This extremely long movie provides the kind of storyline that you have seen many times before and have probably enjoyed. It seems that there’s an endless appetite for tales of diverse bands of comrades who face great trials in battle. But a lot of the dramatic high points are not overly convincing, unless perhaps you are an ‘Avengers’ fan (I have never seen any of the other films, although I did see an ‘Iron Man’ movie a long time ago). Many of the people in the packed cinema I sat through this movie with made what I assumed were suitable sounds at various moments, including laughter when one character or another said something they found funny, so presumably I was the outlier in my estimation of the movie in this regard.
It takes a while to get going because it has to tie in its narrative with what has come before in earlier films in the franchise, but once you get to the meat of the matter things happen fast and you are rarely bored. The character of the android Nebula (Karen Gillan) was interesting for a number of reasons and she supplied the drama with a lot of the requisite forward momentum leading up to the set piece of the final combat between the forces of good and the forces of evil (which are led by Nebula’s “father” Thanos, played by Josh Brolin). Nebula in my mind had a weird emo vibe about her that made her stand out from the largely heteronormative type most of the other superheroes conformed to. Her eyes have no whites, which is an aesthetic trick that serves to visually enhance her uniqueness for the viewer.
This franchise has some big names that add depth in many of the scenes that are not dominated by CGI. There is still plenty of acting to be done and Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man, Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow, and Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye in my view stand out for the subtlety of their performances. Tilda Swinton has a short cameo role dressed in a yellow robe as a kind of monk and this is pretty convincing, helping to keep things chugging along nicely. In the end however it’s hard to sympathise with the principal characters that do not die (I won’t give anything away here beyond saying that some do, in fact, die) mainly because of the clunky manner with which those that remain express their sadness at the demise of the fallen. Some scenes possess the kind of mawkish emotion that you find at an official military funeral.
The comedy, also, is a bit obtuse and at times somewhat lacking in freshness. The voice of Rocket, the laconic CGI raccoon, which was supplied by Bradley Cooper, forms one point in a comic nexus that is used to alleviate the otherwise crushing weight of the multi-episode story. Other comic moments are supplied by Thor (Chris Hemsworth), who starts out as a bit of a maudlin soak ensconced in a remote fishing village with a tub of beer and a big belly, the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), and Ant Man (Paul Rudd). Captain America’s (Chris Evans) arse comes in for a bit of light-hearted mockery as well, but this kind of in-joke didn’t make me laugh.
The wisecracks aimed at his backside were partly justified on the other hand by what was overall a wooden performance by Evans. I decided that he’s meant to be dull and virtuous (until the very end of the movie, when a different facet of his personality emerges) and his character has quite a lot of work to do to make things progress. The plot is very complex, as a lot of these big-budget productions are wont to be, and it relies on the necessity of the Avengers going back in time to capture a set of powerful stones that can be used to combat Thanos, and to undo the carnage that this quiet, aloof, and arrogant character has wreaked on Earth and on other parts of the universe. In the course of their journeys they pass through some scenes that took place in earlier ‘Avenger’ movies. There are plenty of opportunities for an audience member who knows what happened before to get their kicks out of this.
The technicalities of the time-travel plot device abrade the margins of the narrative. Things get a bit hard to follow when Nebula and her own self (a twin who comes back from the future) are shown contemporaneously in some scenes. The matter of whether people can be kept alive, once they have been killed, if you go back in time to a point before their death, is explored, but this plot device is abandoned by the scriptwriters. The dialogue that supports the matter of the technical possibility of time travel furthermore is clunky because it is burdened by references to other movies that feature this standard science-fiction plot device. This is merely tiresome, but the idea that time travel is enabled due to quantum physics is not entirely credible.
You’d have to say that this kind of ensemble piece lowers the risk the movie’s producers and financiers face because it spreads out the highlights and the flat bits over a large cast of actors and a large number of characters. But there were awful solecisms in the scene in Tokyo where Hawkeye is brought into the story. Here he is shown in a swordfight with a Yakuza boss in a suit (named, I discovered, Akihiko) who is played by Hiroyuki Sanada. The dialogue in this scene is mind-numbingly stupid and its lack of subtlety (haven’t we moved past this sort of silly orientalism yet?) is made worse by the fact that Sanada is a very good actor who is famous in his home country. Having an actor of this calibre play the token oriental doesn’t chime with the sophistication displayed in the rest of the movie by the producers and the directors.
The viewer does get to feel things at certain dramatic high points such as during the battle. The fight scenes are also visually interesting, which helps to offset undistinguished parts elsewhere. I guess that you could say that the kind of thrill the battle offers justifies the cost of entry to the cinema, and the catharsis enabled by a good quantity of biffo can’t be denied (although it’s not clear if the fight the film alludes to has already happened at some point in America’s history or if it is yet to take place). Having seen the film, the thing that to me mainly explains the theatres, at the cinema where I saw the film, being packed to capacity for the past few days is the reliability of an old story well told.
