So I Suffered Through: The Avengers (2012)
Fitting for a movie by Joss Whedon of all people, this film feels like it's uncomfortably close to me and wouldn't leave even if I asked nicely.
Everyone and their mother has made the joke about how, due to the presence of so many TV shows and films and spinoffs and the sudden semi-canonicity of Every Marvel Movie Ever, the MCU has ironically recreated the inherent headache of trying to follow an ongoing comics storyline by following through 100 issues of stuff you only tenuously care about.
Well, Joss Whedon back in 2012 introduced a more common pain point of comicbooks to the MCU: A character you like being handed off to a writer you don't.
There's a lot of negative things to say about The Avengers - and make no mistake, I'm absolutely going to say them - but the ultimate worst part of the movie is that Joss Whedon clearly had no interest in the script he was handed (allegedly rewriting huge chunks of it) but also seemingly never watched the movies he's following up on. While fitting for a TV director, it does mean that watching these in order betrays just how out of character everyone is.
Steve is written as though Whedon was handed two cards saying "man out of time" and "boy scout" so both lines are repeated verbatim in the movie but… God, Whedon's Steve is so insufferable. He's a hardass military man who stops just short of using outright callsigns and has become unbearably cynical, with him seemingly portrayed as a guy who has off-the-shelf War Trauma that completely glosses over his reasons for partaking and the inherent optimism in his writing in the last movie even when things got tough. There's also a rather alarming deference to authority present here that just feels out of character for the MCU Steve, a man who respected his superiors but continually defied them when his strong moral core won out. This in turn gives him a strange coldness that gives me that awful old "did I miss a movie?" feeling from Hulk 2008.
Tony likewise has character writing that betrays a relative ignorance of how he behaves in Iron Man 1 and 2. Whedon's Tony is not a man who feels much in the way of remorse, empathy or self-reflection. He is, in many ways, Whedon's idealized version of self, being a rich ubermensch that people only get combative with when they're objectively in the wrong and whose girlfriend is a swooning trophy wife that never really challenges and only lightly snarks at him. He is right about everything, is seemingly always in control, never meaningfully fumbles and soaks up the vast majority of the cool moments. Whedon clearly loves the idea of Tony Stark, but not so much the vulnerable and somewhat traumatized MCU Tony, so that's thrown out the window.
This all comes to a head in a fairly nauseating scene where they snark at one another. You've likely seen it in the form of gifs - Whedon shoots all of his movies for trailers and gif clippers - and it's the one where Tony insists all of Steve's good qualities are from the serum and Steve insists that Tony is nothing without the suit and… I think it's bad, but it's bad in ways that are fun to talk about, so it gets its own segment. Put simply, as much as we're all tired of "HE WOULDN'T FUCKING SAY THAT"-type posts, neither of these men would actually say any of this.
Steve is already intimately aware that superficially obnoxious and self-absorbed people can be putting on a front - because he met and probably fucked Tony's dad - and Tony may be vain but he's not vain enough to accuse someone else of only being special due to outside factors since, you know, he's only special because he inherited generational wealth and he has an inferiority complex over this. I'm not even doing character reads here, this is in the fucking text. The end result is a scene that feels as though someone scribbled "write a conflict here" at the midpoint and everyone scrambled to get one out the door. My fellow Avengers haters have often called this "fanfic writing", but fan fiction tends to be much better at handling characters than Whedon.
What really outs the terrible character writing as being, well, terrible, is when they have to interact with other Movie Protagonists. Steve and Tony are terribly written all around but them talking to other characters especially highlights it. Steve treats Coulson with an uncharacteristic level of contempt, which I don't mind because Coulson is a detriment to every movie he's in, but it's so weirdly OOC for him to treat an earnest man like a yapping dog that he's resisting the urge to kick. Black Widow was in Tony's last movie but they barely interact and when they do it's as if they're meeting for the first time. Natasha's own competence in Iron Man 2 is mostly sanded down in giving her the Whedon Special of simultaneously being a hypercompetent stoic and a histrionic whump cushion, meaning she talks to Hawkeye like a therapist who just broke down upon hearing a backstory that's Too Much, Man. Thor meanwhile is a caricature of himself that's kinda stiff and uncomfortable. Chris Hemsworth was incredibly switched on in his debut movie so going from that to watching him struggle through lines too overwrought even by Asgardian standards is painful, doubly so when he talks to anyone else in scenes that feel conspicuously like they were done way too late in shooting to feel natural.
