Avengers: The Down Side Of Up

[Crimson_Dragoon]

I know its a bit off topic, but I'm glad to see someone else that likes the changes made to the Starship Troopers movie. I mean, I do like the book and all, but the movie was so much more fun and memorable than it ever could have been if it was more faithful to the book.

Overall, I think everyone needs to get off the whole "perfect adaptation" thing. It should go without saying, but movies are not books or comic books. Each medium has its own strengths and weaknesses, and in moving a story from one medium to another, things will have to change to account for this.

 

[Kurt Cristal]

So is he saying that having auteur-directors do the next films would be a good thing or a bad thing? That being said, I'd like to see Guy Ritchie do a Marvel film. Slow-mo, quirky nicknames, awesome licensed soundtrack, wacky dialogue. Good times to be had.

Also, Neveldine & Taylor would be cool as well. What's that, they already did a superhero movie, you say? Nope. Didn't. Ghost who? Never heard of him.

 

[Flatfrog]

Other than snarky one liners, all the Avengers has is spectacle. Like Transformers 3, along with practically every other blockbuster of the last few years, the Avengers will simply convince Hollywood to pour money into expensive CGI tech demos that show yet another city being destroyed by yet another extraterrestrial threat, probably by some sort of machiney looking enemy.

I think you're missing two big points here about what makes The Avengers special and extraordinary.

The first is what you dismiss as 'snarky one-liners', but is much more than that: it's a strong, effective group dynamic - precisely what Whedon specialises in and why he was such a perfect choice for the job. It is very easy to underestimate how difficult it is to write effective scripts with large numbers of equally prominent characters, especially when those characters are all interacting with one another (as opposed to separate or intersecting plot strands).

As Orson Scott Card once pointed out, the number of relationships between characters increases according to the square of the number of characters (or thereabouts), so keeping track of those relationships, especially in the context of an action movie with only limited time available for character development, is a huge challenge. Add to that the issue that all these characters are played by major stars and that is a really impressive achievement.

The second is what you dismiss as 'spectacle', for which I'll refer you back to Bob's review of (IIRC) Transformers 3, where he was talking about the poor editing of action movies. I was watching Quantum of Solace the other day and it struck me again there how plain confusing the action sequences were - a mess of jump cuts, extreme close ups and loud noises that made it almost impossible to keep track of what was happening to who, and meant that really all I was doing was waiting for them to be over so we could get back to the story.

Contrast that with the final battle that takes up the last act of Avengers, or for that matter the sequence aboard the flying fortress in the second act. Consider that each of these contained multiple intersecting stories - we're not talking Return of the Jedi here with three simultaneous but separate stories, but one big battle taking place on multiple fronts simultaneously. Note how often we move from one part of that battle to another, and how well we are kept informed of all the action, and how well-paced it is with each character being given their own role and story beats - even useless Hawkeye.

Again, Whedon pulls this off so smoothly that you don't even notice what an achievement it is, but it really is masterful. If I were awarding Avengers an Oscar, it would be for Best Editing.

So - is it Casablanca? No. Is it a better all-round film than Dark Knight Rises? Not sure. But is it a bigger *achievement* than Dark Knight Rises? Undoubtedly, in my opinion.

(tl;dr: They're really, really *good* snarky one-liners and spectacle)

 

[Steve the Pocket]

If I may add another caveat to that list: Pressure and standards.

A key component of the success of an Avengers approach to franchises, is for the component films to all be good, or at least not embarrassing disasters. Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor were all well-regarded and successful, and The Incredible Hulk ... wasn't the other Hulk film. Since Hulk had been first, they had time to release a new version that retconned it into oblivion, but imagine if it hadn't been. Or imagine if DC were in the middle of trying to set up a Justice League film franchise when last year's Green Lantern came out. Would they be stuck claiming that was canon to an otherwise good series? Would they have to order a do-over and lose precious time they were planning to spend making and promoting another character's intro film?

And it gets thornier the more heavily invested the studio is in the idea. The Avengers, I assume, wasn't officially greenlit or maybe even planned until the series of films that lead into it was well under way. So if something had gone horribly wrong before that point, there'd be nothing really lost as far as anyone would be aware. But any future attempt at cashing in on that model would be planned out from the beginning and probably heavily invested in.

