by Jerreck McWilliams
Staff writer
Courtesy photo
The cast of “The Avengers.”
BAM!
That’s an onomatopoeia. Look it up on your own later. It’s also the sound of the first scene of Marvel Studio’s “The Avengers” slamming into your 3D-spectacled face, and it does not let up from there. Watch it with friends.
Seriously, take a huge group of your compadres and as many of their acquaintances as you can stuff into a sedan and go watch this movie, which might be the penultimate achievement of the comic book-to-film genre.
Marvel Studio’s “The Avengers” is, like the comic book series it is based on, a mish-mash of Marvel’s more popular and better-selling superheroes: Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Bruce Banner/The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Clint Barton/Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Natasha Romanov/The Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans).
All of the above are brought together by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the director of SHIELD (Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division), in order to fight the threat that was created in the 2011 Marvel Studios film, Thor.
That threat is Thor’s fallen brother, Loki (Tom Hiddelston), who has recovered from his lost-in-a-wormhole-for-all-eternity fate in Thor and now has plans of unleashing an alien army to destroy Earth using a device known as the tesseract.
Breath pause.
While “The Avengers” benefits from many attributes (excellent actors, a huge budget, talented crew) what sets it apart from other superhero films is its director and co-writer, Joss Whedon.
Whedon is best known as the creator of TV shows such as “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Firefly,” and the hit web musical “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.”
In “The Avengers,” as in his previous works, Whedon frees his characters from stereotype, pitting them not only in a battle against good and evil, but also sewing conflict among the group of heroes as each persona seeks competing goals.
Tony Stark fights for SHIELD not for the sake of being a good guy, but because he believes SHIELD is hiding something, and he wants to know the truth.
Bruce Banner is more or less forced into helping the team, and Thor constantly struggles with his desire to both protect Earth and save his brother Loki who seeks to destroy it.
Writing characters against type is rarely done as well as it was in “The Avengers.”
Visually, “The Avengers” delivers excellent quality, although it is no more or less impressive than its contemporaries with comparable budgets.
There are no new technical achievements generated by the film’s crew; however current motion-capture technology did allow Mark Ruffalo to be the first actor to play both Bruce Banner and the Hulk.
Audibly, the crew behind “The Avengers” deserves more than a pat on the back. While the sound design, as with the film’s visual feats, are not revolutionary, the choices made by engineers highlight their ability to create both dramatic and familiar effect from sounds that just aren’t real.
Oddly enough, it also boosted shawarma sales across Los Angeles thanks to a one-shot joke after the credits. At the end of “The Avengers”, the ensemble is shown retiring from the final battle to eat the Middle Eastern dish at local establishment in Manhattan.
Shawarma aside, the combination of excellent actors, sound design and visual design, all woven together through the writing and directing talents of Whedon, make what is perhaps the best superhero flick yet.