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I think Marvel Entertainment has done a reasonably good job on the more recent releases I've seen, namely
Thor, the first
Iron Man, and (going back a way), the first
Spider-Man. This pleases me, because my first two boyhood favorites---Fantastic Four and Daredevil---were so mishandled that, based on reviews alone, I refused to go near them. Not even worth sneaking in to see.
A contemporaneous reader of 1960s Marvel Comics should enjoy
The Avengers. My standard of excellence for movies based on comics I read as a kid is not Art, but a port from pulp paper to cinema that is faithful to the original in tone and atmosphere while using digital effects to make the exercise of superpowers seem feasible and naturalistic.
Avengers succeeds at both of these "metrics" through excellent casting of the principal characters (with one exception) and very good battle choreography.
Each of the main heroes captures what an adult reader of '60s superhero literature would expect of the characters. Captain America is not that far on the good-looking side of average, and his personality is pretty wooden. That is good; lesser directors would have made the mistake of infusing him with glamor and wit, the same formula used to cast every male protagonist in a film aimed at a teenage audience. What makes him Captain America is that he's an operational wizard, commander-wise. Tony Stark is, as you would expect, a brilliant, arrogant asshole. Thor is a little bit dumb. And Bruce Banner was both entirely original yet correct in original spirit as a somewhat distracted, slightly disheveled scientist who is terrified of and addicted to his own capacity for rage.
The Hulk, incidentally, is one of the most problematic characters in this genre to portray, and all previous attempts I've seen (both live action and animated cartoon) miss the mark either somewhat or by a very wide margin. This one succeeds. For more on the subject, I'll commend your attention to a recent analysis in
The New Yorker by a newfangled reviewer who goes by the monicker of Film Crit Hulk. He (she, or it) nails the topic for the most part, except that I disagree with his assessment of Bill Bixby's Bruce Banner.
Unfortunately, I feel strongly that Sam Jackson was miscast as Nick Fury. This is both a '60s fanboy thing and a matter of comics history. Originally created by
Jack Kirby as a WWII commando squad leader, Fury was one of Kirby's two self-ascribed alter-egos within the literal universes of characters he created in his career (which he spent largely as an exploited piecework artist by Marvel). Fury had no superpowers, either as a sergeant or as a secret agent for SHIELD. We kids knew him as the cigar-chompin' tough guy with a Bronx accent who was much smarter than he sounded. A very similar personality, but much more insecure and alienated (not to mention having an epidermis of orange rocks) was Ben Grimm, who mutated into The Thing in 1961. Kirby has identified both of those characters as versions of himself, with Thing reflecting how he felt about himself and Fury reflecting how he would like to have been seen by the world. (Kirby wrote their dialog, and much more, but was never given writer credits by Stan Lee.) So, out of respect both to the original creation and to Kirby, I think that the producers should have passed on Sam Jackson's star power (and anyone else's star power as well) and cast an actor who could portray Fury as being instantly recognizable to geezer fanboys. But since Kirby---co-creator of all the principal Avengers characters plus Fury---was almost passed over in the end credits, thanks in large measure to decades of bad faith by
Stan Lee, maybe it's no wonder that Fury's authentic character is nowhere to be found in the movie. It's not that Jackson does a bad job; it's just that he's nothing like Agent Fury or his barking, hard-fisted homunculus.
About the combat choreography: a trouble I always have with CG battles in superhero movies is that they're very hard to parse, visually. Everything happens too close and too fast for my eyebones to sort out. In the Avengers, things happen as loud and fast as you would expect, but somehow it was much easier for me to perceive the action taking place in a fixed landscape. The raw power exchanged between Thor and Iron Man, trying to kick each other's ass due to a misunderstanding in the Mighty Marvel Tradition, feels plausible as they fling each other into heavy, unmovable objects without restraint. However, the one thing I think we're always going to have to suspend our disbelief about is the dynamics of mass, momentum, and inertia: we just can't escape many incidents where the low-power and no-power humans such as Fury, Hawkeye, Black Widow, and even Cap should be liquified, decapitated, amputated, or blunt-force-trauma-ed by a sudden acceleration from zero to, say, 100 g (or the converse). These things occur when being swatted by the Hulk, or thrown by an explosion, or grabbing ahold of an alien flying motorscooter moving at about Mach 1. Deal with it, ya yardbirds!
Big Rock Head criticized the movie's style of humor as being too
Scrubs. My reaction was that he may be correct in making the connection, but that the humor used in
The Avengers was very much in the spirit of the original Marvel scripts, and even
Mad Comics---simultaneously witty and corny---and predates
Scrubs by decades if not centuries. We can see similar formulations in
The Three Stooges, for example. At the root of BRH's observation (I'm assuming, here, because I've never seen an episode of
Scrubs) is that the modern sitcom form has become so dilute that it builds entire teleplays on a series of round-robin quips that try to serve as substance instead of periodic punctuation. So the humor in
The Avengers is not high comedy, but that's because it doesn't have to be. It serves the same purpose in the movie that it did on the newsprint pages 45 years ago---to lighten the violent action and humanize the characters.
All things considered, the director and producers deserve lots of credit.
The Avengers is a movie worth paying to see. But reflexive cynicism tells me that it's probably not too early to start worrying about how The Corporation will do its best to lower the common denominator for the next installment by 30 IQ points or so.
