INFINITY WAR MIXES THE BEST OF SUPERHERO MOVIES WITH THE WORST OF SUPERHERO COMICS

I’ve been in the tank for the Marvel movies since they started, and especially since the first Avengers movie blew away all my expectations and skepticism that you could ever translate the overstuffed, overwrought comics of my youth to the big screen. But if The Avengers was a supersized annual issue of the comic brought to rollicking life, Infinity War is something else – the sprawling, dozen-issue CROSSOVER EVENT that wove through several titles and roped not just a team, but multiple teams of superheroes from the far-flung corners of the Marvel Universe together to battle some cosmically overwrought threat. The Infinity Gauntlet, the source material for Infinity War, is probably both the most famous of these, and the dumbest.  The film is an improbably faithful adaptation in some ways, despite half of the characters from the comic not existing in the movie universe. It copies the most unique thing about the limited series, which is that the villain is essentially the protagonist and POV character, and somehow makes that work within a summer blockbuster framework, which is a remarkable feat of filmmaking in its own right.  But it also maintains the elements that made me largely indifferent to Marvel’s most epic event, even as a credulous, 10 year-old dork eagerly pawing his way through his cousin’s box of “classic” comics. 

In the comic, as in the film, Thanos starts out immensely powerful and then, by gathering the various Infinity Stones together in his big gold gauntlet, becomes all-powerful.  Not “essentially” or “practically” all-powerful, but literally, explicitly omnipotent. The writing goes out of its way to directly, repeatedly (“classic” superhero comics are nothing if not endlessly, repetitively expository) tell us that he has limitless power and control over time, space, and reality itself.  The series is best remembered for the big battle sequence where Thanos “kills” a dozen of the most famous Marvel heroes one by one.  In the comic, this comes after Thanos has snapped his fingers and killed half the intelligent life in the universe, while in the film, he lays mostly non-fatal waste to the heroes before the Snap itself does the work of wiping out half the cast.  But the problem is the same regardless of medium or order: it’s just too much.  So much that the mind, even the credulous, 10 year-old mind, rejects the premise entirely.

"Thanos killed Spiderman and Thanos killed Iron Man and
 Thanos killed Wolverine and then Thanos looked at me!"

The biggest problem with comic-book storytelling in general has always been the lack of commitment to consequence, most glaringly in regards to death.  Killing characters is not the only way to give a story weight or stakes, but when an entire genre is built on the basis of constant, life-and-death danger and no one ever dies, that danger never becomes real.  But the problem is not so much that comics don’t ever kill people.  It’s that they do, but always find a way to take it back.  Which is worse than not doing it at all.  The better stories, like the X-Men’s Dark Phoenix Saga or say Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s more comic book-y story arcs, retain some semblance of lasting significance by maintaining the pretense of permanence for a longer stretch, and/or going through some contortions to make the resurrection an event unto itself.  This way, reviving the slain does not erase all the emotional fallout of the death entirely.  The worse ones, like Infinity Gauntlet, simply undo everything of supposed import that transpired.  These stories self-sterilize to the point where things can proceed as if they had never even happened.

And sure, none of these made up stories about people in tights punching each other really matter in the end.  But the art of telling them lies in creating the illusion that they do, that at least within the confines of this fictional world, the events being related have weight and consequence.  If we take half a step back, we know there is no way the Avengers, or James Bond or Tom Cruise, are not going to win out in the end.  But you obscure that fact by making the villain seem so powerful that it is not apparent how the good guys can beat them. And the way they triumph should always come down to more than just punching better than the other guy (see: the Dance Off To Save The Universe and subsequent Care Bear Stare from the first Guardians Of The Galaxy, or the bargaining loop from Dr. Strange).  But the Infinity storylines over-egg this pudding, by making the enemy so overpowered that the fisticuffs seem entirely pointless before they even begin.

Again, the source is not subtle on this point

The movie starts by having Thanos thump the Hulk in hand-to-hand combat, which establishes him as the biggest, baddest threat the Avengers have faced in terms of raw physical strength. But as the comic ceaselessly reiterates, and the film makes clear from at least the point where Thanos demonstrates the Reality Stone’s power against the Guardians, he can instantly kill all the heroes with a thought. So the only way he can lose is if he wants himself to lose, which is an idea the comic plays with in a way that is interesting but not terribly satisfying, because it means the heroes’ efforts never really matter, and their “sacrifices” are both moot and phony.  It’s super obvious, super early on, that they are not going to be able to punch their way past him, but we still spend most of the story going through those motions again and again. 

The Snap similarly overshoots the mark of raising the external stakes for the rest of the fictional world.  If one of the biggest criticisms of the Marvel Universe is that it is too static, then wiping out half the life in the universe would seem, at first blush, to be a major corrective to that.  But it’s so major that even a soft child’s brain could intuit that there is simply no way that it wouldn’t be subject to immediate, wholesale take-backsies.  The touchstone for genre geeks when it comes to the type of downer cliffhanger Infinity War is shooting for is The Empire Strikes Back. But the difference in scale between the two is striking.  Sure, it was never likely that Han Solo would stay sealed in a rock forever.  But if somehow he had, the Star Wars universe could have gone on without him. It was, if not exactly plausible, then at least possible within that fictional milieu. There is just never any way that the Marvel Universe, on page or screen, is going to permanently shift to a post-apocalyptic landscape ruled by an untouchable, murderous God.  

