3. The Avengers

I went out and saw The Avengers the other day.  I read an interview with the director, Joss Whedon, where he said he was attracted to the movie because The Avengers was the first comic he could remember reading and it was very strange.  It's a bunch of superheroes who get together and take care of things they can't handle by themselves.  But they all had their own comics so it was little odd.  The film, for some reason, adds Black Widow to the team (she only helps assemble/disassemble the team in the comics, if memory serves correctly).  In the comics, the original lineup included Giant Man and the Wasp too, so who knows what Whedon was thinking.  I guess the film canon is a bit different, but still...

Anyway, the movie is pretty much what you'd expect from a comic book movie circa Spiderman 1.  It's very funny, possibly the funniest comic book movie yet.  There are laughs every few minutes.  It's good to see a comic movie not take itself so seriously.  Whedon was the perfect director to pull this off.  Buffy was hilarious, so I expected at least that much.

I haven't seen Whedon's OTHER major feature film release yet (Cabin in the Woods) but I've heard similar things: "he makes it genuinely scary while still making it laugh-out-loud funny."  That's kind of exactly how Avengers is.  It's a genuine super-hero movie with lots of laughs.  Very entertaining.

However, the movie is pretty much what-you-see-is-what-you-get.  I found no real subtext or anything deeper than "SAVE THE WORLD!"  I was a little annoyed by this.  I don't see why you can't have this type of thing, even in "popcorn" movies like Avengers.  I mean, Whedon's work usually always has some kind of deeper aspect, be it the unusual strong female lead leading around a group of boys or a genre-bending western set in space.  This is... a movie about a team of super heroes.  No more, no less.  They all have different reasons for joining the team, but they're kind of glanced over, even in a 2+ hour movie.  I liked the movie, I just found it shallow.  That doesn't make it un-enjoyable, it just makes it not-immortal.

Rating: 4/5

Quotes:

Captain America: (planning the plan of attack, giving out directions to each member)  And Hulk- (Hulk looks, suspicious) smash.