Marvel Cinematic Universe: Marvel's The Avengers (Retrospective)

Marvel's The Avengers (2012)

After four years and five films of teases and buildup, The Avengers landed with no small amount of fanfare and unusually positive reviews. The experiment to fold a group of individually popular superheroes together into a single, cohesive story paid off in spades, and it's easy to see why. Almost ten years since it first released, The Avengers remains a well-crafted, engaging, and funny action-adventure spectacle.

When Thor villain Loki (Tom Hiddleston) returns at the behest of a mysterious new master, he arrives on Earth as a harbinger of worse things to come. Meant to pave the way for a coming alien invasion, he wastes little time in decimating S.H.I.E.L.D., placing Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) and Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård, returning from Thor) under some kind of mind control, prompting Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) to finally call in the team he's been building. While Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) retrieves Dr. Bruce Banner (portrayed here by Mark Ruffalo, replacing Edward Norton), Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) approaches Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Fury himself ropes in Steve Rogers (Chris Evans). The team comes together to capture Loki, and it isn't long before Thor (Chris Hemsworth) joins the party to round out the cast.

For being such a big, bombastic movie, the plot is relatively straightforward and relies on the tried-and-true "the villain secretly wants to be captured" twist that became so popular in the wake of the The Dark Knight (2008). It's not a hard twist to see coming, which is probably why the film smartly telegraphs this early on. Rather than muddle through an overly complicated plot in a film that is, by nature, stuffed full of characters, The Avengers wisely focuses on those characters and their relationships. This is where all the magic occurs. It's a thrill watching Iron Man butt heads with Captain America, and good fun to see the mighty Thor come to blows with the incredible Hulk. The vast majority of the film is spent letting the team work out the kinks in their internal structure, which is why the finale is such a rousing payoff. When the Avengers finally come together behind Captain America and begin to function like a well-oiled machine, we get the sense that this dream team is unstoppable.

It's hard to fault the film for not taking itself too seriously, because that's never been the point. These films know exactly what they are and what they want to be, and are content to play within the confines of the comic book genre. Perhaps this is the most refreshing approach to the source material, because watching The Avengers feels very much like reading one of the comic books from which these characters and stories are adapted. Just like comic books are not high literature, The Avengers doesn't set out to be the Citizen Kane of the modern era. Because of this, the film comes across as having an unusual amount of confidence in both its characters and execution. I suspect this has a lot to do with the fact that the characters had already been established in the films leading up to this one, and because each of the actors were already comfortable in their respective roles, allowing for a kind of freedom and playfulness not commonly seen in these kinds of big summer blockbusters.

The Avengers is certainly not a perfect film. The final sequence rolls on for a few minutes too long, and the characters (except for Banner) all pretty much reach peak development by the end of the second act. Taken on its own, separate from the continuity of the established MCU, The Avengers has all the depth and nuance of an airbrush painting. It's pretty to look at, but there's not much there by way of substance. Black Widow carries the weight of the most important conversations, the first with Banner, the second with Barton after he's been freed from Loki's mind control. The rest is all sound and color. But, the film isn't exactly meant to be taken on its own. No, it's firmly planted within a specific context, and sort of expects viewers to already be familiar with its characters. If you're looking for character development, this film probably isn't going to satisfy. But if you're just looking to see all of these iconic characters come together in an all-out blockbuster of a flick, then The Avengers is for you.

Marvel and its collaborators struck gold with this film. The cinematic universe only expands after this landmark movie, eventually blossoming into a full-blown cultural phenomenon the likes of which hasn't been seen since the release of the original Star Wars trilogy. Regardless of the numerous movies and sequels that will go on to populate the MCU, none of them will really recapture the magic of The Avengers, when these heroes all assembled on the big screen for the first time.

Marvel Cinematic Universe: Thor (Retrospective)

Upon each viewing, I find myself enjoying the fourth film of the MCU immensely. By this point, the training wheels are off, and the production companies have plotted a firm course toward bringing the Avengers together, and the rest of the team must be introduced. In this way, Thor feels like a much freer film than Marvel's previous outing, Iron Man 2. Rather than trying to build out characters from the Iron Man movies, Thor pivots hard into new genres and territories. Much of the action unfolds on a cosmic playing field known as the Nine Realms, detailing a conflict between the realms of Asgard and Jotunheim. When Earth finally crops up in the story, it's almost a stopover for the broader conflict.

Marvel's Thor (2011)

When the brash Thor (Chris Hemsworth), son of the Asgardian king, Odin (Anthony Hopkins), is stripped of his title and power and banished to Earth for his insolence in provoking a conflict between Asgard and the Frost Giants of Jotunheim, what follows is a character arc very similar to that of Tony Stark's in the first Iron Man. The heart of this story is that of a man who never grew beyond being a spoiled brat learning to both take responsibility for his actions, and temper his contemptuous attitude with patience and respect. After falling for a mortal, the brilliant fringe scientist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) and being fed a sinister lie by his traitorous brother, Loki (Tom Hiddleston), Thor grows into a man worthy of reclaiming what he's lost.

Much like Iron Man, if heroes are meant to instill in us virtues and ethics, then Thor presents a worthy hero. Not because he wields great power, but because he undergoes a profound change of heart. He goes from selfish and cocksure to selfless and modest, willing to give up his own life for the people of Earth. Similar to how Christ admonishes his disciples to deny themselves and take up their own cross in Luke 9, Thor quite literally dies a death to self. And only in dying does he find life again. In a blast of thunder, he is resurrected to reclaim his title and fearsome power, and this is what lends the film its transcendent quality. 

This is the stuff of myth and legend, what C. S. Lewis called the myth of the Dying God in his wonderful essay, "Myth Became Fact." These myths of Pagan messiahs and Pagan gods who die and rise again in fantasy are "good dreams," Lewis calls them in Mere Christianity, echoes in fantasy of the Father's plan worked out in reality—myth becoming fact in a particular time and place in human history. These stories, these virtues, point to Christ, a kind of basic morality system common to all humans, however sinful we might be. The very fact that we can conceive of stories like the one told in Thor, these pure expressions of virtue, suggests that there is, in fact, the purest expression of virtue, or the greatest story ever told. The mortal characters in the film, specifically Stellan Skarsgård's Erik Selvig, even discuss this in the context of the myths and legends of Norse mythology coming to life before their very eyes.

Thor is a marked improvement over Iron Man 2. Within a fantasy of warring gods and monsters, the film finds its heart in a timeless and human story about a bad man learning to be good. Between Iron Man, the Hulk, and Thor, it's easy to see how these initial films in the MCU managed to capture audiences the world over, and should banish any lingering doubts as to whether or not the once-lambasted characters in the pages of funny little 20th century picture books have become some of the definitive myths and fables of our times.

Kong: Skull Island and the Loss of Myth

Kong: Skull Island (2017)

Gareth Edwards's Godzilla was something of a revelation for me. I left that Chicago theater back in 2014 having witnessed a kind of renaissance of the monster myth on the big screen. Somehow, Edwards had taken an icon of film lore and imbued that familiar character with an ancient, unknowable dimension that worked to draw viewers "further up and further in" to the world of myth. Three years later, in 2017, I was sitting alone in another theater on the other side of the country in Dallas, and witnessed another movie icon undergo the same treatment.

I walked away from Kong: Skull Island knowing that Edwards's Godzilla wasn't a fluke. Instead, it became very clear that what Legendary Entertainment seeks to do with these movies is to tell the preeminent monster myth of our time. Standing in the tradition of the great mythic stories like Paradise Lost, Frankenstein, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and dealing with themes of forbidden knowledge and the loss of myth, these films have much more in mind than big-budget carnage and monster smackdowns. Instead, what this interconnected film series does is bring cosmic forces to bear on a world that man has done his very best to ruin in his pursuit of forbidden knowledge.

