The Avengers

[Darkwing]

First of all, why has no one posted this yet. Second of all, it was everything and more that I dreamed. Obviously not like a deep story type deal, but it's exactly what I (and many many other people) wanted. It's really something to be seen on the big screen, I'm still dribbling and drooling over it and it's been almost a full day that I've seen it. Definitely rewatching many times! Also, I know I get in for free so that kind of makes it easy for me to see it, but it's seriously worth the money, at least if you're into the Marvel heroes.

[largento]

I went Friday morning and greatly enjoyed it. The Hulk steals the movie. Two scenes especially brought giant roars from an otherwise mild audience.

 

Coming up in a time when virtually every super-hero movie or TV show was a let-down, it's been amazing over the last decade to watch these super-hero movies find their way. The Avengers doesn't get bogged down in the street clothes stuff that always took up too much time in an effort to keep the production budget down. It's greatly satisfying in that regard.

 

I loved that Loki spent more time wearing his horns ...and the post credit reveal of a major Marvel character floored me. Especially after having to deal with Galactus being a cloud in that Fantastic Four sequel.

 

I liked that the characters never seemed like they were wrong or out of place. Sometimes in a crossover thing like this, the characters can seem to be written wrong or just not act like themselves, but here, the characterizations from the movies leading up to it were all dead on. From Tony Stark's wit and cockiness to Captain America's earnest line to Black Widow: "There's only one God, ma'am and I'm pretty sure he doesn't dress like that."

 

Whedon has scored huge with this.

[robcat2075]

Am I likely to like this if I have no Marvel knowledge at all?

[jason1025]

Maybe

 

Its a fun ride. very witty, lots of action. It sets the bar for super hero movies if you ask me. I wish the xmen movies could have been this good.

[thejobe]

im still trying to get tickets.

 

the theater said to try monday.

 

then i asked can i just order tickets for monday?

 

they said no.

 

i want to see it so bad!!!

[Fuchur]

I dont see it that way... in the end there was no story at all (or one that could be told in very few words).

 

I think "Wolverine Origine" or the (new) Batman-Movies (Batman Begins and Dark Knight, I know they are DC) were really way better than this one. Evem the spiderman-movies (which are really just average, and I have been a fan of Spidey for years) were better.

 

Maybe Avengers 2 is better, but this one was all about introducing the super heros and their strengthes, which already got introduced enough in their own movies.

And here they just didnt have enough screen-time to really go in deep so you get something about their motivation, etc like it is done in their own movies... logical if you think about it... they had to share it between all the heros)

Nothing new here... and while I already knew all of them, the first hour (or so) was really not very interesting...

 

A few funny moments (mostly with hulk, I like Mark Ruffalo as the hulk... he is a great guy) and the FX was nice, but that was it.

 

See you

*Fuchur*

[jakerupert]

I was really disapointed, the best herochara being the asistant of Nick Fury and the funniest scene, when Hulk beat up Loki stating ("mediocre god")

(Tony Stark was good as always though.)

 

I liked the Ironman movies and Thor was fun too, even F4 is far more entertaining.

 

Loki is a quite lame boring chara in my eyes

 

and also I think its the last time I took that 3D rip-off in cinemas!

Only going to watch these kind of movies on DVD in the future WITHOUT 3D.

 

And the grouping of superheroecharas comes out kind of negative as well, cutting eachs heroicness down severly by

each of the others.

 

 

 

 

Could have seen "Battleship" that evening instead, which would probably have been the far better choice then.

 

 

But...naturally that`s only my personal point of view not intended to spoil the movie for the ones, who like it.

[largento]

im still trying to get tickets.

 

the theater said to try monday.

 

then i asked can i just order tickets for monday?

 

they said no.

 

i want to see it so bad!!!

 

Can you not buy your tickets through someplace like Fandango.com or MovieTickets.com?

[Fuchur]

I was really disapointed, the best herochara being the asistant of Nick Fury and the funniest scene, when Hulk beat up Loki stating ("mediocre god")

(Tony Stark was good as always though.)

 

I liked the Ironman movies and Thor was fun too, even F4 is far more entertaining.

 

Loki is a quite lame boring chara in my eyes

 

and also I think its the last time I took that 3D rip-off in cinemas!

Only going to watch these kind of movies on DVD in the future WITHOUT 3D.

 

And the grouping of superheroecharas comes out kind of negative as well, cutting eachs heroicness down severly by

each of the others.

 

Could have seen "Battleship" that evening instead, which would probably have been the far better choice then.

 

 

But...naturally that`s only my personal point of view not intended to spoil the movie for the ones, who like it.

 

I am with you there, especially since 3d was not used too much. I would not have looked it in 3d if it would have been offered in 2d. My experience says that with very very few exeptions, only real CG-animation-movies are worth it to be seen in 3d, since the informations are already there and it does not cost them more to include these informations... Rio had quite nice 3d-effects for instance.