'Unnatural' is a word that really describes the feeling permeating this entire movie. Whedon is ultimately a TV director and thus every hallmark of serialized TV that has an uncertain future is present here. In Folding Ideas' video on the Jarhead sequels, Dan Olson says 'budget-conscious' a lot, and I keep thinking back to that phrase whenever I think about Avengers. Like any TV show where they write 15 minutes of plot per episode for a series with 45-50 minute episodes, there's a lot of outright stalling for time because The End is where all the budget goes. Some scenes linger on a near-static image or motion for so long that it starts to become conspicuous, and there's a ton of superfluous cuts during action scenes that exist Just 'Cause. There's this one really egregious moment in the Helicarrier assault where Steve and a random mook spend about five minutes taking turns firing their guns at one another and it's such blatant runtime padding that it would feel kinda quaint in a mid-budget direct to DVD sequel but is frankly insufferable in a movie that cost and made more money than nearly every country in Europe. I typically don't put on my Editing Critique hat but this film feels so goddamn cheap that it went past annoying into outright infuriating. Y'all have more money than god and THIS is all you can do?
Further to the point is Whedon's signature writing. Nearly every line of dialogue is comment-snark-quip, comment-snark-clapback, or comment-snark-beat-clapback. Worse than being merely insufferable, it's formulaic. The other side of the coin is the significant amount of dialogue which is quite obviously framed and shot in such a way that it can be used as trailer footage. I know MCU fans had a grand ol' time dogging on the Infinity War-Endgame hype cycle for how much trailer footage ended up missing, but seeing as the alternative is this I'm fine with it. A good friend described it as "Joss Whedon shooting every other scene so Tumblr gif makers can use it as fuel" and they're not wrong. It's an uncomfortably… showy style of directing. The other Phase One MCU movies aren't exactly masterclasses in subtlety but everything is so overdone in this movie that it feels like it's made for an audience younger than the toy-buying children it's aimed at. I've seen CBeebies shows better scropted - and lit - than this.
You may notice I'm taking more potshots at Whedon than I did towards the other directors, and that's because his creative thumbprint is all over this one. Despite the change in framing, shot composition, colour grading and even camera lens, I honestly felt the other Phase One movies are fundamentally consistent with one another. Whedon meanwhile throws that to the wind in what one of my dear mutuals referred to as "lit up like a yogurt commercial". When this film was recent I saw an incredible amount of comments declaring that The Avengers was nothing like other Marvel movies released up till that point, and I'm inclined to agree: The other ones are much, much better.
Whedon is a deeply incurious man that considers the understanding of why people think and behave to be extraneous bullshit, and so the resolution to all of the team's conflict is Tony pulling a heroic sacrifice fakeout that ties them all together as a #team. Black Widow is superficially cool not because of anything she says or does but because Whedon wants her to be and has no real interest in selling her as a character. Loki, returning from Thor, is so deeply detached from his previous characterization that he's metamorphed into Albert Wesker as depicted in Resident Evil 5. Changing character opinions or moments that would be a lead-in to interpersonal payoff are skipped over entirely, leading to a movie that's paced about as well as trying to recall your weekend after a particularly nasty concussion. We know thanks to hindsight that this is all indicative of a deeply self-absorbed man who was conducting a reign of terror against both women and his peers who would later be ostracized not so much for his actually terrible deeds but because he's very much a nightmare to work with.
…I like Bruce Banner in this movie though. Less so because of the script and moreso because Mark Ruffalo is so good at playing and understanding Mr. Hulk that he elevates every scene he's in by virtue of being the only guy that isn't visibly annoyed at Whedon's writing. I can't tell if he's actually good or if the well was so poisoned by Edward Norton's abysmal performance that anything else looks better, but the bar for quality in this film is on the floor so I will of course celebrate anyone stepping over it. It's been memed to death too but the "Cap, I'm always angry" is a good line. Ruffalo gets it.
Anyway… Fuck. Okay. The future of the Ham MCU Watchthrough.
This film was bad. Categorically worse than Hulk 2008 in every way and only saved from that bottom spot in the rankings by having passable action (albeit notably worse than previous films) and slightly better acting, but fuuuuuuuuuuck it almost demoralized me out of the rewatch… But not quite. There's a few good films on the horizon (and some bad ones: look forward to the Age of Ultron writeup) and I'm still between games. It's been hard for me to really start anything and this watchthrough has provided much-needed structure until I can latch onto anything else; I sit down with my dinner, I put on my headphones, I boot up either American or Euro Truck Sim, and I put on an MCU movie. It's nice when I'm otherwise in freefall, even when the movies aren't good.
So yes, the show will go on.