Why 'The Avengers' is a step back in superhero time

I am a fan of crackle-pop-’May I have my big tub of popcorn please’ summer blockbusters. As well as of superhero flicks. So when I saw that The Avengers had 93% on Rottentomatoes, a popular online review aggregator, I knew I had to see it. Plus there was the very real temptation of admiring Scarlett Johansson, a very three-dimensional actress (if you know what I mean) in 3D.

What was surprising though, was that I found myself — several times — almost dozing off while in the theatre, sitting up only when the Hulk made an appearance, the Green Giant bringing to the screen some of the Sunny Deolian handpup-wielding bone-crunching that I have so grown up to love. But alas, that in itself did nothing to elevate the rest of the proceedings above the tedium of a standard CGI-fest. And even that seemed to be heavily inspired from Michael Bay’s smash-em-up series Transformers, which had almost exactly the same ‘energy cube from outer space’, the same ‘space portal opens up in the sky through which evil beings stream in’, and giant metallic corkscrew-like thingies that munch through skyscrapers. It was lame then. It looks lamer re-cycled.

The superhero franchises, until recently, have always been derided as silly escapism, purely for kids and geeky Peter Pan fanboys. I mean, how seriously can one take men who wear underwear over their trousers and sport eraser-sized erect nipples encased in latex? Though once you think about it, the genre does not need to be silly.

The superhero myth embodies a recurrent literary theme that forms the core of innumerable classics: of the underdog protagonist who discovers some power (typically something internal like bravery or love or compassion) and then uses it to overcome a nemesis (like poverty or discrimination or fate). In the comics-based superhero ethos though, the ‘power’ is something unreal, like the ability to spin a web, to fly, read minds, manipulate metal, while the nemesis an actual physical enemy, like Lex Luthor or the Joker or the Kingpin, cartoonish and over-the-top.

The critics never gave the genre respect, even when the movies were visually spectacular in the truest sense like Tim Burton’s Batman or Del Toro’s Blade II. The strife between protagonist and antagonist, they said, was too literal and humdrum.

Nolan, one of the most visionary directors of modern times, changed everything with his Dark Knight saga. He kept the external trappings of the superhero genre (the hero, the arch-nemesis, the spectacular effects) but also layered in layers of internal conflict. Now, Batman comes up against not a man in a funny clown costume with Muhahaha schemes of world-domination but a somber personification of unfathomable evil who challenges the hero not merely physically but also emotionally.

Dark, philosophical and utterly brilliant, Nolan’s Dark Knight saga showed the power of the superhero genre to transcend its cliches to become something greater. There were others who also took the genre in other directions — Bryan Singer made Superman into a sensitive suburban Dad, Sam Raimi cast Spiderman into an angsty Devdas-ian romantic hero who struggles between friendship and love, while Ang Lee portrayed the Hulk as a superhuman who is not so much blessed as haunted by his powers.

Given how developed the genre has become artistically, The Avengers is a definite step-back. If it was meant to be a sly self-parody with elements of deliberate campiness, which it definitely tries to be sometimes, that angle is not consistently developed. One reason is the poor writing for which much of the ‘comedy’ fall flat. If it was supposed to be about serious conflict between people with extra-ordinary abilities (there is a rather boring ‘conflict’ scene where the superheroes argue like kids over who gets on to the water-slide), well, then it falls light-years short of Watchmen or for that matter even X-Men. If it was meant to be a roaring saga of heroism, The Avengers needed more bad-ass
dialogues and definitely more original action set-pieces. And perhaps, the most damning of its failures, with the exception of the

Hulk, none of the superheroes (no, not even Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow) were even remotely interesting as characters.

Which leaves me wondering: What Avengers was it that I saw? Surely not the one everyone is raving about.    

Arnab Ray is the author of The Mine and May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss,