Joss Whedon – Memphis Flyer

The Paradiso is filling the traditional late summer movie doldrums with some repertory at the IMAX. For the last week it has been the spectacular presentation of 2001: A Space Odyssey providing an unparalleled cinema experience. This week, Marvel Studios is celebrating their 10th anniversary with an IMAX marathon. In the Marvel spirit of giving people what they want, here are 10 highlights from the 20 Marvel movies, arranged in the form of a numbered list to give it that little bit of extra narrative tension. Everybody loves lists, right? Let’s do this.

10. The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Marvel

Back in the lean comic years of the 1980s, a struggling Marvel sold the film right to some of its creations. Marvel’s A-list superheroes, The X-Men, Spider-Man, and the Fantastic Four wound up with Fox or with the Sony corporate hegemony, where films of varying quality were made in the early 2000s that whetted the appetite for comic book films. When producer Kevin Feige took over in 2007, just as the studio’s business model was changing from licensing its intellectual property to making their own films, Marvel was forced away from their flagship heroes to mine deeper into comic history. This proved incredibly freeing, and opened up new opportunities. Guardians of the Galaxy (Saturday 3:40 p.m.), for example, was one of the most fun blockbusters of the past decade, even though it comes from one of the more obscure corners of the Marvel comics library.

9. Marvel’s Biggest Failure

Of the 20 films Marvel screening this Labor Day weekend, exactly one, Ant-Man and The Wasp (Monday, 10 PM) has a titular female lead. And Evangeline Lilly as The Wasp gets second billing to the worst lead actor in the entire Marvel universe, Paul Rudd. Black Widow, portrayed iconically by Scarlett Johansson, is arguably the most interesting Avenger. If Marvel had wised up and given her a solo movie five years ago, they could have stolen DC’s Wonder Woman thunder, and we could have possibly avoided the Ghost In The Shell debacle.

8. The Most Comic-Book-y Comic Book Movie

I’m going to offer the hot take that Christopher Nolan has been bad for the superhero genre. He successfully brought gritty realism to comic book movies, but in the process he sacrificed the comic book form’s biggest strength: outlandish visuals. Marvel films, especially the later ones, have embraced the possibilities of CGI. None have veered farther from photorealism than 2016’s Doctor Strange. Director Scott Derrickson channels the Sorcerer Supreme’s creator Stephen Ditko with wave after wave of psychedelic freak outs — while also lifting some licks from Nolan’s Inception for good measure.

7. You Need A Good Villain

You know why Batman is everybody’s favorite superhero? Because he’s got the best villains. Superhero films live and die by the charisma of the bad guy, and the plausibility of their plan. The best recent example was Michael Keaton as Vulture in Spider-Man Homecoming (Sunday, 9:50 p.m.). The sotto voce threats he delivers to Tom Holland’s Spider-Man while Peter Parker is trying to bone his alter ego Adrian Tooms’ daughter Liz on homecoming night may be the single best acted scene in any Marvel movie.

6. The Guardians’ Secret Weapon

Who is the heart of the Guardians of the Galaxy sub-franchise? If you said ubiquitous hot guy Chris Pratt’s Star Lord, you’re mistaken. The correct answer is Karen Gillian as Nebula. Gillian has been low-key walking away with every movie and TV show she’s been in for the better part of a decade. She propped up Matt Smith’s mediocre Doctor Who for three years as Amy Pond, one of the best companions in the show’s 50-year history. Just last year she stole the Jumanji reboot out from under The Rock. Nebula, tortured and twisted and intensely physical, plays nemesis to her sister Gamora, and the scenes between Gillian and Zoe Saldana always crackle with emotion. When she reluctantly teams up with them, in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (Sunday, 7 p.m.) her pouty sarcasm fits right in with the rest of the crew. In real life, Gillian just wrote and directed her first feature film, The Party’s Just Beginning.

5. The Third Act

The “Marvel Third Act” has become a shorthand for a big ending where our colorful heroes fight a horde of grey, identical monsters, with lots of attendant property damage, but no consequences for the heroes. It was perhaps best executed in 2012 by Joss Whedon in The Avengers (Friday, 3:40 p.m.), but its unimaginative imitators have been a plague on the multiplex ever since. Interestingly, Whedon commented on the Marvel Third Act in Avengers: Age Of Ultron (Saturday, 7 p.m.), when the destructive aftermath of the Battle of Sokovia would haunt the heroes.

4. Smaller Is Better

One of the problems with writing stories about superheroes is that they’re larger than life. That means the stakes must always be growing larger to give the overpowered protagonists a decent challenge. But after the fifth time you’ve seen someone save the world, you think maybe it isn’t that hard. The best Marvel stories turn out to the ones where the stakes are smaller, and the heroes alone. Ant-Man (Saturday, 9:55 p.m.) excels despite its flat lead because the conflict is almost beside the point. The real fun is the giddy special effects sequences that are like a jazzed-up version of The Incredible Shrinking Man.

