Avengers 2: Spader Neutered (Page 1 of 2)

Interesting topic Teague.

I just watched Avengers 2, and I was simultaneously impressed at how deftly it manages to handle all the characters, while also realizing these films are just way too overblown for their own good, and they are suffering greatly because of it.

I should note that I still have the first Avengers at an 8/10 on IMDb, and I think I would still agree with me-from-x-years-ago on that assessment.

Avengers 2 was 2 hours and 21 minutes, and the editing pace in general and always felt like it was kind of racing to make it to the finish line on time. There just isn't enough time to do all characters justice. The bloat bleeds through to all areas of the film.

The plot becomes kind of muddled with various character motivations and need of differentiation.

The action scenes to me where the biggest problem, both in terms of motivation as written on the page, aswell as execution.

It's constantly a flurry of quick cutting back and forth, as every sequence needs all characters to have little mini-sequences with some context of beginning, middle and end. The way the action scenes are filmed in general is lots of short shots, rarely longer sequences. This might be just to give the editors as much leeway in post to trim the film to a tolerable length.
An exception to this is the intro scene which is one long take, but that also suffers from such chaotic juggling of characters that in the theatre seat, it's just hard to keep track, and the filmmakers can't easily emphasize one moment over others, or create some sense of structure, because they just need to get through the somewhat automated-feeling motions of giving each character their allotted screen time and scene weight. In comic book form this would probably work great, it would create dense panels the reader can study and absorb. The film version though, is the equivalent of an intro scroll of text at double the comfortable reading speed. Sure you might be able to read it all before it goes off the screen, but you retain none of the information once you power through it. You read the words, but you don't know if there was even anything of relevance there.

I don't know, maybe I'm getting older and my brain is slowly turning as elastic as a rubber band left out to dry in the crispy heat of the summer sun. I'm only 29 though, surely I've got some time left before that sets in?

Spader('s voice) was great, his character I felt was bland all around, and his motivation was basically that of the bad guy in MI: Ghost Protocol; Kill all humans and let the world reset itself. The character as stated by Whedon himself is freshly formed in the film, and so gets a skewed world view from taking in information and processing it with an immature sensibility.
However this also leads to the motivation for him also being devoid of any real meaning. He wants the world to end because... nothing really. And... fight! Queue endless hordes of mindless drones that, like stormtroopers in the prequel trilogy, are picked off so easily they never feel threatening in the least.
It's a cliche which seems to persist only because not having that element there to kill a lot of time, while they are disposed of in almost comedic numbers, would immediately make obvious how little else in the film there is. It would just be James Spaders robot flying around and punching Avengers (or shooting a non-defined energy from the eyes/hammer/palms/forehead) until either side can't fight anymore. It would become immediately clear how devoid of substance the characters and their movitations are without the free energy that comes from sheer numbers.
Like if you and 9 friends are playing soccer one evening, and suddenly after an hour of darn good fun, 5 of them have to leave suddenly. And now there's just 5 people left and the energy level just drops as the intensity dissipates, the 5 of you running around a now comically oversized arena, you can't have goalkeepers anymore because then there'd be no outfield players, and now with no goalies everyone would rather just take potshots from long range rather than actually play the game. Suddenly the underlying mechanics and dynamics of the game are unbalanced, and made very obvious, and the fun just drains. 10 minutes of long-shots and dithering later, everyone finally realizes this and collectively decide to put an end to the evening before it becomes embarrassing.

Contrast this with something like The Terminator. It's basically 2 vs. 1 the entire film (3 vs. 1 in T2), and the singular goal of the villain is simply to kill a protagonist. Yet those films are filled with energy, excellent editing structure and flow, and carefully choreographed tension in the plot and script.

The sound design of Avengers, something you might also agree or disagree with Teague, is generally just a wall of chaotic action noise. I do think that if the sound mix and design were more scaled back and with better layering in terms of which sounds are important to the moment and which aren't, that might help the editing and general frenetic feeling of the film. I'm sure even 2001 would feel stressful with the wrong musical accompaniment.

T2 on the other hand has a delicate, often very quiet sound mix, which has moments of rise and fall, and plenty of dynamics even in action scenes. In T2 every gunshot stands out, every glass shard clatters against the floor, and low sound levels are used before, or interspersed with louder moments
Avengers was just a blur of nonspecific noise to me. There was twice as much audio info there as there needed to be, and not enough separation in terms of dynamics and volume to be remotely helpful in aiding my brain to decipher the action.

The only moments the movie got a welcome sense of life were the character scenes, because you can tell these people really enjoy working with each other, and Joss Whedon can direct actors and can get their energy across to the audience. In those glimpses it feels like a cameraman just got sneaky and caught some shots without anyone knowing, capturing real joy and camaraderie.
Oddly enough, for the same reason, those shots almost became jarring to me, suddenly I was watching a different movie with enjoyable characters that act like real people, and I would find myself grinning like an idiot. And I always felt sad when those moment ended and the (frankly, at the end) gosh darn plot-serving action had to start up again.

This film also has the Quicksilver character, the same fast-moving character that appeared in X-Men: Days Of Future Past.
Bryan Singer and crew created some truly memorable scenes with that character in DOFP (if you've seen that film I shouldn't have to say anything else, you know what I mean). In Avengers though, that character really doesn't do much of anything. We do get some scripted backstory which was surprisingly effective at explaining the motivation of him and his sister, but once in action, the character is as figuratively invisible as he is literally invisible to the naked eye. There are very few moments of slow-mo to let the audience see his perspective, and the rest of the time his characters scenes are just shoved in among the rest, in an editing flow which felt droning, and relentless.