Kong: Skull Island opens with a shot of the blazing sun, a recurring motif in the film. In the film's commentary, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts states that this opening shot is done with the specific purpose of establishing myth. As we stare at the fireball, a lone silhouette comes spiraling out of the blinding light, a WWII pilot plummeting toward earth—a nod to the myth of Icarus and another recurring motif. As the 1973 expedition formed by Bill Randa (John Goodman) plunges into a violent storm onboard helicopters in attempt to reach the unmapped "Skull Island," earth's very own final frontier, Lt. Col. Preston Packard (Samuel L. Jackson) reassures the passengers, "Remember the tale of Icarus, whose father gave him wax wings to fly. But he flew too close to the sun, and his wings melted, and he fell into the sea. But our wings are not made of wax, but of Pennsylvania steel, guaranteed not to melt!" Packard's words are hugely ironic, as he misses the point of the Icarus tale: that man's hubris is his own undoing.

This is a lesson as old as time itself. The tree in Eden of which man was commanded not to eat was of the knowledge of good and evil. In the creation, man was made good, with the prerogative toward a good God and His value system. But the moment man sought to attain that which he considered to be "pleasing to the eye" and "desirable to make one wise," he reached beyond his grasp and stumbled over into sin. And, like echoes from Eden, this theme has resounded through the ages in our mythic storytelling. Man's greatest adversary has always been himself and his unwieldy, sin-ravaged spirit. In Kong, Packard is convinced that the triumphs of technology and modernity have moved man beyond those old stories. He all but says, "We are not like Icarus, we are better." And the helicopters made of "Pennsylvania steel" do indeed pass through the storm, and continue on to the uncharted island unscathed—right up until the moment a tree spears one of them from the sky.

And in a moment of horror intermingled with wonder, the proud humans look for the first time upon the awesome sight of Kong, a hulking mountain of a figure emblazoned against the light of the sun—the point being that Kong is a monster straight out of myth, a symbol of the great unknown that is bigger than both man and his machinations. And suddenly Packard is eating his words. That Pennsylvania steel might have gotten them through the storm, but it isn't much use against a monster that can—and does—swat them from the sky like flies.

Interestingly, in an interview with the popular entertainment industry news source Den of Geek, Vogt-Roberts was asked whether he saw movie monsters like Kong and Godzilla carrying on the tradition of the ancient Greek myths. He responded, "I think we live in a time in which people have lost myth in their lives because you can go on Google and google anything and find the answer to something. As opposed to wonder. As opposed to being okay with not knowing. I think that a big part of this movie for me was about confronting people with myth, reminding them myth exists and what happens when you are put in the presence of myth. What does it do to you?" What's important here is how he links myth with this notion of wonder.

In his brilliant piece, "When Our Souls Stand on Tiptoe," the late theologian Mike Yaconelli says: "I would like to suggest that what a pagan culture does first is steal the wonder and mystery from life. A pagan culture methodically takes away risk, danger, spontaneity, intuition, passion, chance, threat, and peril. We become the slaves of predictability, rules, policies, uniformity, and sameness." I can hardly think of a better description of the age in which we live. With the rise of modernity and the philosophy of the "self-made man," whose ultimate goal is something of a quiet life lived happily with his loving wife, two children, and a dog in the yard, all hemmed in by a white picket fence that separates them from the neighbor next door who lives more or less the exact same life, Christians have found subtle ways to erode the risks that come with living an authentic life of faith. We suddenly never have to talk to our neighbors about the gospel of Christ, because it becomes an inconvenience, a disruption to the routine that is so clearly the hallmark of the life well-lived. As our children grow, we tell them to put aside those old storybooks in favor of participation and conformity—because those old storybooks won't pay one's way through college, which is an absolute necessity if one hopes to have enough money to live a comfortable life devoid of suffering—a life which looks a lot like having a loving spouse, two or three kids, maybe a dog in the yard, all hemmed in by a white picket fence separating them from the neighbor next door...the cycle repeats itself.