3. The Evolving Hero

The creeping Batmanization of the world compels every lead character to be dark, tortured, and brooding. Only manly men who experience no pleasure in their lives can aspire to the title of hero. Marvel has resisted this, and their bread and butter has become redefining what a hero can be. In Captain America: Civil War (Saturday, 1 p.m.), Vision, played by Paul Bettany, wears a sensible sweater/oxford combo and cooks breakfast for his superpowered girlfriend Wanda Maximoff (Elisabeth Olsen). Then, in Avengers: Infinity War (Monday, 7 p.m.), he offers to sacrifice himself to save half the universe.

2. Killmonger Was Right

Why was Black Panther (Monday 3:40 p.m.) so good? The number one reason is that director Ryan Coogler did his homework and delivered a perfectly constructed action movie. Each scene builds on the last and leads to the next. And most importantly, both the hero Black Panther (the unbelievably charismatic Chadwick Boseman) and the villain Killmonger (the unbelievably charismatic Michael B. Jordan) have believable motivations and coherent cases to make for their sides. T’Challa is the king and defender of the status quo in Wakanda. They have been kept safe by their advanced technology for hundreds of years. But Killmonger rightly points out that while Wakanda has stayed safe, they have allowed the colonization and genocide of Africans outside their borders. Killmonger wants to use the power of Wakanda to rectify that situation and colonize the white world right back. Black Panther defeats Killmonger, but T’Challa is moved by his vision and opens Wakanda up to the world, hoping to make it a more just place. It’s a rare bit of moral complexity in a genre that is pretty much defined by its black and white ethical structure.

1. Captain America: The First Avenger

Coming in at number one on our countdown that is in no way an actual countdown is Captain America: The First Avenger (Friday 1 p.m.). Director Joe Johnson hits the superhero sweet spot with this Nazi-punching triumph. Johnson’s influence looms large over the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He is a special effects innovator whose debut film Honey I Shrunk The Kids, was basically a look book for Ant-Man. His 1990 film The Rocketeer, about a man who finds a super flight suit and battles Nazis in the 1930s, was a box office failure at the time, but provided a template for The First Avenger. Chris Evans, who had previously played The Human Torch in Sony’s failed Fantastic Four adaptation, gives a performance on par with Christopher Reeve’s Superman as the once-scrawny kid from Brooklyn who would become the moral center of the Avengers. The overriding theme of all of the Marvel movies is Stan Lee’s maxim “With great power comes great responsibility,” and no one sets a better example than Captain America.

In “The Freshman,” the first episode of the fourth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, our heroine, having killed the villainous Mayor by exploding her high school, discovers that the vampires have followed her to college. Buffy’s trusty sidekick Xander knows what to do: Get the gang back together.

“Avengers assemble!” he exclaims.

Now, 16 years later, Buffy mastermind Joss Whedon has released his second, and if the director is to be believed, final, Avengers movie to a different world. In 1999, “Avengers assemble” was a reference to Marvel Comics’ B team — it was funny because it wasn’t the X-Men. Now, Captain America (Chris Evans) helms the flagship of the biggest film franchise in the world. Disney’s success with Marvel has set the standard for the 21st-century blockbuster, and all other Hollywood studios are trying to emulate it. Even Star Wars, the original modern film franchise, is adapting the model. It’s no accident that Furious 7 has the same number of main characters as The Avengers. Whedon’s 2012 film, the first to unite all of the different strains of the Disney-owned end of the Marvel Universe, was used as a blueprint, with Vin Diesel playing the Captain America role and Dwayne Johnson playing Nick Fury. The results of that cargo cult appropriation was laughably bad but extraordinarily profitable for Universal. Even car chase movies have to be superhero movies now. Comic books are rewriting film in their own image.

Is this a bad thing? If it means more quality movies like Avengers: Age of Ultron, maybe not. It’s a sprawling epic that represents the best work the corporate Hollywood studio system can produce. With Whedon’s work, that’s not damning with faint praise, it’s just a statement of fact.

Contemplate, for a moment, the extraordinary difficulty Age of Ultron‘s screenplay alone represents. Whedon had to juggle Captain America, Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), from the first film, while introducing new villain Ultron (James Spader), as well as three new members of the team, Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), and Vision (Paul Bettany), and integrating Don Cheadle’s War Machine from the Iron Man sub-franchise and Anthony Mackie’s Falcon from Captain America: The Winter Soldier into the outfit. That’s 11 superheroes and a supervillain. The Batman franchise has repeatedly choked on one superhero and two supervillains. Only a few of the X-Men movies were able to pull off something so complex, and Whedon moonlighted as a script doctor on the first one of those back during the Buffy days.