I realize most of these complaints can be levelled at most of these films. I guess I've just been pleasantly surprised enough times (Days Of Future Past for instance) where franchice films have far surpassed what might be expected of them in terms of storytelling, script and acting.

I don't know. Maybe not having Joss Whedon would be a blessing in disguise. Having more limitations might be what these films need, so even the Avengers films could benefit from some specific plot focus, rather than constantly having to fan-pander by trying to fill the film with so many different flavors that it ultimately just comes out a muted grey.

Time will tell I guess.

Joss's attitude in the press recently has revealed a real animosity towards Marvel. It's very clear that he hated the process of making Age of Ultron and finds their whole production structure to be total misery. Recently he came out and said that Edgar Wright's Ant-Man script was amazing and Marvel was stupid for not just letting him do his thing. That's not something you say about a studio you want to maintain a relationship with. I don't think he just wants out because these movies are exhausting to make. It really seems like he's sick of the whole studio.

I haven't seen Age of Ultron yet, but looking at Marvel's upcoming slate, it might be the last MCU film I see for a couple years. Nothing looks all that appealing to me until Black Panther and Captain Marvel, which I'll get behind for diversity's sake. Even if some crazy unexpected talented director hops on one of these, I'll know that it won't be their movie. It'll be Marvel's movie. At this point, I've seen what Marvel can do, and I'm not interested. The ones I like are the first Captain America, The Avengers, and Iron Man 3. Well, the first Cap was a period war movie and he's not in that period anymore, so no more movies like that. Joss is leaving, so nothing else like Avengers. And Marvel fans HATED Iron Man 3, so I don't expect them to take cues from that film going forward.

Last edited by Doctor Submarine (2015-05-01 18:22:55)

Yeah, see I've read the same articles as you and I didn't see it as animosity or bitterness.  I read it as accepting the reality of movies that draw enough money to make Solomon blush.  There's a reason why Marvels films work, and a lot of it comes down to the very nature of the machine that can be frustrating to the individual filmmakers.  The alternative, is DC which has produced two very good films, two good ones, and a mess of bad.  Marvel has their method, and you cannot deny their reasoning.  joss gets it.  And it's what he signed up for.   As for Edgar, you can disagree without being disagreeable, and that was the tone of his comments.  I wouldn't read that to mean a deep seeded animosity for the studio.

As much as I would love to see a Cameron directed Avengers... just to see what the ever living fuck THAT would look like. He's got 4 new Avatar movies to make.

And probably a trip to Mars or something, knowing him.

Last edited by BigDamnArtist (2015-05-02 00:12:59)

I had the thought aswell. My thinking was that the voice and tone for Ultron needed to be... younger, for lack of a better word. Less weight, more energy. I guess more the Tom Hiddleston character rather than Spader. Like a teenager who thinks they know everything but lacks the experience to contextualize it.

I enjoyed it.

Like Mass Effect 2 (my favorite of that series, not to say that AoU is my fave, a bit early to tell), its strengths lie in the character moments. Even Ultron gets some good ones in his first half. Once he flips his switch from Noah to God, though, the action scenes take their weight. I enjoyed those too as well, but it's the character moments and scenes in the first two acts that I enjoyed most about the film. The third act does what it needs to, and does it well, but the first two acts set up the ball and the third lets gravity do the rest (pun?).

Also where the hell was Falcon during that big-scale evac.

As for directors and the future of the series, I can't speak to that. I've enjoyed all of the MCU films thus far to varying degrees and will continue to see them.

I liked it, it made me laugh. And it entertained me (I avoided every single trailer so that I could be surprised for once, ya know?).

You know what's interesting? All this talk of "he had to shoehorn in this and that and t'other" but really, it didn't really seem that way to me. Sure, there was the infinity-gem / mindstone but that was dealt with rather quickly, and what else was there?

I'm sure that between Joss and Marvel, there was a long laundry list of things that they wanted/needed to be in the movie, but since we knew that going in, I just kinda... corrected for that beforehand, so it didn't really bother me.

I do agree that Avengers 3 is gonna be astoundingly fucking hard to write and direct though. (In an ideal world, they'd let Shane Black do a 22 Jump Street on it, but I'm sure that only me and, like, four other people would enjoy that).

Disclaimer: if you dislike the tone of a post I make, re-read it in a North/East London accent until it sounds sufficiently playful

/BDA is currently laughing way to hard at the thought of Marvel "scaling back" or making anything less bluntly ambitious to come to the keyboard right now, please leave a message/

I like that he *wasn't* a typical mid-last-century killer robot. He was less interesting to me towards the end when he became one.

I think it may have less to do with the format and more to do with that particular genre of it. I was never a comics reader when I was a kid, but I've been able to dive into Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman's stuff just fine. The new Star Wars series too. Standard superhero comics, however, still throw me for a loop. I think it's a combination of, in a lot of cases, the overly saturated art and the gee-whiz dialogue; it's really damn hard to take them seriously when coupled together.

Last edited by Abbie (2015-05-03 15:48:00)

I'd agree with Praxus on that one. My first 'proper comics' were the likes of 'Batman: Year One' and 'The Dark Knight Returns' - things that are generally regarded as 'the good stuff'. Once I sort of had a grasp on the whole history of comics, I was able to appreciate the earlier stuff for what they were.