Because of this, it’s clear that Thanos’s triumph does not just have to be “fixed”, the way defeating Loki or Ultron’s armies reverses the course of their earlier, successful campaigns.  It has to be literally, completely undone.  The question of “how” is barely even a question; what can done with a snap of a finger can and will be be undone with another snap.  The powers of the gauntlet are such enormous nonsense, that it is immediately evident that the only way the heroes will be able to triumph is via nonsense of equal enormity.  But returning to the Dark Phoenix example, even after comic book nonsense eventually brought Jean Grey back to life her death remained something that everyone remembered and was affected by. By contrast, the inflated extremity of the Gauntlet’s power all but guarantee that few if any of the characters will even be aware of the apocalypse they lived/died through when all is said and done.

"Please...I'm not..ready....for naptime..."

And that sucks. But what is remarkable is that the movie generally works, in spite of the central dramatic thrust being so transparently phony.  It’s an odd, overstuffed beast for sure, and it did take me a bit to adjust to the tone.  I’ve long thought of the Marvel movies - with the exception of Black Panther - as comedies with action sequences more than action movies with jokes.  And IW can feel awkward in how it marries the goofiest, comic-book nonsense plot of any MCU film with the most portentous, heavy tone of them all. Even Black Panther's direct engagement with real world issues didn't require the eschatological sturm-and-drang with which IW requires everyone to treat Space Smurf's quest to complete his rock collection.  And the shift between Thor: Ragnarok, which was practically a Naked Gun-esque spoof of this genre-unto-itself, and the oppressive grimness of the opening scene of this film is especially jarring, as it grinds all the hope of its direct predecessor into dust.

But IW still finds plenty of space for humor, and since it is almost entirely character-based, it complements the heightened stakes more than it undermining them.  The cast is enormous, but exceptionally well-balanced and it’s impossible to give the Russos enough credit for making this feel like as much a Guardians sequel as an Avengers movie, while also not letting Dr. Strange take over the entire proceedings or Spiderman feel like he is being needlessly tacked on (though technically, he probably is). We take for granted how easy the MCU has made juggling movies full of characters who are headliners in their own right look, but it definitely is not.  Pretty much no matter who your favorite Marvel hero is, Infinity War gives them their due.  Okay, Ant-Man and Hawkeye are completely MIA, but c’mon, Hawkeye isn’t anyone’s favorite. I know because Hawkeye actually was my favorite growing up, and he ain’t even cracking my top 10 in his MCU capacity.

Sorry, bud, but you got the giant megablockbuster franchise you
 wanted, instead of the smaller Netflix Series you deserved

Captain America and Black Panther don’t get a lot to do outside the big fight, but their supporting casts/settings get enough love that they still feel fairly central.  And even if they hadn’t, just the shot of the two of them sprinting out ahead of the line as the army charges into battle is enough to cement their stature within this pantheon.  So on balance, it doesn’t matter much if you are a particular partisan for the Iron Man or Guardians or Thor or Dr. Strange or Captain America or Spiderman or Black Panther subfranchise, or even if you just really love the Hulk or Vision or Scarlet Witch, you have no reason to feel slighted by IW. That alone is simply phenomenal, even after ten years of these movies adding plate after spinning plate without a hitch.

What sells that, and this entire endeavor, is the miraculous impeccability of the casting across dozens and dozens of roles.  When you have a megamovie with 45 important characters and the biggest casting missteps could credibly be considered to include Don Cheadle (who is great being his affable self, but imo never quite sells Rhodes as a military man) and Carrie Coon (who is the best actress working in my books, but wasted in a henching capacity), that's simply incredible.  Okay, the actual weak link is probably the perfectly serviceable Sebastian Stan, but the point stands.  The cast of the MCU is a legitimate wonder of the modern world, and the Russos have proven so masterful at shifting the Rubik's Cube of characters into new, wildly entertaining configurations that they are able to constantly, unobtrusively scratch the itch that lies at the heart of our infatuation with franchise filmmaking – to provide the comfort of the familiar, but also surprise us with it.  Stark and Spiderman are a proven combo at this point, and we could have guessed that he and Strange would be fun together. But who would have thought Rocket and Thor would yield such great results?  That we would get a great moment between Captain America and Groot?  Stark and Wong?  Starlord and Thor, or Rocket and Bucky(‘s arm)?  

Of the many things that crack me up about this character, none compare to imagining the DC
Studios folks periodically being overcome with jealousy that Marvel has the  kleptomaniac
space raccoon to lean on while they struggle to make their sexy Aquaman movie work.

