Now that he’s got a mainstream franchise film under his belt, Joss Whedon will probably be best known as the guy who directed The Avengers. But before this he was best known for being the guy who created cult TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly. That might not look like a good enough resume to entrust him with what is potentially the biggest movie of all-time on paper, but if you revisit his career up to this point, and you study what he did with those genre-bending TV shows, it suddenly becomes clear why he’s the only guy on the planet who could have taken on a project as big and complex as The Avengers and made it a success.
Over the course of Whedon’s television work he perfected the art of filling a room full of characters with wildly divergent personalities, having them chafe against each other, and using their conflicts to create both drama and humor. In everything he did he started with a handful of loner, individualist characters and had them develop into a family over time. And over-and-over again he figured out how to present fantastical, over-the-top genre material without any of the cheesiness or cheapness that usually comes along when it’s served up by someone else. His recipe looks something like: one part character development; one part balls-to-the-wall action; one part respect for the story he’s telling; add a dash of mock-heroic humor. Faced with as daunting a task as making a movie with a cast as large and a scope as epic as The Avengers, Whedon’s potion was just what Marvel needed to make sure they didn’t fall flat on their faces.
Getting all of The Avengers in one place, giving them a shared goal, and having it all make sense must have looked like the beginning stages of putting together a jigsaw puzzle back in this film’s early development. Even if the folks in charge got the job done, it still seemed to me like the finished product was going to look more like a Frankenstein monster, held together with tape and glue, than a complete, pretty picture. But credit to Whedon (writer/director) and Zak Penn (who got a story credit); not only did they finish the puzzle, they also made something entertaining and impressive in the process (okay, so they did have one piece left over in Thor’s girlfriend, Natalie Portman, but they kind of just threw her in the junk drawer and nobody much noticed).
The biggest hurdle in front of this story getting off and running was all the setup that needed to be done. Even after five films of prep work the Avengers hadn’t all been in the same room, or all been briefed on the bad guys and MacGuffins stuffed in this story. Through all of the introductions, explanations, and mouthfuls of exposition that the first half of the film contained, there could have been some painfully slow moments. But these scenes get peppered with so many quips and gags that you never even realize you’re being sat down for a pseudo-science lesson. Whedon kills it with the jokes here, and his humor is always weaved into the script organically. He doesn’t do the thing some screenwriters do where all of the characters just speak in a more sarcastic version of the screenwriter’s voice, and he never sacrifices character in order to shoehorn in a gag. Each of the protagonists is talking in their own voices, and, if anything, the gags they’re involved in help to flesh their personalities out even further (how can you not love the fact that Agent Coulson is a trading card-toting Captain America fanboy?).
But while Whedon had a few big wrinkles to work out when putting together The Avengers, he also had some pretty big assets to utilize as well; the biggest of which being the fact that he was working with nothing but classic, enduring characters who were being portrayed by actors who were already very well cast in their roles. After Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, and Chris Evans’ work in Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America, everyone was already comfortable in knowing that the performers cast could play their characters with authenticity and charm. And though there were bigger question marks as to whether actors like Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, and Jeremy Renner would be able to match their contemporaries’ work while playing Hulk, Black Widow, and Hawkeye, they’re all strong enough actors that there wasn’t much doubt they would be able to rise to the occasion if given the right material and enough focus (which Whedon’s excellent screenplay has no trouble providing).
Real mention should be made of Ruffalo’s portrayal of Bruce Banner, however. Ruffalo is the third actor in the last decade to portray the character on the big screen, and even when put up against names like Eric Bana and Edward Norton, he blows the competition out of the water. He brings a bumbling, eccentric, Wayne Coyne-as-a-college-professor aura to Banner, and it makes the character far more likable and engaging here than he’s been anywhere else. Ruffalo is also helped along by the fact that, when hulked out, the big green guy gets far better stuff to do here than he has in his solo adventures. Whedon saves the Hulk the bulk of the big laughs and butt-kicking moments, and it’s hard to imagine anyone coming out of the theater after this movie without having contracted a serious case of Hulk fever. Banner is the only character who Marvel hasn’t been able to get to perform, both critically and financially, in the way that they really wanted him too—but Whedon finally cracked the code. The Avengers is going to sell a lot of Hulk Hands, and I imagine the studio will be beating down Ruffalo’s door to get him to take the character out for another spin sometime real soon.
The third big strength of the film, aside from its humor and its character work, is how much fun all of the action is. Marvel films up to this point have been entertaining throughout, but have petered out once it’s time to get to the action climax. Not so with Whedon’s film. The basic plot we’re working with here is that Thor’s brother Loki (still played be a menacing and delightfully preening Tom Hiddleston) has made a deal with an alien army wherein, if he can open a portal for them to get to Earth so they might conquer the planet, they’ll let him rule it in exchange for giving them the Tesseract (that glowing cube of cosmic energy from Captain America). The story works as a framework for a great heist sequence at the beginning of the film, where Loki steals the cube away from the good guys, a bunch of tried-and-true superheroes-fight-each-other-before-they-team-up slugfests in the middle of the film, where we get to see everyone do battle in various combinations, and then the biggest, most fun, and most satisfying action climax in a Marvel movie yet, where The Avengers and the bad guys trash most of New York City while waging war for the fate of the universe. Whedon’s previous work has all contained an action element of some sort, and it’s all been fun enough to follow, even while working under the constraints of a TV budget, but when turned loose with a Hollywood blockbuster budget, the man makes the art of the action scene look effortless; and he even manages to throw some experimental and exhilarating camerawork into the mix while he’s at it. There hasn’t been action of this eye-popping a scope on the big screen since Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and The Avengers has the advantage over that film of being both way more entertaining in the lead-up to its apocalyptic throwdown, as well as prettier and easier to follow. It’s hard to imagine event filmmaking done much better than this.
If there’s a complaint to be had with the movie, however, it’s with the story. Even though Hiddleston’s Loki is entertaining and engaging when bantering with the heroes, his world domination motivations are a little thin and shallow. And the alien race he’s working with is all but nameless and faceless. They don’t quite add up to a conflict equalling all of the cinematic firepower on screen. The limitations of the bad guys’ machinations are understandable though; there was so much work to be done in getting all of the heroes reintroduced and establishing what their group dynamic was going to be that also trying to fit in too complex of a problem for them to face would have just stuffed the film too-full of things the audience needed to follow. But now that the team has met and forged relationships with one another, it would seem that this is a problem that could be rectified in any Avengers sequel. Match the laughs, thrills, and character work of this story with a conflict that’s a little more compelling, a little more complex, and perhaps even more personal, and the results could be something truly sublime.
Really, one could go on extolling the virtues of The Avengers forever. To write about the film is a frustrating exercise in trying to resist the urge to just give a rundown of all of your favorite action beats, subtle jokes, and little character moments. One could talk (or type) until he’s out of breath trying to convey just how much joy gets packed into every second of this film’s 143 minute runtime (which, though lengthy, goes by in a flash). Watching The Avengers is so much fun that the urge to relive the experience and share it with others is overpowering. But here I am, quite a few words into my review and I haven’t even begun to crack the surface of all the good things I want to say. So I’ll just leave you with the following advice: Go see The Avengers. After you’ve seen it once, go see it again. And then look me up so we can geek out about all the cool stuff they might do for the sequel. In Whedon we trust.
