Note: this is a reply to Maria
Aspan's discussion of the four key things that worked about the Avengers (at
movieline.com).
Re: The Avengers doesn't try to
give equal time to each of the heroes; it might as well be called Iron Man 2.5.
Thor is there to swing his hammer and drop off the villain from his
movie, Hawkeye gets brainwashed before we even know him, and Captain America
fades into Tony Stark's straight man. And you know what? Those are
good things. The movie's already over two hours. And by choosing a
few Avengers to focus on, Whedon made me more invested in what happened to
Stark and Black Widow and the Hulk during the course of the movie.
Stephanie Zacharek, you'll note, saw it
different. She argued that Iron Man's pronouncement, his
"self-important wisecracks, begin to wear a rut in the movie" -- that
he wore on us, leaving the hero who all along didn't try to hard -- Captain
America -- as the stand-out Avenger. She said it was the hero who
remained most human that you remember; and it is true that the ground fight
involving the least powerful Avengers -- Hawk Eye, Captain America, Black Widow
-- left together enough human precariousness and human uplift to make them seem
for a moment the human core and the rest as external battle armaments. I
wrote awhile ago, in a comment that may, alas, have gotten lost in the woods,
that we might see in this film a transitioning away from the super-hero types
we've gotten used to wanting to associate with -- the wise-cracking Wolverine
or Iron Man types -- towards actually wanting the patriotic, the square, the
straight-man types redeemed for our appreciation, even our identification.
I thought the old preference would have to be allayed, played to, to make
the transition possible while keeping our self-respect. I think we're all
still more here with Iron Man than we are with Captain America, as you argue,
but that comment in the film about America actually being in the mood for old
school, and the scene where Captain America garners the respect of the police
force, began to clear a path, I think, for Captain America to more take over in
the next film -- with his perhaps even being accorded a knock-out win in an
argument with Stark, with average intelligence but solid virtue stearing wit
and snark clear to the side. How this will happen while engaging an
inter-galactic villain, I don't know, but I still expect to see it.
A final note on this: there was a
sense when Iron Man brandied wits and, well, brandy with Loki,
of these two actually being co-sympathetic, fundamentally akin -- with both
being conniving, smart-as-sin, full-of-themselves court wits, who'll ultimately
need to oblige themselves to more straight-laced kings. You're right --
Iron Man's sacrifice didn't register (note: I'm referring here to another
of Aspan's comments; specifically that she "believed in Coulson's death
much more than the movie ever made [her] believe that Iron Man would actually
have to sacrifice himself to save Manhattan); and, we noted, it was the best
that he had. Penny is going to need to absolve him, and perhaps with
this, absorb him -- already she wasn't seeming so second-fiddle;
instead as if already reeling in the stray dog wanting his being reigned in.
Comments
Post a Comment