At this point, none of the work the actors are doing with these characters is exactly revelatory, with the possible exception of Josh Brolin as Thanos.  He still looks exceedingly goofy, but the performance is remarkable for its subtlety.  Somehow the translation from the page removed all the cruelty from the characterization without lessening the megalomania or evil, which if you can figure out how that even works, please explain it to me.  But it does, and turns what had been probably the biggest flaw in the entire MCU fabric into one of the best villains in the genre. I'll still take Killmonger and Loki ahead of him, but that he's even in the race is incredible after the wet fart of his initial teases.  Brolin and Zoe Saldana deserve the most credit for stapling the absolute absurdity of the plot to something approaching an emotional core.

But the movie is packed to the gills with others doing fantastic, if quick, work. Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany do a hell of a job selling a ridiculous relationship that raises all sorts of odd anatomical questions, and was also mostly developed off screen.  Bettany in particular continues to ground the most outlandish piece of this universe in understated strength and grace, while Dave Bautista remains the improbable comedic MVP of the entire franchise, and sneakily strong on the dramatic end to boot. Chris Hemsworth has been playing Thor impeccably for years, but I never expected anything as affecting as when he is recounting all he has lost, in very short order, to the foul-mouthed cartoon raccoon. The way he goes through the paces of his trademark bravado, but with all the joy hollowed out of it, brings to mind the old actor adage about the way to convincingly play drunk is to be trying to act sober and failing.  It’s funny (“Well, he’s never fought me twice”), and a handy catch-up for the audience that hasn’t boned up on his subfranchise recently, and quietly heartbreaking, which are two adjectives that I never would have thought to apply to the character.  Thor was always my least favorite Avenger on the page by a wide margin, but Hemsworth has edged him up to close to my tops on screen, which without slighting some very deft writing by the Russos and Taika Waititi, is mostly down to old fashioned movie star magic.

On a similar tip, it’s gotten very easy to take Downey Jr. for granted, but somehow he is far from phoning it after a decade of these big, corporate green-screen-aploozas.  My best guess is that the ever-expanding cast of superstars to play with is enough to counteract the boredom from playing the same character for literally the tenth time.  But who knows really, maybe he’s just an uber-professional, so long as the barges full of money are being dumped on the beaches of his private archipelago. In any case, watching his performance in IW, I was struck by how his signature characters are so slick and motor-mouthed that all he has to do is shut up momentarily and we intuit just how hard they are working not to lose it entirely.  You can see it at Strange’s house as he realizes his greatest nightmares are coming true, or with his wordless gulping after getting impaled by Thanos.  

For another variation, check out the scene where he comes 

out from under the bed in Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang

Then on the other end of the subtlety spectrum, there is Tom Holland’s (apparently improvised) death scene.  For all the reasons I pontificated about up top, I started out yawning my way through the final sequence, but when he started pleading and apologizing as this teenage kid felt his life slip away, it hit like a ton of bricks.  Which is my reaction to the entire film in miniature. I can identify every single reason that none of this should mean anything at all, but after a decade and 20 movies with this incredible cast, it’s impossible not to get swept up as they perform the living hell out of the nonsense.

RANKING THE MCU

I was a Marvel geek as a kid, and I pretty much love the current wave of movies they have put out.  Having just seen Guardians Of The Galaxy, I thought I’d use this space to talk about it a bit, see if I can get into the heads of those that dislike the MCU in general, and of course do the ranking thing, because this is the internet, and the internet don’t take kindly to opinions what don’t come in list form.

11. AGENTS OF SHIELD

I’ve written about my problems with this show before, but this is just a remarkably small, unimaginative show to place in such a colorful, expansive universe.  It made some strides at the end of the year, post-Winter Soldier, but the characters remain bland and undistinguished, the dialogue routinely falls flat, and the production values are embarrassing.  It’s only bone-deep Marvel partisanship that will bring me back next year.  They’re adding Mockingbird, guys!!!

Guys?

Guys???

10. Iron Man 2

The complaints aren’t wrong.  It’s too concerned with setting up the shared universe, at the expense of its own story.  Which is true but not as big a sin as some make out – the shared universe is at the heart of what makes these movies special in spite of the fairly rigid formula and frequently lackluster villains.  That’s another critique that comes up for this film, which is only partially accurate.  The villains are actually pretty good, and have distinct motivations that go beyond “get magic rock, destroy world”. But Rockwell is having too much fun to be menacing.  Although he may just be further ahead of the curve than Favreau or his studio overlords were at this point; as time goes on, it becomes more and more apparent to me that these movies are as much comedies as they are EPIC ACTION SAGAS (something DC seems determined to deny, to their overall detriment).  Rockwell is giving a performance for an 80’s comedy, someone who wants to bulldoze the rec center, not rule the multiverse.  Unfortunately, Rourke is also underused as the legitimate threat, and his backstory actually makes him the scrappy underdog to Tony Stark’s trust fund D-Bag, which feels a bit off.  Also, it suffers from speeding through some potentially rich Tony/Rhodey conflict with a newly recast Cheadle, who hasn’t had time to settle into a groove with Downey.

But in the end, there’s only so bad you can make a movie with that cast and suits of over-weaponized flying armor. This is the bottom of the heap for the films, but still slots in just fine on FX’s Sunday afternoon hangover rotation.

