I love the dead-pan delivery of the script. Maybe I downloaded the first read-through done by emotionless robots.
And what quality writing! I noticed that they used words with more than two syllables once or twice!
Captain America is much better in this than his actual movie. Which only serves to make me sad about how bad Captain America was.
All in all, things get better as soon as they're on the Daedalus with SG1 the aircraft carrier.
But then Thor arrives and things become a hot mess again. Suddenly we're in Movie B -- Thor 2. Thanks for watching that advance footage. Can we hurry up and get back to the 7 minutes of screen-time you gave Scarlett Johansson?
I don't get the writing. Thor defends Loki as a brother and, as soon as Johansson mentions his crimes, Thor gives up and says that he's adopted. Shoehorn, meet joke.
But, really, why am I complaining? I could be playing Galaga!
And they get points for having Loki call Black Widow a quim. I hope that catches on with American children everywhere now.
I also appreciate that we actually lose stuff. Like Thor's SHIELD agent buddy. Who is also the only likable SHIELD employee. He gets a good death, though. That's actually quite perfect, because Colson doesn't really matter. The perfect redshirt.
RC gave me this wonderful script outline thing that spells out the whole three act structure. The great thing about the Avengers is that I could follow that outline and I knew exactly the right time to go do the dishes and cook some chicken for lunch.
After 100 minutes of build up, though, we finally move into the apocalyptic invasion. So... that warms me up a bit. It sort of feels like a modern Doctor Who Dalek invasion (that is, all is fine and there's only an implied loss of life), but, well... Actually, that drives me crazy. After losing Colson, I was hoping for something a bit more real. But here we are with an alien invasion with shit exploding everywhere and not one person is killed. All the pedestrians escape GI Joe cartoon style. Seriously...not a single casualty. This movie has one death! Colson. And a zillion of Loki's redshirts, I guess, but all of them are masked (or aliens). There's only one clear human death. I don't know why that bothers me. It's just that the final battle is so huge and in the middle of the city with a million people at ground zero and they all just calmly sidestep a falling plane or building?
And, of course, I need it explained why Black Widow can't talk Hulk down or reason with him, but Captain America can give him orders...and even gets a smile. Is it a controlled thing? If Banner intentionally turns into the Hulk then the Hulk is reasonable and nice and useful? He even talks. This is the problem with the Hulk, isn't it? They lean towards comedy and it just doesn't ever work. This whole big climactic battle and we're laughing out loud at how ridiculous it is when the Hulk beats down Loki? We went into fan-made comedy there for a second. Leslie Neilsen as The Hulk!
See, where comedy is acceptable is after Stark saves the day... And then Loki is confronted by all the avengers and makes his quip. No problem there.
And I guess I need a comic book person to explain the after credits sequence to me.
