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Review: The Avengers

Summer’s first big blockbuster demands multiple Seattle Met geeks to review it.

Posted by: Matthew Halverson and André Mora on May 04, 2012 at 10:30AM 0 Comments

The bad guy has an army. They have a Hulk.

It’s been four years and five movies in the making, but the comic book mash-up The Avengers is finally here this weekend. It’s a movie so big—so overstuffed with geeky goodness—we needed two people to review it.

Matthew Halverson (senior editor): Okay, I admit it, I’m a nerd and I’ve seen all of the Marvel movies that preceded The Avengers. I already had a good grasp on characters like Captain America, the Hulk, and Iron Man and didn’t have any trouble following Avengers’ fairly straightforward plot: Megalomaniacal Norse god Loki (Tom Hiddleston) from Thor wants to take over Earth, and a handful of superheroes put their supersized egos aside to team up and stop him. But I can’t decide if that means director Joss Whedon’s job was easier, since a lot of the work was already done for him.

André Mora (design director): I hadn’t seen Thor —in fact, I’d only seen Iron Man—so Loki’s appearance at the very beginning of Avengers was a little confusing. But, like any adult male with long hair, perfect skin, and a hat with two long-ass horns, he’s suitably terrifying and worthy of being hunted down. As for Whedon (who also wrote the script), I think his job comes down to making the superheroes work as one—and he nails it. He revels in making the crew believe in each other. Maybe that’s why Samuel L. Jackson is a bit lifeless as the team’s leader, Nick Fury. He’s kind of useless.

MH: Only in a movie with this many big personalities could Sam “the human F-bomb” Jackson be boring. And speaking of that script, it’s what makes Avengers work. Sure, the scenes of mayhem and destruction are eye-popping, as Loki and his interdimensional army tear up Manhattan (not to mention a little squirm-inducing, even a decade after 9/11). But without the witty banter between cocky Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), earnest Captain America (Chris Evans) and regal Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the explosions would just be cheap Michael Bay ripoffs. What about Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner and the Hulk? Am I the only one who worried the indie icon would be out of his element in a big-budget CGI-fest?

AM: No, I wondered if he might be too good for this kind of blockbuster. But Ruffalo’s ability to bring quiet intensity to Banner before he hulks out makes him a perfect fit. And the Hulk, though mostly mute when green, is crucial to the action scenes. His size in relationship to the other Avengers—and buildings—makes the battles almost believable. The action has a certain choreography that takes it to another level. Maybe it’s a testament to how quickly visual effects are improving, but rather than clinging to closeups, Whedon backs up the camera and lets you take in the scale of the mayhem, where as many as four superheroes are fighting at once. It really brings the feel of a comic book’s page to the big screen.

MH: So we’re both down for the inevitable Avengers sequel?

AM: Yeah. Maybe by then I’ll have had a chance to watch Iron Man 2—and Thor 2 and Captain America 2 …

The Avengers opens nationwide May 4.

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Tags: Film Review, Marvel, Summer Blockbuster

Hunger Games: Not Just Another Teen Movie

Director Gary Ross starts the trilogy off with a winning nail-biter.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Mar 22, 2012 at 10:45AM 0 Comments

Jennifer Lawrence stars as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games.

There’s a lot that can go wrong in the making of a PG-13 movie about children fighting to the death. Cast a lot of Pretty Young Things, and we’ll never believe they could survive a knife fight. Ramp up the teenage love connections, and it veers into gooey Twilight territory. Too little gore, and you lose the adult audience—aka the 25-year-old female fanbase that read all three Hunger Games books in a week. Too much gore, and…well, you look like a sadist.

Lots of decisions for director Gary Ross, who was handed what could be the biggest film franchise since Harry Potter. And though he’s better known for his heartwarmers Dave, Big, and Seabiscuit than his dystopian dramas, at the end of the day, they’re all underdog stories. Turns out he’s well suited to make a winning nail-biter that should satisfy fans, and not confuse the hell out of newcomers to the trilogy. He’s found the key to success: a fierce Katniss Everdeen in actress Jennifer Lawrence, as the teenage heroine who risks her life by taking her 12-year-old sister’s place in this deranged version of Survivor. Taking a page from Oscar-nominated days in the bleak indie drama Winter’s Bone, another film where she gets beat up regularly, Lawrence plays the strong, silent type whose scowl has range: fear, indignation, hunger.

