My Avenging Movie Review

Ok. Most of the time I don't feel any need to review movies. At least most of the commercialized, effects extravaganzas that a lot of movies have become. They are meant only as an experience, nothing more. You are not supposed to overthink them in the first place because they usually have less meaning substance than the concession stand popcorn has nutritional value. A difficult situation, certainly, for someone who was made, from day one, to be an overthinker of everything. But, as always, with a little focus, training, and disciplined effort, you can accomplish difficult things.

That being said, however, doesn't preclude me from getting caught, every now and then, to a movie that just shouts out glaring. blaring, gouts of too much dumb, you just can't ignore it. That this same said example might also garner over 2 billion dollars in only several short weeks of release, also screams out the sad state of where we are right now.

It was just so stunning for me. This feeling, that started out, initially, as a major hit of disappointment, actually starting to turn to angry frustration, as Kathleen and I did our Sunday grocery shopping after the movie was over. And the thing was, I just couldn't quite put my finger on why, exactly. Because there were, certainly, a few good, singular scenes in it. But as a whole?

It has taken sleeping on it, and thinking about it more, here in my work space, and rack shack, room, but I think I may have it now.

It starts with this litany:

1:Hawkey begging Natassha to not give him hope. This after having been on five year slaughter binge of any, and all, bad guys still left in the... what would you call it? Getting Binaried? The cut in half version of being decimated.

2: A Norse demigod of epic proportions has burned out and turned into a beer guzzling, obese embarrassment.

3: A former icon of moral leadership, as well as a true knight of old chivalry, is reduced to running a grief counseling group, with prattle he actually doesn't really believe in.

4: The former icon of truly unbending, unyielding strength, gone too brutally far, has become a mostly burned out blend of a scientist who wanted to know too much, and the anger monkey he mistakenly turned himself into, who now can't seem to get angry at anything, even when righteous anger might be needed... even if in measured doses.

5: And the other, former icon, only in this case of science gone too far, on the spurs of money, who made the money machine that put him on as its protector, even as the suit he wore became ever more integral to his whole being. The guy who was mad at the knight because he wouldn't back the Authoritarian security system, that probably wouldn't have saved them anyway, from a group that had already corrupted Shield. They guy who decides, after half the world's consumers have been taken away, to go back to just being a countryfied father; a life he could go to, appropriately, with the Goop selling girl, because they both had gobs of money.

6: And then there is the ridiculously complicated time travel plot the writers wrote themselves into, with a Villain we have very little sense of, other than he's bigger, and stronger than all of them combined, sometimes, with or without the damn gauntlet of magic stones. And he's also fired up to save life by destroying half of it. As if you could control power on that level in the first place, that carefully, and precisely, let alone how stupid the notion of: "We had to destroy the village to save it," is. Or that there might be a whole lot more to talk about in what to do about too much life competing for too little resources. Another notion where, if these idiots weren't creating armies at this scale, armed to the teeth with instrumentality of unheard of scale, maybe a whole lot more resource might be available to help find actual, working solutions to problems, As opposed to just finding a bigger "BFG" (as immortalized in the movie Doom) to blow what you don't like away with.

And at the end of this three hour epic there is the requisite big battle, but with none of the true conviction, or semblance of some meaning, of any of the first Avenger movie battle scenes. And sure, there's a tiny snippet there, where the girls get to kick ass, but it goes by so fast you hardly notice it amongst all of the other general mayhem to keep the "ultimate power thing" away from the current, "ultimate bad guy."

Despite all of this, though, the one thing I want you ask yourselves is this: Did you come away from this movie with any greater sense of hope for things to come for us as a Nation, let alone for the rest of life on this planet, and us as a particular species in it?

Hawkeye asked Natassha to not give him hope. And boy did this move deliver on that promise. The one thing this nation is in the most desperate, short supply of. Because why else would so much of our escapist entertainment be on the inevitability of apocalyptic collapse. And in that sense maybe we can understand Thanatos, because that was his refrain wasn't it... that "I am inevitable?"

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