The Avengers (no spoilers)

[rowyn]

Early this morning, Lut and I were getting ready to go out to see The Avengers.

Lut: "I'm really looking forward to this movie."
Me: "It should be good. I don't want to get my hopes too high."
Lut: "Yeah. The Hulk was not that great a movie, and neither was Thor."
Me: "Right. I don't want to assume it'll be as good as Iron Man. I'll settle for 'better than Thor'."
Lut: "That's not a high bar to clear."
Me: "Exactly." I paused, thinking about it. "You know what would be a high bar to clear? As good as The Incredibles."

*

We both enjoyed the movie a great deal. It's a strikingly well-done ensemble piece, with a large cast of minor and major characters, all of whom have the opportunity to shine. Probably its greatest strength is its wit: there are a lot of snappy retorts and funny lines. Joss Whedon does a superlative job of capturing the characters: they feel like themselves*, and they feel fully-realized. Making five films that are essentially prequels for this one helped tremendously in this regard.

'As good as The Incredibles' would be pushing it. The plot felt like set dressing to me: serving its purposes in getting all these great characters on stage and giving them opportunities to be great. Which I enjoyed! But the story itself could not have stood on its on. A plot summary would not make you go 'Oh wow!'

Watching the movie will, though. Well worth it. I'd see it again, which I do not say about many movies.

* With the possible of exception of Nick Fury, who really feels like Samuel L. Jackson. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing -- I love Samuel L. Jackson and never read the Nick Fury comics -- but Lut, who is a fan of Nick Fury, found it jarring.

[ETA: comments may have spoilers.]

Comments

[rowyn]

Yes, I enjoyed his performance, and I don't mean any insult to his talent or to the choices the writers made with the character. It's just that (for Lut, who know the character), the character wasn't Nick Fury.

Recasting Nick Fury as an African American was an interesting decision (and made by Marvel Comics ten+ years ago, when they modeled the Ultimate Universe version after Samuel L. Jackson). I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it bothers me a LOT when non-white parts get cast with white actors (or turned white for the cover art, or whatever). So I can see it bothering people to have the ethnicity/race changed. On the other hand, if you're looking to the comics for inspiration for your stories, virtually all the big names, the ones everybody knows, are white men. Marvel's best-known female characters, like Storm and Phoenix, still aren't household names the way Captain America and Spider-man are. Marvel characters who aren't white? Um ... there's Storm again. Straight-haired, blue-eyed Storm. I suppose Hulk is technically green, but I don't think that really gets the point. :P

So I can see why Marvel wanted to broaden the appeal of their line by diversifying it, and there's a long tradition of rebooting brand-name characters like that. Also, Samuel L. Jackson! What's not to like?

The cards made me cry. Bastard.

[octantis.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and that's fair. I never really got into the Marvel universe enough to appreciate it more deeply.

And yeah, that's an interesting conundrum too. I think it's always going to be a bit fuzzy, and a case by case thing in which context matters. Still, in a case like Nick Fury, it seems to me like he's a character in which is race doesn't really make much difference. He could be black, white, asian, latino, or whatever, and the most important considerations would be that he was an imposing hardass, which his cultural background having little bearing. (Apart from loving Mom, baseball, and apple pie, maybe? Iunno.)

Whereas you take something like the Last Airbender, where the cast's respective cultures have some bearing on the world and on the characters themselves, and are based on real world analogues, it gets tougher. Yeah, in the case of Airbender it's a fantasy world and yadda yadda, but not only does it make sense, the cultures represented could do with a bit more... representin'. It gets harder still with Heimdall in Thor's movie, with the flap about a black guy playing a Norse god. Is it far enough removed from reality for a case to be made and for the actor's presence to have more weight? Maybe. Is it a weird choice? Could be a case made for that too, that one's just hazier... but there's still no shortage of white representation and heroes, so that might get some more slack.

Another thing throwing a wrench in the works is that America's pretty young, so a lot of its 'legend' comes from times like WW2 or colonial times, where there were other races present (if in much smaller numbers). I guess I'd find it pretty weird if a chinese guy was cast as the elder of an old-timey village in Switzerland or something like that.

[hotspurre.livejournal.com]

If you're going with a canonical Marvel Fury (a commander of an elite fighting unit from WWII who has had his aging slowed,) yeah, he can't be anything other than white. I distinctly got the impression they were not, which means he's probably in his 40s, and that definitely makes it more reasonable for a non-white character. He could have earned his chops in the first or second Gulf war, for example, or had been in Black Ops.

Heh. With Colson I had a feeling throughout the movie that he hadn't actually died. Or, if he died, he was revivable. He was playing it a bit too cagey about Fury using his death to bind the heroes together, and it is completely something both he and Fury would do. One of the other agents (Hill, I think?) called him on the cards, and that only made me more suspicious. The fact that we didn't actually see the med team pronounce him dead, we just got that from Fury's mouth... yeah, I suspect very strongly we'll be seeing him again. The bastard. :)

In fact, I fully expected the Easter Egg at the end of the movie to feature him. Still, I was excited by the first, and incredibly amused by the second.