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Tonight at 7 p.m. I’ll be joining Emmy Jackson, Bethany Grenier, and Gary W. Olson at Nicola’s Books in Ann Arbor for reading, Q&A, and signing of books.
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Like so many others, I saw Avengers this weekend. Short version: I liked it. A lot. I don’t read comics, so I can’t say what they did or didn’t change from the canonical Marvel universe, but overall I thought it was a wonderfully fun story. My inner seven-year-old was thrilled. So was my actual seven-year-old, for that matter. (He particularly liked the Hulk.)
And now, on with the spoilerific specifics…
Loved Tony Stark and Bruce Banner. It was almost too much sexy intelligence in one room.
Loved Black Widow’s introduction scene, and her interrogation style (which comes back in a wonderful way with Loki later on).
My son’s favorite moment was after Thor and the Hulk finish taking down an alien ship, and the Hulk casually slugs Thor, sending him flying.
My favorite bit was probably Loki’s monologue to the Hulk … and the interruption thereof. “Puny god” indeed. Loved the Hulk’s comic timing. The green guy might not have had great standalone films (though I thought the Ed Norton movie was pretty good), but he was perfect in this one.
I liked finally seeing Nick Fury/Samuel Jackson in action.
The only moment I remember my suspension of disbelief breaking was Hawkeye shooting an arrow into a computer terminal so precisely that the various pins lined up with the terminal in order to hack the system.
Though the “Loki’s mind control can be broken by hitting you in the head” bit was a little too convenient as well.
Such lovely, lovely snark all around.
The final post-credits scene was just fun.
I never really felt like any of our heroes were in genuine danger. Tony’s heavily-telegraphed potential sacrifice at the end was nice and all, but you knew perfectly well he’d survive. The world was at risk, yes. The heroes, not so much. Heck, most of them are already signed up for various sequels.
I have no idea if Agent Coulson is really dead or not. I expected to see him in one of the post-credits scenes. It would certainly be in character for Joss Whedon to kill him off, but it also felt like a setup… What do you think?
I really wish they’d done more with Pepper Potts’ character. She had a fun exchange with Tony Stark in the beginning, but for the most part, she felt like generic off-screen love interest. In such a male-dominated film, it struck me as a missed opportunity to have another active female character, particularly given that the end of the film took place at Stark Tower.
Overall though, I loved it. Major kudos to Marvel for such an ambitious, long-term project. More please.
For everyone else who’s seen it, what did you think? I haven’t had much of a chance to get all geeky and talk about the film, and I’d like to remedy that now…
Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.
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Which is more than a little surprising, both that it wasn't and that Marvel would make that so very clear.
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Offline conversation with some friends of mine has led us to the suspicion that Marvel is likely courting Joss for Avengers 2, and thus wants to make a future project more appealing by not having him take heat on something that happened in this one when it's not actually his fault, especially given his past history of character death.
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And I would love to see Whedon come back for Avengers 2.
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I think I would, too. I wasn't sure at first, but by and large despite rolling my eyes at a couple of specific Whedonisms that felt recycled, I did really like how he handled the majority of the film - and I'll admit freely that finding out that Coulson's fate wasn't his decision cut out most of the eye-rolling I was doing.
(The other Whedonisms in question: the "Hellmouth collapse" feel to the loss of the research center where they were working on the tesseract cube, and the specific story point of redirecting a missile away from earth into outer space with the heroic self-sacrifice involved in doing so, because he did the exact same thing with Kitty Pryde in comics, missile and all.)
Besides, the more I think about the film as a whole, the better I liked it, especially the character interactions and banter, and there's no question that Whedon handles that exceptionally well!
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I would tend to agree with this. I think he's done some good things, but at the same time, there are certainly ... issues. (And I don't even want to talk about Dollhouse.)
I think Avengers got a fair number of things right on that score, but I also agree there were other opportunities he missed.
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I do wonder whether the actor ad-libbed that line, on a direction to say something insulting, and just defaulted to a woman-oriented insult. I've read that there was a lot of sanctioned ad-libbing. But even if that's the explanation, the director allowed it to stay in. And that offends me. There are ways to show a character hates (and underestimates) women without allowing that kind of language. I mean, would the c-word have been allowed?
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