Creativity often flourishes while pushing against restraints, and in this case, Whedon is in one of the tightest straitjackets any writer/director has ever had to don. With so many subplots and characters to deal with, every beat in the screenplay has to be accounted for. Whedon pulls it off, even accounting for the fact that the first cut he turned in to the studio was reportedly more than 40 minutes longer than the final 2-hour-20-minute running time.

Whedon is the best in the business at teasing out real human emotions from fantastical characters in unbelievable situations. One of the ways he does this is by being honest with the audience. As Hawkeye, who seems to serve as Whedon’s voice in Age of Ultron, points out late in the picture, here’s a guy with a bow and arrow fighting an army of robots in a city that is currently being levitated into space. “None of this makes any sense!” He’s telling Scarlet Witch, the new member of the team who just a few minutes ago was an enemy, to cowboy up, and it works, both in plot as a motivational speech and as a Shakespearian aside to the audience.

Shakespeare looms large in Whedon’s world. When he worked himself into exhaustion on the first Avengers movie, he directed an all-star cast in a low-budget adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing to unwind. He has also absorbed the greatest lesson from the English language’s greatest humanist: “The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth

Early in the film, while our heroes are busting up yet another Hydra base in Eastern Europe, Scarlet Witch uses her mind-bending powers to trap each of the heroes in a hallucinatory world where they are confronted by their fears and desires. At that point, Whedon has been in action mode from the word go, but things suddenly slow down and get weird. Captain America sees what his life would have been like had he not been frozen in ice before World War II ended. Black Widow relives her childhood dream of being a ballerina perverted into a life of killing in a brutal Soviet training camp. Thor sees Asgard ruled by evil. And Iron Man sees himself unable to prevent the destruction of the Avengers and the world. The sequence, which cuts back and forth between frantic action and reverie, is the single greatest moment in any Marvel movie to date.

Ultron is a creation of Tony Stark’s hubris. Tony’s worst fear is the destruction of humanity by superpowered cosmic forces, but his solution is to create an artificial intelligence that wants to accomplish just that. Ultron is the best kind of villain: One who honestly believes he is the hero of the story. He thinks if he can just explain the plan in clear enough terms, everyone will be on board with human extinction. Think of the benefits! The cyborg race he will create to replace us will be a great improvement over this mortal coil. Spader’s performance is mostly a voice performance laid on top of motion capture and CGI work, but that doesn’t make it any less brilliant.

Age of Ultron has one of the things The Avengers lacked: romance. It pairs the most emotionally vulnerable of the team, Bruce Banner, with the most emotionally cut off, Natasha Romanoff. But, this being a Whedon joint, the gender roles are switched. Johansson’s Natasha pursues Ruffalo’s Bruce, who flees like Cinderella from the ball at the stroke of midnight. The two actors have great chemistry together, even when one of them is a green CGI creature the size of a front-end loader. When Natasha, faced with a choice between love and duty, inevitably chooses duty, her solution will look very familiar to Buffy fans.

Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr.

That Banner, for the first time, has a possible future outside of super science and “Avenging” gives the big, mandatory fan service moment emotional heft. When the Hulk, driven insane by Scarlet Witch, goes on a rampage in a populated area, Iron Man has to super-size his armor to subdue him. Iron Man fighting the Hulk has been a fanboy favorite ever since it played out on the comic pages 30 years ago, and Whedon’s interpretation proves just how good at this stuff he is. He out-Transformers Michael Bay in the giant robot fighting department while simultaneously echoing and outdoing the city-destroying brawl between Superman and General Zod in Zach Snyder’s Man of Steel.

Most importantly, Age of Ultron does what big studio movies have been trying to do since before Errol Flynn took up his bow and rapier in 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood: It’s a fun flick to watch in a big theater full of people. Is it a perfect movie? No, but its failings are set by the limitations of the genre. Is it the kind of movie Whedon would be doing in this critic’s ideal world? Not really. His skills and vision are bigger than men in tights. Historically, we’ve had Westerns, adventure movies, spy movies, science fiction, war movies, and all the other action movie variants to deliver swashbuckling good times. Now, with Marvel banking $187 million in three and a half days, and Warner Brothers planning at least 10 more movies set in the DC Comics universe, the superhero template is all we’re going to get for the foreseeable future.

Whedon’s contract with Disney/Marvel is up next month, and he’s been telling everyone who will listen that he’s not coming back. Marvel’s still got a crackerjack team, but Whedon is the secret sauce. Age of Ultron seems like the end of an era.