The Avengers

[ykoriana]

So, why did I like this movie? You might say that being a Marvel fan, a Tony Stark fan, and a Steve/Tony shipper I might be predestined to do so. But I’ve learned very early in my fandom life that the higher you build your expectations, the easier it is to be disappointed. *cough Star Wars: The Phantom Menace cough* I was not disappointed in this movie. It was exciting from start to finish. I never thought the language of comic books could be so faithfully translated to the big screen. Everything felt right, it felt like Marvel and the characters felt like themselves. I felt that this movie respects and builds upon the essence that made us fall in love with these characters in the first place, and therefore allows us to continue to invest in them the same emotion we always did.

Or, in a more summarized approach: ALL THE FEELS.

Let’s start with the villain. I loved Tom Hiddleston’s performance in Thor, but here he really surpassed himself. On one moment his Loki looks purely insane, unhinged. The next moment he’s like a little kid that stole candy except no, he’s casually ripping a man’s eyeball out. And then enter Thor and he’s a little bit the Loki we knew before, eyes rolling at his big brother’s gruff manners, getting off on provoking him.

Thor despite being some three hundred pounds and six feet of pure muscle can pout exactly like my four year old cousin. Every time he goes BROTHER COME BACK I LOVE YOU, I both want to hug him and smack him. Because, of course, every time Loki will reject him and it’s exactly like watching a puppy being kicked again and again. Loki being Loki, he probably enjoys this immensely. When they fight at the top of Stark Tower, even I thought for a moment that Loki was going to have a change of heart and then we all saw how that turned out.



LOL bitches I’m just casually ripping this guy’s eyeball out because I DO WHAT I WANT
plus I look damn fine doing it. Admit it, you WANT to kneel before me.
I honestly like Loki as a villain because you got to see him become like that in Thor. Machiavelli wrote “it’s better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both” and that pretty much sums up Loki to me. I find him more interesting than say, the Red Skull, because all you know about the Red Skull is that he’s your usual bent-on-world-domination super villain who was so evil even the Nazis tried to kick him out of the club like, five seconds before being vaporized.

Natasha: badass. The exchange between Natasha and Loki is one of my favorite points in the movie. (I have a lot of favorite moments. Bear with me.) I love the way Loki turns the conversation against Natasha to suddenly have it turned against him. Natasha goes into that room with full knowledge that Loki would know her deepest darkest secrets, and sets out to use that to her own advantage. That’s courage.

Of course the argument could be made that Loki is totally in on all of this and he just plays along because it furthers his goal of turning the team against Banner. Because the plot is layered like that.

Further to the point of badassery: Clint. He gets mind-whammied by Loki and spends half the movie being scary bad, but still looks hot as damn doing it. THOSE ARMS. This also leads to another favorite moment, his exchange with Natasha wherein he gets one of the best lines in the movie, describing his, er, possession as “pulling you out [of your brain] and stuffing something else in”.

With Captain America: The First Avenger being an origin story, it’s easy to forget that by the time Steve flew that plane into the ocean he’s had a lot of combat and command experience. We’ve sort of all fixated on the GIANT HOT VIRGIN part and while that’s fine, Cap is supposed to command this ragtag bunch of people and his good looks alone are not going to win him points except in Tony’s case maybe. So I really enjoyed the fact that from the very beginning Steve’s got the no-nonsense attitude needed to counter the more hotheaded members of the team. Even if, as Tony puts it later, it takes them all a while to get traction.

Then again, the point can also be made that Steve clings to his combat experience because it’s the one thing grounding him in this strange new world he’s thrust into. Cue angst. 

Also, Steve in command mode was really hot. That uniform. That body. Those shoulders. THAT ASS. (if only it had been given as much screen time as Scarlett Johansson’s *le sigh*) And still he was an absolute cutie, paying up his bet with Fury like a good scout and lighting up like a little boy when he actually got the reference.