9. The Incredible Hulk

Probably the most forgettable of the bunch, due largely to none of the principals making it out of Phase I (though there’s technically nothing to stop the Abomination or Tim Blake Nelson’s Leader from joining Red Skull, Loki and whoever else in a Masters Of Evil movie down the line).  It does have a pretty great action sequence, though true to what will become form for many of these flicks, it comes in the middle rather than the climax.  And it has an underrated villain, with distinctive motivations, in Tim Roth’s Blonsky.  As mentioned, one of the biggest gripes with the Marvelverse is the generic baddies, but looking at my rankings, I’m struck that the ones with the best realized villains are crowded near the bottom, and my favorites overall tend to have the most standard “KILL ERRYBODY CUZ YAY EEEEEEEEEEEVIL” schemes.  Which underlines just how much these movies live by their heroes, which they are universally nailing….with the exception of Norton’s Banner.  He’s perfectly serviceable, and honestly makes more sense as a physical presence than either Bana or Ruffalo, but the latter just managed to resonate with audiences in a way that Norton didn’t.  Though to be fair, he never got to work off Downey, Evans, or even Sam Jackson.

8. Thor

There are a few Marvel movies that I’m just amazed work on any level, much less found a real degree of mainstream acceptance.  Of them, Thor is both my least favorite and probably most miraculous, if only for coming first.  The problems it has are really quite glaring.  Arbitrary, distracting Dutch angles.  One of the few casting bum notes (not that it isn’t perfect on paper) in the MCU with Anthony Hopkins’ lethargic performance.  An almost grindhouse-y budget consciousness that sends a truly cosmic storyline on an extended detour to a deserted backlot.  A glaringly tacked-on introduction of Hawkeye that can’t even manage to look cool to counterbalance its utter superfluousness.

But what it nails is the big stuff that saves even these lesser efforts – tone and casting.  Thor was always my least favorite character in the comics, combining about all the worst aspects of superheroes.  Overpowered a la Superman (he’s literally a god, after all), with an unappealing combination of low IQ and high ego, and a costume that stands out as overly goofy even when sharing a panel with Captain America and Quasar.  But Chris Hemsworth was a hell of a find, not just because he could make the ridiculous Technicolor toga sexy.  He finds a real heart to the Odinson that I never saw on the page, and gives him a genuine sense of humor despite most of the humor of the character being of the unwitting kind.  And he’s matched at every step by Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, the most unlikely breakout star of the whole shebang.  He’s sly, he’s funny, he’s tragic without ever becoming fully pitiable.  I don’t want to start throwing the word “Shakespearean” around, because I don’t think I really know what it means in this context, but suffice to say that the relationship between the brothers is a wellspring of both humor and something approaching gravitas.

7. Iron Man

This is many people’s pick for best of the bunch, but that’s mostly because it came first, in my opinion.  That’s a perfectly good reason, as it means that the elements it shares with its descendants are freshest, but also roughest around the edges.  The action beats are more fun than exciting, and it peaks well before the climax, but the groundwork for everything is laid here, including Robert Downey Jr. effortlessly establishing that Marvel Studio productions are, for all their CGI boomsplashery, modern film’s most pure star vehicles.  It’s his very particular charisma that carries the film as a stealth comedy, and made us even kinda like Gwyneth Paltrow again.
Ultimately, though, I look at this like a great TV pilot. It can be really good, but it doesn’t (and shouldn’t, really) represent the very best of what the series is going to be capable of, if it is to run for a dozen plus more entries.

6. Captain America: The First Avenger

This is the first Marvel movie to garner bonus points for deviating from the established tone and setting of the MCU.  Now, there are some who say that the differences are “merely” cosmetic, that this is just every other Marvel movie, transplanted to 1945.  A similarly themed debate is currently going on about how Guardians Of The Galaxy is just “surface weird” or “colorful” and not genuinely weird because it has a traditional 3 Act structure built around a shameless Macguffin.  I can only surmise that to some, words like “weird,” “creative,” “personal,” “innovative,” etc. only apply to films that feature entirely original characters with no recognizable relation to established archetypes, and creates an entirely new setting with no discernible influences from scratch, while utterly disregarding every convention of dramatic storytelling. Which are all fine goals, but if you try to do them all at once, you’d end up with an unwatchably incoherent, plotless, paceless soup (or maybe a Jodorowsky movie, if you’re really lucky).  It doesn’t mean that movies that mix up a formula by introducing a throwback vibe or a talking raccoon as a major dramatic character aren’t taking risks.  It’s just that the magic of hindsight has a way of making any risk that paid off into a boring, safe, obvious choice.

Which is to say, it’s remarkable in general that Marvel has been able to drag the mainstream to a place where they accept their sentient tree and jock-y magic psuedovikings spouting pseudo-Olde Englishe as legitimate heroes.  And it’s remarkable in particular that Chris Evans and Joe Johnston were able to get them to embrace such a square, old-fashioned hero in the age of the antihero.  Sure, the movie relies a bit too heavily on montages for action beats, and it doesn’t use Hugo Weaving to the best of his cartoon-villainy abilities.  But Evans and Atwell bring a ton of personality to a very sweet, chaste, ultimately sad romance, it fully commits to being a throwback piece, and allows Captain America to endear himself to us the old-fashioned way: by punching Nazis.  And yes, I know HYDRA are not really Nazis in the film.  They’re more like uber-nazis that think the SS are too pansy, which is just as good.