 

Battleship is entertaining. Not a must see, but much better than this one.

 

See you

*Fuchur*

[John Bigboote]

Just saw it. OVERWHELMING! The 3D was cool... a great gimmick. The theatre was packed, and the guy at the ticket booth said this movie is saving their ass right now. The nerd/comic guy (think toodle-oooh!) nodded off at one point- which is a reaction I've seen people do when visually overwhelmed. Hulk and Iron Man steal the show. Love seeing Gwynth Paltrow doing sexy bit parts! Oh- and Scarlet JoHannson was excellent. See it again? No thanky!

[Darkwing]

Have seen it twice now and love every minute just as much!

[Rodney]

Just returned from seeing the film.

All in all its a pretty amazing treatment.

I was impressed by the amount of detail that was in the film and there were some very nice character driven moments that make you actually care about their fate.

 

There are some aspects of the film that make it better for those who are not well acquainted with the characters.

A black Nick Fury, while very well played by Samuel Jackson, really pulls me out of the story every time I see him... probably because my 'Marvel Universe' mentality thinks the change has to be 'explained away' in some manner. Someone should get a gold plated no-prize if they can properly explain the race-shift away. Ah well, I suppose it's just as well because they'd have had to figure out how to get Nick moved forward from World War II anyway...

 

My sense of the whole film was that it was almost three films worth of material.

I almost wish they'd saved the fish-like swimming creatures for the inevitable tie in with the Fantastic Four and the Sub-mariner.

The closer they can play these characters to their 'original' comic book portrayals the better IMO. There is a reason they were so successful.

[largento]

The explanation for Nick Fury being played by Samuel L. Jackson is that there was an alternate universe book years ago called "The Ultimates." It basically retold the Avengers story and was part of a whole spawn of Ultimates titles. In Ultimates, they not only decided to make Nick Fury black, but to also draw him as the likeness of Samuel L. Jackson.

 

The aliens in the Avengers movie are also from The Ultimates and are basically the Ultimates version of the Skrull, called the Chitauri.

[Gerry]

Well I'm glad there's an "explanation" (sort of like "guilty with an explanation" in traffic court) but like Rodney, a black Nick Fury clanks something fierce as far as I'm concerned. But I suppose I'm used to it by now; the Captain America movie was way more disappointing.

 

I'm planning on seeing The Avengers possibly this weekend. At first I was going to see it just for the snark value, but then remembered that Joss Whedon scripted, and the reviews are pretty impressive.

[Rodney]

Following the story of 'the ultimates' from an alternate universe is all fine and good but I'd rather find out what has been happening with the 'real' characters in the 'original' universe. Alternative storylines are entertaining but automatically suggest we have abandoned (or simply haven't a clue to what is happening in) the 'real' world of these characters.

 

At it's core is the suggestion that the stories with the original characters aren't entertaining enough to be told.

 

On it's face it puts characters such as the ultimate Nick Fury (and actors like Samuel Jackson in an awkward position) because the 'real' Nick Fury must inevitably appear to assert his rightful place. (Remember when the Hero always won at the end of the day?)

 

Ultimately (pun intended), it is a writers' dilemma to update characters while maintaining connectivity with a/the 'real' Marvel Universe. It seems to me that too many revisionists have their hands in the mix who are willing to change things without taking the time to figure out a better way to fit the pieces together. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby did this but had the advantage of telling the first tales. They were revionists as well but appeared to know when to update a character versus when to spin the essential part of that character off into a new character; retelling the tale of Frankenstein's Monster as a gamma radiated 'Hulk', for instance.

 

One of the joys of reading (and collecting) Marvel comics was trying to figure out (and understand) how the apparent inconsistencies all made sense and fit together in the grander scheme of things. The problem with alternate universes (as witnessed by the mess that DC tried to fix (but IMO failed) with 'Crisis on Infinite Earths'. Alternate worlds are explain things by creating a temporal zones. Outside of that zone the audience doesn't (perhaps cannot) care. In other words, if everything is possible/probable then nothing really matters in the end.

 

Josh Whedon appears to be doing well within the parameters he's been given.

This is in sharp contrast to the current X-Men franchise which is so convoluted at this point as to need a movie all of it's own just to set things aright again. The good news is that, in the grand tradition of Marvel Comics, it could be done and done really well. As an interesting paradox, this is where it gets really interesting because... now that things are so messed continuity-wise... this is the perfect time to really play with the characters and have them do things... and be people... they wouldn't in 'the real' Marvel Universe. Then when they've squeezed all of the money they can out of the alternates/ultimates they run a 'Days of Future Past' scenario which sets things aright again. The down side of this approach is that the core audiences of the presented material can be put off after being informed everything they've experienced is a lie/dream/alternative reality.