I spent six months telling everybody that the CA:TFA costume was much better.
Facepalm.
Steve and Tony. All the delicious tension between them screaming angry!sex, surely I did not imagine that? The exchange between them at the laboratory is just brutal, suddenly all the pretenses crash down and there’s these two men taking out all their hurt on each other. Steve’s angry at Tony not quite for being Tony but for being Howard’s kid and for having everything when Steve LOST everything. And Tony’s angry at Steve for being so helplessly idealistic and for being the person Howard measured everyone up against.

I think it was really smart to follow it by a sequence in which suddenly they have to work together. With that and Tony's reaction to Coulson's death immediately after, it really establishes how Steve begins by seeing just the facade (which, mind you, is what Tony wants the entire world to see) and progresses to seeing the real Tony. Of course Tony is inherently Tony and an Avengers movie would not be complete without Tony willing to sacrifice himself to save the team and the world. Because Steve told him he didn’t have what it takes to be a hero. SOB.

And then Tony’s WAIT WHAT did I actually save Manhattan and possibly the planet by facing certain death and flying a nuclear missile into a time-space portal? MUST CRACK JOKE IMMEDIATELY lest Steve people think I actually, you, know, CARE about all this beneath my debonair exterior.

I loved Tony and Bruce being all gay for science, but most of all I was really struck by the way Tony reached out to Bruce, talking about his own arc reactor and how Bruce might be able to learn to live with the Hulk. And later Tony was certain that Bruce would show up to join the Avengers. FEELS.

I never really liked the Hulk, never found emotional resonance with the character. Ang Lee’s film was an interesting approach I guess, but I never connected with Eric Bana’s Hulk nor with Edward Norton’s Hulk. I don’t know, but the plot, the script, the actors, never created a coherent narrative or character arc for me. However, from the very first trailer I suspected Marvel had found a winner in Mark Ruffalo and I was right. The contrast between Bruce’s self-deprecating manner and the way the Hulk clearly has FUN SMASHING THINGS is brilliant. I love how Bruce seems to be always teetering, unsure yet able to crack a little joke. His line about being “exposed… like a nerve” perfectly sums up the character. And the scene where Bruce admits having attempted suicide really is one of the dramatic high points of the movie.

The Hulk, on the other hand, is just made of win. The audience went wild for him. When he punches Thor in Grand Central Station: roar of laughter. When he smashes Loki like a freaking rag doll: round of applause. For reals. I mean, I was sorry for poor Loki but then again I wasn’t. Also, the look on Loki’s face after being smashed into the ground is just priceless.

FINALLY, OF COURSE: ALL THE COULSON FEELS TOO. Curse you Joss Whedon and your inevitable urge to murder my favorite characters! Serenity, Dollhouse and now this? And Coulson had one of my favorite moments in the movie. Him fanboying over Steve was the sweetest thing ever. "I watched you while you were sleeping", wait, what, so Steve is Bella and Coulson is Edward Cullen? that's not awkward at all.

While I don’t think the folk at Marvel ever planned that far ahead, the truth is that the Coulson story arc became a really solid narrative thread binding all these movies and people together. Coulson was competent but never annoying or robotic: he was human. He put up with Tony’s antics and dealt with bickering Norse gods with an almost zen-like calm punctuated by flickers of bright spirit. Honestly, I bet even Nick Fury slept better when Coulson was around. That Coulson was a Captain America fanboy perfectly fit into both their characters: I think Coulson was one of the few people left that still held core principles the way Steve does. And it was one more in a long line of key factors that made us identify with Coulson.

In hindsight, it’s quite obvious that Joss Whedon, being Joss Whedon, had to kill him. The bastard. We love him, but a heartless bastard he is.

I’ll just finish this now with some tech porn. Because baby, the helicarrier is the sweetest ride around and the Mark VII armor has no performance issues at all. Hot damn.





all .gifs found at Tumblr, because I can't Photoshop to save my life