5. Thor: The Dark World

I don’t remember the specifics of this movie too well a year later.  But I remember that I was thoroughly entertained throughout, and laughed a ton.  I remember that the bad guys had a great design but little personality, a victim of Loki’s breakout status.  Which is a fair trade-off, imo; Loki and Thor’s dynamic is the best part of this sub-franchise by far, and as discussed earlier the alchemical secret that Marvel has uncovered is how to not make the villains matter too much to the overall strength of the film.  I’m still puzzling over how that works, actually.  All other superhero movies I can think of, most notably the Batman and James Bond franchises, really live and die on the strength of their villains.  It’s not even just superheroes; even at this point I’m hesitant to say that you can make any sort of decent fantasy/action movie without striking villains (if you want a single sentence explanation for what makes the original Star Wars trilogy so much better than the prequels, that’s as good as any).  But here these 10 movies are, with about 2.5 effectively realized baddies between them, and me either kinda liking or outright loving every last one, like some sorta sucker.

Maybe it’s something about having a hero that is so fully formed and engaging that you don’t even need a full on nemesis with their own POV to depict their character. It’s enough to put them in front of a really steep hill and watch them struggle to climb it. If you think about it, the main conflict in the Avengers doesn’t arise from wondering how the team will ever be able to overpower Loki.  It comes from the question of whether they’ll be able to get out of their own ways in time to kick his ass (which several of them can, and do, by themselves).  And the entire Iron Man series up to this point has been populated with villains that are riding the hero’s coattails in terms of creating weapons to challenge the ones he already has.

Or maybe it’s just that these movies really are just comedies, where truly imposing villainy is secondary to general flair.  This thesis is still under construction.

4. Iron Man 3

The best thing about the Iron Man movies is that they felt like ersatz Shane Black movies.  So it stands to reason that the best of the bunch should result when they just cut the shit and brought Black himself in.  The climax is a little overly busy, in a bad, weightless way (as opposed to Thor 2’s overly busy, but fun and inventive climax), and I am annoyed by how transparently they went for the Pepper death fake-out (a comic trope that is no less shitty for being “classic”, and is already getting overused in the films).  But…it’s funny.  And surprised me way more than these “cookie-cutter” productions are supposed too.  Particularly with everything involving Trevor Slattery, which was sort of genius in how it elided a troublesome bit of comics history, but also, come on, “His Lear was the toast of Croydon” is just a funny string of words, whether you understand the actual idea they’re supposed to convey or not.

I guess by the 8th time out, this isn’t exactly rocket science.

3. Captain America: The Winter Soldier

I’ve been talking about how these movies work largely based on their comedic chops, and more or less despite the effectiveness of their action and suspense beats. So naturally, when you bring in a pair of directors whose primary credit is from the (transcendent) sitcom Community…you wind up with one of the least comedic efforts, with the best shot action in the entire MCU.  Shrug.

Having succeeded making First Avenger a throwback to 40’s war movies, they naturally went on to make Winter Soldier a throwback to 70’s conspiracy thrillers. One can only imagine that in 2017, Captain America: Serpent Society On A Plane will be a throwback to 90’s slacker comedies, with Cap sharing an incongruously-spacious loft space while struggling to get their boutique record label off the ground, and Sam has to gently push Cap to stop denying his feelings for Black Widow and eventually parachute in to interrupt her wedding to Quicksilver….

Anyway, Winter Soldier.  It underuses the titular figure by relegating him to a mute henchman role, seemingly afraid to push him too far into villainy before the inevitable redemption arc.  Which is not too terrible, as his action sequences kick enough ass to make up for it.  The only really bum note is the elaborate Fury death fake-out, which is a load of shit, because if any of the “major” heroes is actually expendable to the MCU going forward, it’s that guy.  But it also effortlessly nails the introduction of Falcon, integrates Black Widow well, and succeeds in turning Captain America into something approaching an ensemble piece.  And I’ll take one of those over a one-man show every day of the week.  It’s probably why the widely-favored Iron Man movies rank comparatively low for me, and why my top two spots are reserved for:

2. Guardians Of The Galaxy

I loved this movie.  It’s colorful and goofy and fast-paced and heartfelt at the right moments (things got a bit misty at Groot’s last line, and at the moment where Rocket lets Drax pet him, and not only because I was half drunk).  And I’ll acknowledge most of the complaints, or at least the ones that don’t revolve around everyone thinking they are experts on the effects of human exposure to the vacuum of space.  Yes, Ronan is thinly sketched bad guy.  Yes, the Infinity Stone is a particularly naked Macguffin; it’s even lamp-shaded with a line*.  Yes, the climax is straight out of the Care Bears.  Yes, Thanos does nothing but sit and look kind of dumb.  Actually, that last one does bother me a bit. T hey have not done well building up Thanos so far, though I suppose they have another 4 years to work out the kinks before he has to take center stage.