 

[Ashley Blalock]

I know its a bit off topic, but I'm glad to see someone else that likes the changes made to the Starship Troopers movie. I mean, I do like the book and all, but the movie was so much more fun and memorable than it ever could have been if it was more faithful to the book.

Overall, I think everyone needs to get off the whole "perfect adaptation" thing. It should go without saying, but movies are not books or comic books. Each medium has its own strengths and weaknesses, and in moving a story from one medium to another, things will have to change to account for this.

I don't think people are saying that Hollywood should never change anything under any circumstances. I think what people want is for Hollywood to make something better if they are going to change things.

Take League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Huge changes, but the end result was something that was not as satisfying as the original comic book. No big pay off for the changes so no one won with the changes. American Godzilla is the same way, lots of change but nothing as good as the Japanese Godzilla movies.

But then take the first Total Recall film. Doesn't follow the book, but it finds something so interesting and fun that people loved it.

Or the Dark Knight Joker. Not who you'd expect to play the Joker and not like we've seen the Joker before, but people loved it because Hollywood gave people something good in exchange for them dealing with a bit of change.

 

[Tono Makt]

It may be cynic in me, but I'm sure that The Avengers will end up creating a few net negatives. The big one that I'm worried about is the creation of a "it worked for the Avengers" axiom when it comes to the creation of future super hero movies.

One of the negatives it's already reinforcing is the idea that if a movie made for geeks tosses out enough subtle geek-references, geeks will overlook all the glaring flaws of a movie and glomp all over it.

 

[Tono Makt]

Look, I hate to be the party pooper, but could it just be that the Avengers won't have a positive net effect on Hollywood because it's just not that great a movie.

It is what it is: it's shallow entertainment, and it succeeds at that. But honestly, the biggest problem with the film is that its fans, Bob included, are holding it up not just as one of the year's better action flicks, but one of the best films of the past decade. I'm sorry, but it ain't that special. Witty one liners do not a genre-buster make, especially when so much of the rest of the film revolves around the same tropes that have been pervading superhero films for the past fifteen years. The Avengers won't have a massive positive effect on Hollywood, because there is nothing innovative or different enough about it to cause such an effect. Yes, it has some good banter. Films have have had good banter and one liners ever since the talkies first came out.

Other than snarky one liners, all the Avengers has is spectacle. Like Transformers 3, along with practically every other blockbuster of the last few years, the Avengers will simply convince Hollywood to pour money into expensive CGI tech demos that show yet another city being destroyed by yet another extraterrestrial threat, probably by some sort of machiney looking enemy.

Here's the thing: the comics industry is an inherently shallow medium. When something great comes along, it's always the least important elements that are taken and copied by everyone else. When The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen were released, did the comics industry then put out more stories focused on deconstructing the superhero genre, including multiple levels of symbolism, thematic subtext and psychological characterisation? No. They assumed that people dug violent, moody comics, and we got over a decade of comic book characters trying to outdo each other in the unpleasant, sociopathic violence stakes. When Nolan released Batman Begins, did the film industry focus on releasing intricate, deep stories that use superheroes as a tool to explore big ideas? No, they just assumed people really dug origin stories, and set about rebooting every property they could to get another origin story out there for people to see.

What the industry is likely to learn from the Avengers (beyond what I posted already about tossing out subtle geek references - not overt, just things that only geeks who knew the subject matter inside and out would get) is that they already know what the formula is to make a billion dollar movie - lots of spectacle and lots of quotable material. As long as people can go quote lines like "Puny God." or "I've got an army." "We've got a Hulk." and have some awesome visual, the story doesn't matter. Movies like the Avengers are quite capable of making Hollywood dumb itself down even more than it already is.

That's where movies like the Batman Trilogy are so important; yes, Dark Knight Rises is a weak movie, with many glaring, obvious and given the writing team, baffling flaws. But Nolan made the attempt to make a smarter trilogy, and that needs to be rewarded. When it fails - like TDKR did - it needs to be pointed out and analyzed by writers and producers in Hollywood, not just by fans. Hollywood needs to find out why the movie failed so that it can try to do better next time.