It is an optimistic and fulfilling one by the standard of its own, uncomplicated terms and the film itself is well-made with a satisfyingly variegated texture supplied by a solid team of actors, a functional script, and competent direction. It contains oodles of art but unfortunately little that is new or original. It goes to show that you can make plenty of money if you give people exactly what they anticipate.
It takes a while to get going because it has to tie in its narrative with what has come before in earlier films in the franchise, but once you get to the meat of the matter things happen fast and you are rarely bored. The character of the android Nebula (Karen Gillan) was interesting for a number of reasons and she supplied the drama with a lot of the requisite forward momentum leading up to the set piece of the final combat between the forces of good and the forces of evil (which are led by Nebula’s “father” Thanos, played by Josh Brolin). Nebula in my mind had a weird emo vibe about her that made her stand out from the largely heteronormative type most of the other superheroes conformed to. Her eyes have no whites, which is an aesthetic trick that serves to visually enhance her uniqueness for the viewer.
This franchise has some big names that add depth in many of the scenes that are not dominated by CGI. There is still plenty of acting to be done and Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man, Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow, and Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye in my view stand out for the subtlety of their performances. Tilda Swinton has a short cameo role dressed in a yellow robe as a kind of monk and this is pretty convincing, helping to keep things chugging along nicely. In the end however it’s hard to sympathise with the principal characters that do not die (I won’t give anything away here beyond saying that some do, in fact, die) mainly because of the clunky manner with which those that remain express their sadness at the demise of the fallen. Some scenes possess the kind of mawkish emotion that you find at an official military funeral.
The comedy, also, is a bit obtuse and at times somewhat lacking in freshness. The voice of Rocket, the laconic CGI raccoon, which was supplied by Bradley Cooper, forms one point in a comic nexus that is used to alleviate the otherwise crushing weight of the multi-episode story. Other comic moments are supplied by Thor (Chris Hemsworth), who starts out as a bit of a maudlin soak ensconced in a remote fishing village with a tub of beer and a big belly, the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), and Ant Man (Paul Rudd). Captain America’s (Chris Evans) arse comes in for a bit of light-hearted mockery as well, but this kind of in-joke didn’t make me laugh.
The wisecracks aimed at his backside were partly justified on the other hand by what was overall a wooden performance by Evans. I decided that he’s meant to be dull and virtuous (until the very end of the movie, when a different facet of his personality emerges) and his character has quite a lot of work to do to make things progress. The plot is very complex, as a lot of these big-budget productions are wont to be, and it relies on the necessity of the Avengers going back in time to capture a set of powerful stones that can be used to combat Thanos, and to undo the carnage that this quiet, aloof, and arrogant character has wreaked on Earth and on other parts of the universe. In the course of their journeys they pass through some scenes that took place in earlier ‘Avenger’ movies. There are plenty of opportunities for an audience member who knows what happened before to get their kicks out of this.
The technicalities of the time-travel plot device abrade the margins of the narrative. Things get a bit hard to follow when Nebula and her own self (a twin who comes back from the future) are shown contemporaneously in some scenes. The matter of whether people can be kept alive, once they have been killed, if you go back in time to a point before their death, is explored, but this plot device is abandoned by the scriptwriters. The dialogue that supports the matter of the technical possibility of time travel furthermore is clunky because it is burdened by references to other movies that feature this standard science-fiction plot device. This is merely tiresome, but the idea that time travel is enabled due to quantum physics is not entirely credible.
You’d have to say that this kind of ensemble piece lowers the risk the movie’s producers and financiers face because it spreads out the highlights and the flat bits over a large cast of actors and a large number of characters. But there were awful solecisms in the scene in Tokyo where Hawkeye is brought into the story. Here he is shown in a swordfight with a Yakuza boss in a suit (named, I discovered, Akihiko) who is played by Hiroyuki Sanada. The dialogue in this scene is mind-numbingly stupid and its lack of subtlety (haven’t we moved past this sort of silly orientalism yet?) is made worse by the fact that Sanada is a very good actor who is famous in his home country. Having an actor of this calibre play the token oriental doesn’t chime with the sophistication displayed in the rest of the movie by the producers and the directors.
The viewer does get to feel things at certain dramatic high points such as during the battle. The fight scenes are also visually interesting, which helps to offset undistinguished parts elsewhere. I guess that you could say that the kind of thrill the battle offers justifies the cost of entry to the cinema, and the catharsis enabled by a good quantity of biffo can’t be denied (although it’s not clear if the fight the film alludes to has already happened at some point in America’s history or if it is yet to take place). Having seen the film, the thing that to me mainly explains the theatres, at the cinema where I saw the film, being packed to capacity for the past few days is the reliability of an old story well told.
It is an optimistic and fulfilling one by the standard of its own, uncomplicated terms and the film itself is well-made with a satisfyingly variegated texture supplied by a solid team of actors, a functional script, and competent direction. It contains oodles of art but unfortunately little that is new or original. It goes to show that you can make plenty of money if you give people exactly what they anticipate.
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