But here’s a few ways to get me to overlook any flaws your movie might possess:

–   Include a talking raccoon as a major character, and not have him be a joke sidekick, but basically the Han Solo of the group.
–   Put a combination jack-off joke/Jackson Pollock reference in a family film. I spent the next 5 minutes cackling while thinking about all the parents in the audience wracking their brains trying to figure out how they were going to explain that when their 8 year-old asked why it was funny.
–   Balance your ensemble well. Give everyone a purpose, a personality, and some moments to shine. Guardians has to introduce 5 different heroes, none of which have any mainstream cache, but it is one shiny-ass movie from top to bottom.
–   Have Zoe Saldana kick ass in green body paint. Look, I told you not all of this was rocket science.
–   Set a good chunk of a movie in the severed head of a dead god floating in outer space.
–   Have a running gag about the heroes stealing prosthetic limbs from handicapped people, for no real reason.
–   Keep it to 2 hours. Seriously, not everything is an epic, particularly comedic action romps.
–   Howard the Duck easter egg. This is kind of a no-brainer in a Marvel movie, but it applies all the same to westerns, erotic thrillers, and period musicals.
–   Have the hero challenge the evil space overlord to a dance-off.
–   Have Michael Rooker play an asshole.  If he’s painted a stupid color, all the better.
–   End in a big Care Bears climax.  Seriously. It’s hokey, but I’m a sucker for stories about ragtag groups pulling together to do things they could never accomplish on their own.  Fantasy stories like this can make that theme very literal, and I’ll fall for it pretty much every time.  I am a skeptic by nature.  I do not believe in gods or ghosts or magic or reincarnation or Celestials.  But I do believe in a very specific kind of alchemy, a mysterious process that happens when people come together and become more than the sum of our parts.  There can be a weight that I could never hope to lift, that would crush me into the ground if I tried to shoulder it.  But give me one good friend, and together we can carry five of them.  It’s nonsensical, it’s sappy, it’s neither grim nor gritty nor grounded, but it is always going to resonate with me. Because it’s the one kind of magic I believe in.

1. The Avengers

Guardians may get off to a stronger start, but I can forgive a wobbly start very easily if it leads to a strong finish, and The Avengers has the strongest finish of any superhero movie…yeah, just any.  Even the best of the genre, like Spiderman 2 and The Dark Knight, blow their big action load before getting to into an entirely new sequence for the emotional climax.  And as wonderfully as Guardians introduces and integrates each member of its team, their coming together can’t match the momentousness that comes from bringing together multiple established franchises in such a shockingly coherent, effortless, and fun way.  I’ve gushed at length about the amazing high-wire act The Avengers makes look easy, but I’ll just add that another of its accomplishments is to make the most entertaining scenes come from the heroes bickering with each other.  We’ve already become attached to each of these heroes individually, and it’s no mean feat to make these clashes pop while not making any one of them act out of character or into the “jerk” for the purposes of a particular argument.

Also, Avengers has a Hulk.  And it’s not afraid to use it, but also has the discipline to withhold it until the moments it will have maximum impact.  And it has the best Marvel villain running around with Loki, and Thanos still removed enough to be mysterious rather than looking silly and nonthreatening.  Plus, for no real reason, cameos from Harry Dean Stanton and Powers Boothe.  But mainly, it’s got great action, great characters, and is really funny.  To the extent that Marvel has a secret, that’s about it.  It’s about having a good time with charismatic heroes.  It’s not dark or edgy or even “cool” really, but it is simple and fun and good-natured in a way that maybe even holds them back from creating truly memorable, hateful villains, but also makes all the shortcomings easy to overlook.

For me, anyway. Your mileage probably varies, but that’s only because you’re probably an asshole.

Love and kisses,
Schwartz

*which includes a reference that has bothered some, since Pulp Fiction came out after Quill left Earth, but given that Earth and its culture are not unknown or inaccessible to the rest of the galaxy, it doesn’t feel worthy of a No-Prize to concoct as scenario where he might have seen the most popular movie of the 90s

STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH AGENTS OF SHIELD

Disclaimer:  If you somehow were interested in reading this column without realizing it would contain spoilers for both Agents Of Shield and Captain America: The Winter Soldier…then you were wrong, and kind of weirdly dumb for even thinking that.

Marvel’s Agents Of Shield has not been a good show.  In its first 15 weeks of life, it has featured flat, unengaging characters engaging in rote, unimpressive action sequences and exchanging in sporadically amusing banter across the same cheap set. “Crossover” episodes that were less eventful than the standard procedural episodes.  Production values that make you wonder if ABC and Disney even knew these kids were making a show from their IP.

But how much of this was really the show’s “fault”?  A great deal of it, undoubtedly.  But as a serialized narrative, it was lethally middled from the moment of its conception.  So how much of AoS’s failure should be attributed to Nature (being inherently torn between the need to stand on its own and simultaneously serve the greater needs of the MCU), and how much to Nurture (failings in writing, casting, and general execution)?

