I thought about not writing about The Avengers (2012, directed by Joss Whedon). I mean, what's the point, eh? It's a movie that seems to be "critic proof." What I say will matter not one whit when it comes to the public's embrace of this film, this big, stupid, monstrous superhero movie. For that matter, I thought hard about not seeing it at all. I'm entirely convinced of the obscenity in Marvel/Disney's refusal to pay Jack Kirby's estate a sum commensurate with his status as one of the prime creators of The Avengers, a refusal born out of a fit of pique when it comes to asserting the corporate ownership of somebody else's dreams. Let's just get that out of the way first: The act of watching the film impinges on my conscience. I can salve it a little with the knowledge that someone else paid for me to see it. But only a little.
Anyway, those are all my issues and they're largely independent of the film itself. There's a lot of stuff about this film that's independent of the product on the screen. That's the Hollywood hype machine for you, working on all cylinders in this case. Whether the movie itself is any good is entirely beside the point for them. All that matters is separating you, dear moviegoer, from your hard-earned money. The process by which that happens, whether it's putting butts in seats, buying Blu-ray discs, getting your kids a passle of action figures for Christmas (or Hulk fists, which I suspect are left-overs of hype campaigns of seasons past), has nothing to do with whether the movie is good. It's hard to find the movie, I think, amid all of this crap. I have an anecdote about all this that I need to get off my chest:
I was wandering around in the toy department at Target a couple of weeks ago, just after The Avengers opened in the US. By chance, there was a woman with her daughter there when I turned down the aisle housing all the Avengers tie-in merchandise. They were rifling through the action figures. The girl was distraught. There was no Black Widow action figure. Not a one. Why? Because they didn't make one for the mass-market tie-in. Girls who may like The Avengers are out of luck. I mention this because it's not like Disney to miss a marketing opportunity. They had to realize that hiring Joss Whedon, whose work has a significant female audience, would draw more women to all this ephemera surrounding the movie. Marvel comics, for their part, at least put out a new Black Widow comic as a tie-in, though I don't recommend it for girls who might be interested in the character (it was originally published in Maxim, so it's more than a little fan service-y for Marvel's traditional audience). Again, this has nothing to do with the movie, but I'll come back to the Black Widow presently.
So how was the movie?