I’ve been still thinking about THE AVENGERS movie, especially after talking with friends who have seen it too. As predicted I am one of the few who didn’t like it.
© 2012 Marvel LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Now that it’s been almost a week since I’ve seen this movie, I’ve identified the singular, underlying problem with the story and reason why I didn’t care for it.
THERE WAS NO CLEARLY DEFINED HERO! More over the lead character(s) was (were) NOT the hero(es). It’s an odd issue to have in a movie. As a scriptwriter, I tend to dissect a lot of movies to find the crux of the problems, so maybe I’m being too nitpicky or maybe I expect too much from popcorn movies.
Please excuse this brief digression, but Hollywood needs to do better than TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON (2011) and PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD’S END (2007). (I didn’t see PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES (2011), but I heard it was a sorry excuse for a movie.) There is ABSOLUTELY no reason to keep making sequels of these two franchises, but they will unless they hear our feedback. In my opinion, a reboot will be required to bring back life to them à la BATMAN and SPIDER-MAN.
Now back to THE AVENGERS… I respect writer/direct Joss Whedon’s work and I’ve already acknowledge that THE AVENGERS is worth seeing, but the story was lacking a key element: a hero with a heart.
I am not sure whose story this was suppose to be, who to root for or who was the hero. The rule is when you are watching a movie, the character who is one the screen the most is usually the protagonist aka the hero. In THE AVENGERS’ case, it could be either Nick Fury or Loki, but both of these scenarios have issues.
The story starts from Fury’s perspective, but he does not save the day. One of the Avengers takes care of this instead. Therefore, Fury was not the hero. Nick Fury turned out to be just a bystander in this story. He was the wiseman, pulling the strings from afar (or from high above), but in the end, THE AVENGERS was NOT his story.
As for Loki he was the antagonist aka villain, and probably the most well-defined character of the movie. I would argue that THE AVENGERS was his story, since it was mostly told through his perspective. However he was not the hero of the story, which circles back to my initial argument: who was the lead character? Tony Stark’s/Iron Man’s last ditch effort certainly had semblance of a hero moment, but THE AVENGERS was not his story either.
Without this crucial piece of THE AVENGERS’ puzzle, this story simply did not work and was the reason why the climax did not pay off for me.
I would further argue that if The Avengers as a group were suppose to be heroes (after all this was an ensemble cast) the chemistry and cohesion among them was lacking, or at least they took way too long to be developed. I can’t remember at what point in the movie where I thought to myself, “This is where the story should have begun.” It was probably at least 40 to 50 minutes into this action extravaganza. Not only did the story needed to written better, I would have liked this movie to be edited down to under two hours to help highlight the essential elements of the story. Less distractions from the main plot are always better.
Perhaps in THE AVENGERS 2 is when the Avengers Initiative will truly take shape and when our hero(es) will be born, but first we’ll have to see where IRON MAN 3 (2013) takes us.
© Rob Dragan