NATURE:
AoS is unprecedented in certain ways.  It exists primarily to prop up and promote the Marvel film franchises, so one might have expected more extensive crossovers and guest appearances from the Avengers.  But so far, we have had one scene with Nick Fury, and one episode where one of Thor’s Lil’ Buddies came through town.  That’s not really exploiting the enormous, colorful Marvel Universe to its fullest potential, a need which would seem to be built into the show’s DNA.
But it’s also as it should be, probably.  This is a 22 episode season of a weekly drama series.  It can’t be nothing but cockteases for The Winter Soldier and Age Of Ultron and Starfox: The Worst Avenger.  And thus you have the major instability at heart of the show.  We have to buy into these characters and be interested in their adventures in and of themselves, but we are really only supposed to care because of their proximity to the real deal Heroes and Shit That Actually Matters (the movies).  Separate them too much from the big events and you have people tune out because they aren’t getting the MCU action they signed up for; tie them too closely to the Big Stuff and the same people will get antsy wondering why we’re wasting our time with the JV squad when all the cool shit is happening just to the left of frame.

So what the show needs is to carve out its own identity, independent from the movies it spun off from, so we can invest in the story we’re actually watching rather than the more interesting one it suggests is happening elsewhere.  But then how is it that this week’s episode was by far the most intimately tied to a Marvel movie, and also by far the best episode to date?


NURTURE:

Because it fixed a lot of the problems with the execution.  The action was still largely confined to the plane and dark corridors, but it is rougher, bloodier and has a desperate edge that fits with the dire circumstances the team finds themselves in compared to earlier romps.  And the dogfighting sequences are a bit of a change of pace and features decent effects work to boot.  It’s not on the level of Winter Soldier*, but it’s a real step up and pretty good by TV standards.

But more than that it’s that things actually HAPPENED.  That the major events were rolling downhill from the movies doesn’t matter much, because the team needed a shakeup in a bad, bad way.  Worse than they needed better fight choreography, even; for all the improved action and wild twists, my favorite bit in the episode was Fitz responding to the threat of torture and enslavement by swearing to bring Paxton down.  Except that he’s not Iron Man, so he actually just promises to play a part in taking him down.  And he’s not Captain America, so he forces it out through tears.

FitzSimmons are the best characters on AoS, because they are the only team members that actually are the “normal folk”, on a show that is ostensibly premised around exploring normal folk within this very abnormal world.  Skye is some sort of alien from the planet Sexytron, and it’s been all too easy to see Coulson/May/Ward as ersatz analogues for Captain America/Black Widow/Hawkeye.  We’ve talked a lot on the message boards about how these folks are bland individuals, but it’s also a problem that their team dynamic is basically what you would get if you removed the really heavy hitters from the Avengers, then made the less powerful folks even weaker and less distinctive.  It creates a feeling that we’re wasting time passing it with the watered-down versions, which creeps into each and every scene in the show without our really realizing it.

But as mentioned before this episode was definitely the high point of the series.  The final twist turns the weak characterization of Ward on its head and allows for a shake-up of the team dynamic.  But it’s about the fourth twist of the episode, which pits the team against each other before plunging them into a legitimately tense situation, where neither they nor we know who they can trust.  They can’t pack this many twists into every episode, or else they would rapidly become weightless and numbing.  And they can’t drastically reboot the show every time they need a goosing, no matter how much it spices things up that the team is fractured and cut off from the unlimited resources, infrastructure and reinforcements that SHIELD represented (a safety net that constantly worked to erode any sense of danger or urgency an episode threatened to build).

Now, though, things have the potential to be much more interesting going forward.  Don’t get me wrong, one good episode does not make AoS a good show.  15 hours is a long time to spend building a boring, lukewarm house just so you can have fun burning it down in the 16^th, and I’m neither in a hurry to revisit the earlier parts of the season myself nor to blame anyone who bailed along the way. But there is opportunity here, so as a public service I am going to offer my advice for how to keep Agents Of Shield operating at a level we might call “good” with a straight face.  I do this knowing that the remainder of the season has no doubt been written if not shot already, but Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen would have to be crazy not to reopen production to implement these suggestions.  For clearly I possess expertise they cannot hope to match.  They are but experienced, professional, HUGO Award-winning writers and showrunners, whereas I…I have the internet.

So in helpful DO/DON’T format, here is how to save Agents Of Shield:

DO:  Move FitzSimmons further to the fore.  As mentioned, they’re the only completely human characters, and as such offer a perspective that is unique to this show’s setting.  I’m agnostic on positioning them as a romantic pairing (because on the one hand that seems really hacky and obvious, but on the other they’re so cute together…), but give them emotional storylines to anchor and I don’t think they will let you down.

DON’T:  Hire more models for new roles.  I know Clark Gregg looks like a normal dad, but having everyone else on the team, down to the tech geeks, look runway-ready glamorous has not been working terribly well.  Agents Blake and Garrett immediately outshone the superhumanly-symmetrical Skye and Ward from the moment they stepped on screen, because they were played by honest-to-god Actors, with immediate, distinctive personalities.  I realize that the most likely additions to the team are Cobie Smulders (now that HIMYM is done) and the replacement-Ward that showed up with Paxton, neither of whom are too rough on the ol’ eyebones, but I’m just saying.  The sets and costumes are already homogenizing enough, so in the future cast with an eye for diversity (be it of race, age, or rating on the Clydesdale Scale).