If Yaconelli's diagnosis of the current cultural climate is accurate—and I believe it is—then stories like Kong: Skull Island aren't just temporary distractions from the "grind of life." These stories are, in fact, doing the hard work of replanting that sense of wonder in a culture that is unashamedly pagan. Director Vogt-Roberts explicitly states that the purpose of Kong: Skull Island is to confront a modern culture consumed by technological innovation with myth all over again. And it was the great conviction of C. S. Lewis that the story of Christianity, the story of the God who comes to earth in the form of a man, dies and resurrects so as to assure those whose faith is found in Him that they, too, will be raised up at the end of all things, works on us in the same way that those mythic stories do—with the key exception being that it really happened. Imagine, for instance, if I were to tell you that Kong: Skull Island is a story that actually happened. That there was a lonely, morose ape-like creature lording over a forgotten island discovered by an expedition in the 1970s. If you believed it, your paradigm would shift. Your world would come undone. Everything you thought you knew about reality and what was possible would be smashed to pieces, and you would be forced to re-contextualize everything you understood to have meaning in life. This is the power that Christianity wields. And though we try our hardest to reduce wonder to the ones and zeroes of binary, every so often a story comes along that works in the same way those old stories of myths and legends used to. Stories that jumpstart the imagination, that spark a sense of wonder and rekindle the fire that leads us to search for worlds unknown. That catch us up in a sweeping story because, when we just get right down to it, we all intuit on some fundamental level that there is something greater than what man can dream up out there just beyond the horizon, on the other side of the gray rain curtain that is the edge of our dimension, that secret place to which all of our longings point us.

Because, the truth is, there is something strange and mysterious lingering out there in a dimension just a little higher than our own. And there is something familiar about that strange and mysterious thing—familiar because it wears the face of a man, a man who has already been here. All our lives are lived in the wake of his first coming, and the seismic shift that occurred in the world when that man was put to death for bringing the power of that strange and mysterious dimension into our own. But the image of that dead man haunts us because the dead man is no longer dead. Because the dead man came back to life and, with a word of promise, returned to that strange and mysterious place to let the clock continue to run in our dimension, letting the hands turn so that you and I would be born, and in our own ways come to be haunted by this strange man of history.

Haunted by his word of promise: that things aren't always going to be this way, that the pain and suffering we experience in the here and now has a purpose—and that purpose points to why we need him to come back. Why we need that strange and mysterious dimension of reality to become one with our own—a dimension in which death itself begins to work backwards, a dimension in which myth becomes fact, where a sense of wonder is normative, where all of this is possible because that strange man is not merely a man, but a cosmic man, a God-man, whose final act is to pull all of reality together into himself to banish doubt, to judge evil, and to rescue those whose spirits rage against the predictability, the rules, the policies, the uniformity, and the sameness of a world in which Jesus Christ is nothing more than another myth to be scrubbed out by man's hubris.

This is the power of mythic storytelling at its finest. This is the power of Kong: Skull Island. We watch this big ol' monkey smashing the little helicopters out of the sky knowing that what we're watching isn't really about a monkey smashing helicopters. It's about man, who thought he could wipe out the world of myth. It's about the power of a cosmic, mythic being judging man's hubris. We watch these movies knowing that characters like Kong, like Godzilla, aren't just oversized monkeys and lizards, but are actually symbols. Symbols of something strange and mysterious. And the moral of their stories is that when the strange and mysterious comes breaking into our dimension of reality, everything we know is undone. The paradigm shifts. Our knees knock together at the thought of it.

And when we come to see that strange and mysterious thing looks more and more like the cosmic man upon whom the universe waits, we fall on our faces.