(I'm also going to toss away alot of my own (meagre) credibility here and say that movies like Sucker Punch need to be made, even if they end up falling flat on their face. Sucker Punch was a movie that tried to do something interesting but failed. Hollywood needs to learn from those kinds of failures that reaching higher is a good thing, even if it ends up failing.)

Captcha: "my bleeding heart". How appropriate, given that you're saying almost exactly what I've been saying since I watched the Avengers and came out going "This is what has so many geeks splooging about? Seriously? Am I being punked?".

 

[Tono Makt]

(tl;dr: They're really, really *good* snarky one-liners and spectacle)

I has started to type out a far larger reply, complete with multiple quote blocks and individual responses to your points, but I'll sum it up in a very small statement instead.

There is literally no point that you made in this post that I agree with in the least up to the last line, and then I only agree to a very, very slight degree - they were decent one liners and spectacle.

(edit to remove ambiguity over who I was quoting, as I left both opening quote commands in)

 

[anthony87]

Oh Bob come on now. We all know that The Amazing Spider-Man was great. It's okay to admit it.

 

[Siberian Relic]

So, let me get this straight: The Dark Knight Rises and Prometheus failed because they weren't utterly flawless masterpieces and didn't reach their lofty ambitions, while The Avengers was a success because it met its own shallow ambitions and altogether managed to exist without raising a stench to high heaven?

 

[mikespoff]

Great article. Hopefully Bob, and other comic geek commentators, can remember these lessons.

I'm thinking in particular of the recent attempt to launch a "Wonder Woman" tv show, which ended in disaster and cancellation. When the first stills came out to promote it, everyone (including here on The Escapist) painstakingly criticised every stitch on the costume, and threw such rage at it that it was redesigned at least twice. Then the pilot of the actual show came out and everyone said it was rubbish. Well, if the pilot had been torn apart and restiched as many times as the costume had to be, I'm not surprised it was bad. But if everyone had just shut up about the costume and waited to see what they pulled together for the actual show, we might have gotten something special out of it.

This obsessive nit-picking and resultant redesign based on people on the internet saying, "waaa, they used wrong shade of red on her boots!" does not help to put together a coherent story. Fortunately "Batman Begins" came out as an entire movie without redsigns based on "OMG his suit is too bulky and we hate it!", so we could all actually see the entire work of art.

TL;DR - If the movie execs are inclined to pander to the fans, then the fans obsessing over tiny details will only HURT the artistic integrity of the final product.

 

[Moeez]

I'm the complete opposite of Bob. Avengers was the most disappointing movie this year after Prometheus for me since the first 2 hours were so dull with badly done action scenes, dull cinematography and dialogue, to only be saved by the last 30 min where suddenly the action didn't resort to confused nonsense, group dynamics were more present, and Hulk finally got to shine. Other than that, I didn't give a shit about these characters as no one was in any true danger, not even Black Widow (her running away from Hulk was more a money-shot than "oh no, she'll get crushed!"). Loki being the main villain was odd, since he doesn't work in that role and wasn't as menacing as Bane if we're comparing both films. I left the cinema with the assessment that it was another forgettable superhero blockbuster movie. It didn't leave much to think about.

The Dark Knight Rises was the only blockbuster to go way past my expectations and have me ending up crying as the perfect ending to a trilogy and to really end Batman/Bruce Wayne's journey that could NEVER happen in the comics. Anne Hathaway as Catwoman was a wonderful surprise, every word Michael Caine said had me close to welling up, Blake was likeable and a good fit to take up the mantle, and Scarecrow finally had his day.

 

[MelasZepheos_v1legacy]

That last point is interesting to me, especially in regards to The Dark Knight Rises.

I can see a lot of Nolan in the Dark Knight Trilogy and it has been one of the things that put me off it. When I thought about it I realised I'd actually rather watch Batman, Batman Returns and Batman Forever as a trilogy than the DK Trilogy. Not to say that I don't like Nolan's work, I just think that the older films are better adaptations of the character.