DO:  Give the team their own ongoing antagonist.  Yes, they’ve had the Clairvoyant, but it would seem that he turned out to be Paxton, who is definitely not going to stick around on a weekly basis.  Even if the Clairvoyant is a mantle that gets passed around HYDRA according to convenience, it’s no longer really viable now that we’ve seen behind the curtain.  Bring someone from the comics, but not a heavy hitter or anything.  It can be someone who has already been used in a minor capacity in the films, like Armin Zola or Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell is arguably as big a star as Paxton, but he seems more like he’s game for just about anything, so who knows?), or someone that is unlikely to ever see the silver screen (Motherfucking MODOK!!!).  Marvel’s got several thousand characters to their names; don’t be afraid to burn a few just because you might want to maybe use them in Doctor Strange 3 in 2022. Of course, “Turn, Turn, Turn” set up Ward as the perfect person to take on recurring villain duties.  Which leads me to the most important Don’t…

DON’T:  DO NOT PULL THE PUNCH WITH WARD’S TURN.  Don’t have it turn out that he was brainwashed or coerced into killing his fellow agents.  You can’t play that card again so soon after the Deathlok arc.  Don’t have it turn out that Hand planned to sacrifice herself all along so that Ward could infiltrate Hydra and take it down from the inside.  That’s too risky and dumb for ostensibly smart characters to think of as a viable plan, particularly when she is about the highest-ranking loyalist left in the ranks.  Really don’t have it turn out that the gun was loaded with blanks and the agents had ketchup packet squibs ready as an elaborate fake out.  If we can’t trust that people are dead when you show them get shot point blank, followed by a double-tap once they’re down, why should we even bother paying attention to anything you ever show us again?  And don’t have it be a Life Model Decoy.  Actually…

DON’T:  Do anything with Life Model Decoys, ever.  I mean fucking ever.  They are dramatic antimatter.  Once you introduce that device, you will never be able to create a smidge of tension again (and this is a show that runs on life-and-death stakes), and there is no putting the genie back in the bottle.  Again, if we can’t trust that a graphically depicted point-blank firearm execution will result in death, then we can’t trust anything and nothing matters at all.  It’s bad enough that Coulson was brought back to life and Fury elaborately faked his death in Winter Soldier.  I know coming back from the dead is a longstanding comic book trope, but it’s probably the shittiest thing about comics and it’s, if anything, even shittier here.

DO:  Keep the action choreographer from last episode.  The fights were much better than they had been before, if not movie-level.  The show benefits from playing a little rougher.  To that end…

DON’T:  Keep futzing with the icers.  I know the show’s for kids (sorta) but kids don’t give a shit about the good guys shooting bad guys.  They don’t care that Star Wars doesn’t stop in its tracks to establish that Leia’s always sets her blaster to stun before taking a shot at a stormtrooper.  They would not have tuned out on GI Joe if the heroes occasionally hit their target.  Kids can play with Nerf guns themselves, they want to watch the grown-ups use the real things.

DON’T:  Force a fistfight and a shootout into every episode.  I know I just made a big deal about the action, but elaborate action sequences are simply not within the means of a weekly show like this.  Besides, I was talking mainly about stakes, not quotas for violence.  A better idea is to…

DO:  Play up the sci-fi and espionage angles of the premise.  Aim for more suspense than action.  The most effective part of “Turn, Turn, Turn” was the The Thing vibe that came from the crew creeping around a base under siege, never sure who was actually the enemy.  There was a long infiltration scene on The Americans this week that eschewed any depiction of violence whatsoever, but was as intense as any gunfight I’ve seen this year.  That sort of thing falls well within AoS’s wheelhouse and budgetary limits, but for some reason past episodes apparently felt like such sequences weren’t complete until several armed guards ran at Ward and tried punching him instead of shooting or tazing or macing him.

DON’T:  Do another 22 episode season.  13 is fine, really.  It works for all the best shows, and a lot of them still end up with some filler in there.  13 hours is a long time.

DO:  Keep HYDRA in the driver’s seat for a while.  I know that the title of the show kind of indicates that the team can’t operate independently forever, but the heroes work better as underdogs.  And again, operating without that safety net raises the stakes.

So that’s my plan for saving Marvel’s Agents Of Shield.  I have another, more drastic one for if no renewal is coming and you want to burn the whole thing down, but I assume that’s not going to be the case.  AoS is never going to become the crown jewel of the MCU, but I think moving in these directions would give the show a decent chance at nabbing the elusive brass ring of Not Sucking. YOU’RE WELCOME, Marvel/Disney/America.

*which features the best superhero action since The Avengers, or Spiderman 2 before it – I particularly like how so many of the combatants are not shy about bringing guns to a fistfight, in sharp contrast to the unfailingly polite guards and goons on AoS.