay on the six people fighting them, and I think that’s a sensible choice even if it does mean the invaders never become anything more than a crowd. A more detailed army would have crowded out the team, and I’d rather have the team.
The numbers are telling their own story too. It shattered the opening-weekend record, and the critics are broadly with the crowds on this one, which doesn’t always happen with this genre. For once the phenomenon is earned. What I can’t stop thinking about is what it means for everything coming next, because the post-credits sting promises there’s more where this came from, and I actually believe the shared-universe idea has legs now. Whedon and Marvel took the most preposterous bet in modern blockbuster filmmaking and made it look easy, and a month ago I’d have called that impossible.
Go see The Avengers. Then go see it again. It’s the most fun I’ve had at the movies in years, and I have no idea how Whedon and Marvel top it.
Which Avenger had the best moment for you, and did you laugh as hard as I did at the helicarrier? Tell me in the comments.
3 comments