The Avengers
It was too hot to think today, so I watch these Avengers, and not the other, more interesting, film with Sean Connery in a Teddy Bear costume.
This film feels like a prequel to The Incredibles. Sure, they save the world from a takeover attempt by an alien, but what cost? The government was willing to nuke Manhattan. Now, there’s no Wall Street, there’s probably more dead than on 9/11, billions are needed to rebuild New York. I hope Tony Stark’s fortune is nationalised to help pay for the damages, and the heroes are drafted to work on the reconstruction. Not relaxing while eating in some shawarma joint. After all, with great power comes great responsibility.
If you ignore all that and focus on the plot, I don’t understand The Hulk. Banner goes to the sticks because he can’t control it, but then he only fights the bad guys and even saves Tony Stark? What the heck? Turns out being The Hulk has only upsides and his whole ennui was for nothing! And Hawkeye’s superpower is pretty useless, stopped being relevant centuries ago. I’m guessing Black Widow’s superpower is being a girl? That’s why everyone else falls for her.
And you can almost sympathise with Loki. Surely, he’s just a freedom fighter that tries to make humanity ruled by a more intelligent species. Humans got an unlimited clean power supply and immediately went and made weapons out of it. Loki is just trying to put down the warmongers so that humanity can enjoy a new period of progress. You can argue that armed coups are not the best of means, but their ends are aligned with humanity’s long-term goals.
At spaces, you can’t really tell the difference between this and nu-Star Trek. There’s special effects galore, people on a ship’s bridge barking orders to underlings, colourful tight costumes, aliens, diverting power to subsystems, super powerful not-people on prisons trying to rule the world. It all blurs together.
I know that this is the middle of a series. I know that most of the reveals and callbacks went over my head. I know that space badguy in the end that smirks to the camera is supposed to be a big deal. This all doesn’t change the fact that this is only for diehard fans, doesn’t stand on its own, and is a disposable childish film.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.