30 Mayıs 2012 Çarşamba

THE AVENGERS: MOVIE REVIEW

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Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, ScarlettJohansson, Samuel L. Jackson, Chris Hemsworth, Jeremy RennerDirector: Joss WhedonRuntime: 143 min. Verdict: An excuse for a privileged few to have a nice indulgent outing.Which makes it a commendable juggling act giving all of them a significantpersonality in a feature length narrative.Genre: Action, Fantasy, Superhero
                Consider this.Thor criticizes his brother Loki about considering himself superior to humans,about how he misses the whole point of ruling, and how he better not touch hisbeloved planet. Yet moments before, Thor flies into the little plane where IronMan and Captain America are escorting Loki to the Shield, knocks the latterwith his hammer, and flies out with his brother. I would want to understand thedramatic logic of such behavior, or if there’s any for that matter. I mean, hecould have one of those witty little conversations, couldn’t he?  And so I wonder if the sequence takes placeonly to have a silly little action sequence between Iron Man and Thor. And forCaptain to join the mud-fight a moment later. The problem here, apart from theyawn such a lack of imagination to cause an “action” sequence induces, is thatthere’s only so much one can do with having superpowers fight each other. Weremember Neo and Agent Smith in TheMatrix Reloaded, and we remember Potter and Lord Voldermort from last year,where all one can cause is a whole lot of thunder and lightning and smashes andflying long distances and breaking through walls and all that blah. It issilly. And it is so old everybody knows nobody is going to win, which makes itessentially meaningless footage. Or fun, if you would want to put it that way.                 The problemis, if one would want to call it a problem, is that The Avengers seems to be having tug-of-war between wanting to besome sort of ponderous pontificating piffle and fun. Fun as in the narcissistickind, where the individual (superhero) is more concerned about a general levelof coolness/awesomeness than anything else. How else can one consider theHulk’s second coming, where he reveals his big secret, and then explain what hedoes on the Helicarrier, where his intentions seem to be to not merelyreplicate Harlem but to kill Ms. Romanov. He almost kills a pilot alright. Doeshe really consider them deserving of his destructive self? Or is it merely moreof the film’s meaningless fun footage? Or, is it a literalization of the film’scentral belief, which much like Watchmen,assumes somewhat of a genre-subversion – that these superheroes are merelyweapons of mass destruction that we absolutely need to possess to fight anonymousfantastical other-worldly enemies? Sort of like an argument for war and ajustification for all that has happened over the last decade. That energy is atthe center of the conflict cannot be just a stock plot-point, right? I mean,the only difference between Mr. Limpet and Jake Sully is merely justificationto be on the morally right side, right? What Mr. Whedon intends to propose is ajustification for war to be fun and heroic, where the enemies can be safelyclassified under “others”, and where it doesn’t matter if the warriors aremerely puppets/tools manipulated into action. In other words, a simplistic worldof black and white.                 But let ustalk about the other end, mostly addressed by Loki and Thor, and to some extentNick Fury, which concerns some nonsense about our lack of compatibility with freedomas an absolute, and which is just as perfunctory as that action sequence Idescribed above. And just as ludicrous. Loki, with his illusions of grandeur,turns into his Asgard self complete with robes and horns, so much so that wehear the crowd exclaim in the background. They run. And when he appears inmultiple places and asks them to kneel in order to deliver his drivel, they do.It is astonishing how uninspiring the crowd behavior is. Here we are with a demi-Godpresent in multiple places at once, which should at least stun the crowd.Remember the medical staff at the asylum in Terminator2:Judgment Day? But no, Loki speaks, people kneel and when he starts taking freejabs at mankind, an old man stands in defiance and observes – “We’ve had men like you before.” Youwonder when. It is this lack of, let us sayreverence, or wonder, for Loki, or for anything that is, well not from aroundhere that places The Avengers in arather uninteresting place in the history of the summer action blockbuster. Considerfor a moment Super-8. There’s no suchregard for the uncommon here, much in keeping with the genre’s generaldisregard for wonder, where big is shorthand for awesome, and where most of thetricks are so tired they are conventions. We’re firmly in a fantastical world wherethere seems to be no place for the exclamation mark. Which, for some reason,feels some kind of a shame. I mean, if the crowd can believe anything, then whythe need to have the Helicarrier invisible. Considering that everybody knows Iron-Man,and that the newsreel footage of TheAvengers at work ought to establish them as a fact of daily life, and NickFury’s politics is essentially to present these guys as universal deterrents,it probably might be logical to have the Helicarrier wander about in the sky inplain sight. You know, big brother and stuff. Which is what makes me suspiciousof a film like The Avengers, whichsort of wants to stand for the criticism of Hollywood’s generally liberalbehavior. I suppose Watchmen hasalready provided the answer to Mr. Whedon’s narcissist stance, which finds spectacularmanifestation in the Hulk’s utter disregard for Loki. Mr. Ruffalo is one of ourgreat actors and the mischief in his eye is less of a superhero and more of aninteresting villain. Or let us put it this way – let usjust have some smashing fun. I mean, that is what it was all about in the end, wasn’tit. All the Avengers were doing is smashing items one-by-one, individual by individual,arrow by arrow, bullet by bullet, and having an absolute ball at that. I mean,they weren’t closing it anytime soon, and it actually took only a single pilot witha nuke to wrap the nonsensical carnage. So yeah, it’s fun. And when it’s not philosophizing,The Avengers seems to be operating inWile E. Coyote’s world. Thor unleashes the power from his hammer upon Iron-Man,who instead of falling a thousand feet back has the power in his suit chargedto 400%. Big centipede beasts run through Manhattan and Iron Man destroys oneof them by flying right into it and blasting out. And the big one, where a nukeis sent to destroy all the invaders and Iron-Man resourcefully escorts it to thesource in another universe. It would have been outright hilarious too, were itnot for the film’s abrupt shift to melodramatic tones. Still, amidst the abundanceof meaningless footage (ultra close-up barely legible shots where seconds passby before we realize what we are looking at), and the philosophizing, there’resome moments of genuine wit. Not Aaron Sorkin staircase-wit, but reverseengineered stuff, wherein you write the punchline first and then come up with asuitable trigger. Hulk pushes Thor out of the frame to have the glory all tohimself, and we smile. These are kids, you know, not superheroes exactly. Ormaybe they are. I mean, when the Helicarrier is falling and the lives of allaboard is on one man, Iron-man gets to use his genius and literally push thewheel. It is the film’s one true moment of transcendence, where both Iron-manand Captain America, past and present, push the wheel and let it soar. That is,I guess, the stuff superheroes are made of, no?

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