Oh right, hunger. That’s the weird thing about this movie. They never really cover why everyone’s hungry. The opening reel explains that, every year, 12 districts are punished for rebelling against the Capitol by sending two children between the ages of 12 and 18 into the Hunger Games, where they Fight to the Death until a victor remains. (Note the capitalization—for emphasis!) But no mention of this being a postapocalyptic America, where food is rationed. There are few, if any, wide-angle establishing shots. Who needs backstory? Instead, this is a shaky-camera film about the here and now, with plenty of bizarre close-ups of nostrils and eyeballs to make everyone feel disoriented. Ross says we’re supposed to enter this world through “Katniss’s serpentine tunnel vision.” Her tunnel vision made me a little queasy.

But it works, in a way. Nerves are meant to be high. The Hunger Games play out like a twisted Olympics, with over-the-top opening day celebrations broadcast nationwide and people placing bets on which child will live. In the arena itself, an ogre of a teenage boy grabs an oversized sword and preys on the young, whooping like he’s a stand-in from Lord of the Flies. Blood splatters, but the filmmakers refrain from showing us the worst of it. And just when another little girl screams and you have to remind yourself to breathe again, something breaks the tension. Like when Woody Harrelson, channeling Kurt Cobain as the slacker mentor Haymitch, reminds Katniss for the umpteenth time that she’ll probably die soon, Elizabeth Banks (as taskmaster Effie) steps in with a cheery “Who wants a chocolate-covered strawberry?” It seems The Hunger Games is also a dark comedy. One thing it’s not, though, is a love story. The much-hyped love triangle between Katniss, her childhood friend Gale, and fellow competitor Peeta is downplayed, to the point where even ardent fans might question whether it was ever more than part of the game.

The Hunger Games is in theaters nationwide on March 23.

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Tags: Film Review, Hunger Games

In Chronicle, Should We Have Sympathy for the Devil?

Today’s antihero is a teen with superpowers who ransacks Seattle.

Posted by: Matthew Halverson on Feb 03, 2012 at 09:15AM 0 Comments

Mad teenager.

It’s hard not to feel for Andrew, the angsty, hoodie-wearing, Seattle high schooler at the center of Chronicle. (More on the local angle in a minute.) Played with brittle intensity in this new found-footage sci-fi flick, he drifts through life unnoticed by everyone—except the meatheads at school who remind him daily of his place in the pecking order, and his alcoholic father who uses him nightly as a punching bag. And it’s that blatant attempt to play on the audience’s sympathies that makes the flick such a confounding mess.

Things start out promisingly enough: Andrew and two other partygoers stumble (literally) upon a glowing, subterranean crystal formation in the woods, and then discover days later that they’ve developed telekinetic powers. Watching them experiment with their newfound abilities by playfully terrorizing shoppers at a toy store is a trip, because pulling pranks is exactly what you’d expect a trio of reckless and suddenly supercharged teenagers to do. It’s even enough to distract from director Josh Trank’s failure to capitalize on the in-the-moment immediacy that found footage (done well) can offer.

But instead of mining the kids-undergoing-massive-transformation scenario to explore the pinballing emotions of young adults, Chronicle devolves into disturbing wish fulfillment for anyone who’s ever been picked on. When Andrew realizes that even his ability to fly can’t make him cool or fix his relationship with his dad, he lashes out—as only a guy capable of crushing cars with his mind can. But because Andrew’s life is so god-awful, we’re left to wonder whether Trank wants us to actually root for Andrew as he brings a city to its knees.

And about that city: The Space Needle is a constant presence in Chronicle, poking out of the background in multiple shots and even serving as the backdrop for some of Andrew’s ragey exploits. But the Emerald City is just a setting and hardly a character, raising a question about its inclusion that could also be directed at the movie itself: Why bother?

Chronicle
In theaters nationwide Feb 3

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Tags: Film Review