Which is the big difference between something like the Avengers or Batman and something like (I've just spent the last five minutes searching for a recent memorable action blockbuster that wasn't an adaptation or remake and have found nothing, so just insert something appropriate here). If you make an original character, it'll be judged solely on the strength of the movie/story/actors/director of that movie. If you make an adaptation, you throw in the addition of 'and how well does it compare to the source material.

Of course Joss Whedon's film is a better adaptation of a comic book property that The Amazing Spider Man or The Dark Knight. The man lives and breaths comic book nerdery, that is his style. In the same way the Christopher Nolan's style is 'Pretentious: The Movie' or Shyamalan is 'watch my mental breakdown as I convince myself of my own genius and convince everyone else of my insanity' Joss Whedon's is 'watch while I try and make a comic book come to life.'

My point is that Bob's final point is about finding director's who will try and put their own spin onto something, and why that isn't a bad thing, but I would argue that the far better choice is to match the right director to the right project. You wouldn't want Francis Ford Coppola directing a movie about a boy who grows up too fast, but when he's directing a gritty war drama it's perfect. In the same vein, you don't want a romantic comedy director making a comic book film, because they don't match, but a guy who's spent all his life basically making comic book adaptations might just be the guy you need.

 

[Moeez]

I can see a lot of Nolan in the Dark Knight Trilogy and it has been one of the things that put me off it. When I thought about it I realised I'd actually rather watch Batman, Batman Returns and Batman Forever as a trilogy than the DK Trilogy. Not to say that I don't like Nolan's work, I just think that the older films are better adaptations of the character.

I'm sorry, what?! WHAT?!

The Nolan films are the ones that have taken more from the comics than the old trilogy. Long Halloween, Year One, Knightfall, No Man's Land, all have showed up in some way in Nolan's trilogy.

The old trilogy had Penguin as some black goo "thing", Catwoman was revived from death by magic cats, Joker killed Batman's parents instead of Joe Chill, Two Face was just Jack Nicholson's Joker performance rehash instead of a tortured soul, and dozens of other points that were nothing like the comics.

 

[flarty]

still talking about avengers bob?

Is this how your going to review every film in comparison to the avengers now? think ill stop paying attention to your reviews.

I enjoyed Avengers but ultimately it was just a straight forward action film with witty one liners, the storyline felt so infantile and trivial. There is still better films out there from the superhero genre, has everyone forgot about watchmen?

So, let me get this straight: The Dark Knight Rises and Prometheus failed because they weren't utterly flawless masterpieces and didn't reach their lofty ambitions, while The Avengers was a success because it met its own shallow ambitions and altogether managed to exist without raising a stench to high heaven?

how do i rep this guy

 

[Tono Makt]

So, let me get this straight: The Dark Knight Rises and Prometheus failed because they weren't utterly flawless masterpieces and didn't reach their lofty ambitions, while The Avengers was a success because it met its own shallow ambitions and altogether managed to exist without raising a stench to high heaven?

Also TDKR wasn't as true to the source material as Bob would have liked, which was a mark against it already. It also didn't involve an actual Robin, which Bob has been pushing for since at least Kick Ass. So TDKR had a few strikes against it before it was released.

 

[Trishbot]

Bob still is hating on Spider-man... I think this is the 7th or 8th article he's lumped it into the "it's a terrible movie" category while skill ignoring the fact that, while not perfect, a huge majority of people enjoyed it.

But I do think we're going to be seeing a lot of "me too" attempts at superhero team-ups. Even Guardians of the Galaxy could fall victim to it (I hope not). But DC, definitely, seems to be in a hurry to screw it up.

 

[The Human Torch]

Opinions, this thread is filled with it and they all contradict each other. As far as the future of Marvel movies: I hope that more will be released of the same quality as we enjoyed so far. That is all.

 

[Souplex]

As someone who grew up after the Matrix had left its impact on modern action cinema, I am confused by what you said at the end of the article:
The Matrix was smart?

 

[Nouw]

I'm curious as to what you think of the upcoming Starship Troopers reboot since that's supposed to be more faithful.