 

All this is a lot of words that won't mean much to anyone who isn't a Marvel fan from the 70's.

I suppose my point is that in order to maintain any cohesive imaginary universe one must care at least a little for integrity of the characters. When you change who they are that suggests a lack of faith in (and in this case the commerciality of) the original character.

 

Fury had some really serious changes applied to him when he was updated from a World War II Howling Commando to a high tech agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. but the transformation (prolongation?) was at least plausible. The only plausible explanation I can see without resorting to the alternate universe silliness is to suggest that there has always been more than one Nick Fury. When every Nick Fury has an eye patch though... we return once again to the silliness which must be explained away... He's got a robot eye... he's a cyborg... roll the dice and pick a random explanation because eventually no will care anyway.

 

I can hardly wait for the 'Nick Fury' movie where Samuel Jackson spars against an all star cast of other Furys... in a time travel flick. That'd give every action hero actor from Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger to Sylvester Stallone the opportunity to play the character for fifteen minutes of fame.

[largento]

I had a discussion about this sort of thing a year or two ago with a guy at one of the conventions I was doing. My point was that with these characters having been around for generations, a movie version has to somehow bridge those generations. What worked in the 1940s is for the most part not going to work now and if it's entirely the modern version, then you alienate older fans. It's a tricky tight-rope.

 

Somebody not long ago, I can't remember who, made the point that comic books are "stuck in the middle." The origin story has already been told and the ending will *never* be told, so the stories are stuck in the middle. As such, in order to keep from appearing static, they have to do these stunts to make the properties more interesting.

 

The Ultimates may not be the "real" versions of the characters, but as the decades go on, it becomes harder and harder for the "real" characters to be "real." I saw a Fantastic Four cover recently that made me laugh. It had Reed Richards' tombstone and his birthdate was the year that FF#1 was released. If Reed had been 50 in 1961, he'd be 101 now.

 

Some of the Ultimates stuff that creeped into the movies I liked. Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movies used the Ultimates idea that Spider-Man's webbing was organic and part of his transformation, rather than us having to believe that a 16 year-old kid could invent this astonishing web substance and mechanical shooting devices using things he found around his house.

 

Yes, Nick Fury could have served in WWII and then become a spy if it was still the 1960s, but that's impossible now. Continuity becomes continuity after-the-fact. We all know that the continuity says that Captain America was frozen during WWII, yet there were Captain America comics in the 1950s. He didn't know he'd been frozen. :-)

 

Frankly, it's why I don't read many comics anymore. MY version of the X-Men bears little resemblance to the current incarnations (and the Ultimate X-Men). Even Batman and Superman and the DC Comics heroes have so dramatically changed over the years, that they almost have no relation to the characters I grew up with.

 

And that's not really a bad thing. The fact is that comics were on the verge of collapse in the 1970s. They had to do something to keep the industry alive.

 

Back to the "middle" thing, the thing I'm most excited about with this new Batman movie is that supposedly this will be an "ending" for the Batman legend. At least for Chris Nolan's telling of it. An actual ending!

[Gerry]

My theory is that when the comics publishers either became or were subsumed by larger corporations, there was a parallel "corporatization" of the characters themselves where each and every one of them had to become a cog in a larger universe where all their storylines meshed and all the characters made sense when viewed through all the other characters' universes.

 

This was a very bad move because it necessitated all this reinvention of perfectly good characters, when in reality there's no reason (other than the occasional crossover issue) for all these fictional characters to have their entire lives meticulously correspond to each others', any more than Richie Rich's world needs to correspond to Casper's.

 

What has definitely gotten lost is the fact that these are just cartoon characters. Spider-Man is no different than Bugs Bunny. Put another way, the story of superheroes-in-hiding that was creepy in "Watchmen" was told more truly (and way more effectively) in "The Incredibles".

 

It's just a feeling I have but I think eventually all this will spin out of control, or at the very least readers will be lost. You can't have two hundred individual characters (who each plays the starring role in their own world!) and keep track of them all.

[largento]

My feeling is that the industry is basically gone. Their heyday in the late 30s/40s/50s is long gone.

 

They are kept on life support by corporations that need the comics to survive in order to keep their licenses valuable.

 

Marvel ran into a terrible brick wall in the mid-70s when Stan Lee decided to go out west and shop the Marvel properties to the studios. What he found was that the studios were puzzled by what was on the stands. If they wanted to make a Fantastic Four movie, how come when they picked up an issue of it, it wasn't the same Fantastic Four? Stan's reaction to this was to immediately issue a policy at Marvel that everything had to revert to a constant and you couldn't make any changes. This stagnated creativity.

 

Comics for all real purposes died in the 1970s/early 1980s. I honestly think color TV did them in. Comics could no longer get the kid market and so they had to focus entirely on the audience that had grown up on comics and couldn't quite let them go. This meant significantly maturing the comics to meet those tastes and that meant having to abandon the CCCA and aim for direct sales.

 

Once that move was made (and the distributors imploded), it became an industry on life-support. It's self-sustaining on a very small portion of the population. Giant EVENTs are needed to try to give the industy a transfusion of new blood, but the blips don't last very long and you can only pull a "Captain America is dead!" stunt so many times before the audience starts to say, "so what?"

 

In their heyday, comics were mainstream and kids read comics for only 3 years, but there was a Baby Boom of kids coming along to replace them. Now they act like drug pushers, using a "Free Comic Book Day" to try to lure disenfranchised teens into the culture.

 

Digital comics, I think, could have been an early boom for comics, but they have one foot stuck in the past and can't see how to go all in. I think it may now be too late.

[Rodney]

Well, it has been said that every story -should- start in the middle.

With the current crop of Marvel movies I'm just happy to see there is some effort to maintain the core elements of the characters.

The look of these movies really impresses me. The treatment of Tony Stark/Iron Man is a very good example of this. IMO Robert Downey Jr. really captures the character.

 

Much has been said about the effect of real time in comics and there seems to be a few specific schools of thought concerning this. I'm of the opinion that is a necessary element of telling the tale and an element that doesn't need to be explained away. Comic book time is something that happens (or is recorded) on a sliding time scale.

 

The more people try to fix that aspect the more that errors in continuity will appear. The example of the Captain America comic books of the 50s is a good example that provides a clue as to how to proceed. The idea is that the storytellers of the 50s were merely telling the tales as they would from their (then current) perspective. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby dealt with this directly by having themselves appear in the comic books and having the characters take them to task for their 'faulty' portrayal of their adventures. It was a given that these were tales being told as best as they could be told with the means the writer/artist had available to them. So the full truth of the matter was yet to be revealed.

 

A good example of dealing with the retelling of stories appropriately within a sliding time scale in comic book time is the update of Tony Stark's wartime origin/experience from one in Vietnam to one in the Middle East. All the basic elements from the original are there but the time-perspective has changed for the sake of the audience experiencing the tale. One could argue that this is exactly what they are trying to do with Samuel Jackson as Nick Fury... after all, did not the change of locale for Tony Stark wipe out a whole history of Tony Stark's interaction with the Vietnamese... but I find it to be considerably different when these major changes are performed on primary versus tertiary characters. This kind of silliness (trying to fix things but breaking greater things) is something we've been plagued with since Jean Grey had to die for killing a bunch of Aparagus people in the lead up to 'The Death of the Phoenix'. Good writers can deal with these things innovatively without undermining the characters. Bad writers just come up with ideas to make things go away.

 

Keep in mind that we are seeing a Marvel Universe these days that could be explained away in many... thousands... of ways.

 

Speaking of bad decision making... *Spoiler Alert* (invisi-text)

Personally, I think they killed off the best character in the Avengers movie when they killed off everyone's favorite Agent of Shield.

Now that they've killed him though the absolute worst thing they could do... which means they'll probably do it... is bring him back to life again.

For some reason, I keep thinking they might bring him back as Deathlok or some similar character.

I understand why they wanted to kill him off... to make the threat of Loki more real... but they didn't need to kill him to accomplish that in the film.

[Gerry]

I LOVED IT! Great script, great characters, great action sequences. The Hulk was awesome. Joss Whedon is really a story genius.

 

Saw it in 3D, and it was fine but no great shakes. The glasses gave me a bit of a headache.

 

Still don't understand Cap's uniform, it looks like it's still in the sketch stage.

[Rodney]

Gonna go see it again with my brother in about an hour.

 

We'll see it in normal-vision this time.

I saw it in 3D before but I don't really remember all that much being 'jump out of the screen' 3D.

I was impressed by the 3D intro prior to the movie... and the opening credits seemed to be in 3D but after that I just settled in and watched the movie.

It'll be interesting to see if the movie feels flatter this time around.

 

(still living mostly without internet connectivity so life is very relaxing these days)

[Gerry]

Hey Rodney, re: your hidden spoiler above, when you see it again, tell me if you think they *really* did, er, that thing you feel they shouldn't have done. Nick Fury, he keeps a lot of secrets, y'know?

 

Also, there's one more easter egg if you stay til the very, very end of the credits. If you haven't already, it's a good, easy laugh.

 

ALSO: The screen credits for the FX are immensely long, with credits for several FX houses, easily hundreds of names. Trivia question: How many do you think there are? Easily a thousand, but two, three thousand? I was totally blown away just by the length.