Men in Black 3

IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1409024/

Sunday, May 27, 2012, Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar

It's been a decade since the disappointing Men in Black 2 was released, and I can't imagine anyone was clamoring for a third installment except the people with the potential to make money from it. Hopefully not even those people will have any aspirations of making a fourth.

Boris (a role played by and making me lose respect for Jermaine Clement) is a particularly nasty alien who looks mostly human except that he has hand vaginas capable of shooting out darts. Fortunately, he's securely locked up in a moon prison where there's no way he can possibly escape, unless they're stupid enough to allow his girlfriend to visit and bring him a cake with something hidden in it. Unfortunately, they're stupid enough to allow his girlfriend to visit and bring him a cake with something hidden in it. Boris escapes and vows to kill the man who locked him up in the first place, who just happens to be MiB Agent K. But he's not going after K in the present (as played by Tommy Lee Jones). He's planning to go back in time to 1969, so he can kill the much younger Agent K (as played by Josh Brolin) before he had a chance to make the arrest.

Boris' plan works, because one day Agent K is there constantly being annoyed by his partner Agent J (Will Smith), and the next it's like he was just erased from existence and no one can remember him except for J. Only old-timer Agent O (Emma Thompson) seems to have any memory of him, but that's only because she was around when he was killed in 1969 (when O was played by Alice Eve). But J manages to convince O that something is amiss, and she recommends that he talk to Jeff (Michael Chernus), a time travel specialist,who just happens to be the one who helped send Boris back to kill K. And J convinces Jeff to also send him back so that he can kill Boris before Boris kills K.

There are a lot of things to hate about Men in Black 3. Nearly all the scenes set in the present day verge on intolerable. The prison break is absurd, and the interactions between J and K and aliens are always annoying (way beyond anything we saw from Tony Shalhoub in either of the first two movies) and occasionally racist. J and the aliens are often pretty unlikeable in the past too, but usually not to the same degree. And a scene with Andy Warhol (played by Bill Hader) is supposed to be funny but fails miserably.

But there are three things that save the film from being a complete disaster. The first is Josh Brolin, who really does cease to be Josh Brolin and instead becomes a young Tommy Lee Jones. The voice and mannerisms are spot on, and it also doesn't hurt that he's playing a more upbeat and less jaded version of the character. The second is the inclusion of Griffin (played by Michael Stuhlbarg), an alien who is able to experience five-dimensional spacetime and can see all possible versions of the future. He was used just infrequently enough to avoid overexposure and evoked pleasant thoughts of the improbability drive from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And the third positive is the film's ending, which manages to take a break from mediocrity long enough to form a truly touching moment that changes your perspective on other elements of the film.

Unfortunately, the positive elements of the film aren't enough to excuse the negatives. There are certainly things to like about it, but there are also enough things to hate to keep from being a good movie.

Chernobyl Diaries

IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1991245/

Saturday, May 26, 2012, Alamo Drafthouse Slaughter Lane

In one of my favorite episodes of Pinky and the Brain, the plan to take over the world involves staging an accident involving a microwave and non-dairy creamer, because nobody really knows how they work. It's funny because the audience is in on the gag and isn't supposed to take it seriously. In Chernobyl Diaries, radioactivity is treated in kind of the same way, but this time it doesn't have the same effect, in part because they're trying to be serious but are treating us in the audience like we're idiots.

Chris (played by Jesse McCartney) hasn't seen his brother Paul (Jonathan Sadowski) in a couple of years, ever since Paul moved to Russia. But they're going to remedy that with a Eurasian vacation on a trek from London to Moscow. Chris brought along his long-time girlfriend Natalie (Olivia Dudley), who in turn brought her recently-single friend Amanda (Devin Kelley). Things are going well and they're having a great time, but when they reach Kiev, Paul learns of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make their trip even more special. He met a man named Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko) who's offering them the chance to explore the site of the Chernobyl reactor, infamous its 1986 meltdown. The area is still contaminated and isn't exactly open to the public, but Uri can get them in, and if they only stay for a couple of hours they won't have enough exposure to cause any damage.

Although Chris is understandably hesitant to go, the allure is too great for Paul, Amanda, and Natalie, and Uri provides stereotypically Russian overly-masculine assurances that everything will be fine, so Chris is outvoted. They meet up with Michael and Zoe (Nathan Phillips and Ingrid Berdal), a couple of other tourists lured in by Uri, and head off for Pripyat, the name of the city that housed the reactor. When the disaster struck, residents had only minutes to gather their belongings and evacuate, so Pripyat is like a ghost town. There aren't really even any animals around during the day, so they have the whole place to themselves. But there are creatures that come out at night, and when Uri can't get the van started when it's time to leave, they're going to have much more contact with those creatures than they'd like.

On the surface, Chernobyl Diaries is a lot like the horror classic The Hills Have Eyes set in Ukraine. But the differences make all the difference. In The Hills Have Eyes, we get to know and understand the creatures, we learn how they came to be, and we can even empathize with them. But in Chernobyl Diaries, we don't really even get a good look at the creatures, much less form any kind of bond with them. We don't know anything about them, and the film unnecessarily muddies the water about how they came to exist in the first place.

The film also fails on an artistic level. In addition to an excess of darkness, we also get a lot of annoying 360-degree shots in which a camera makes a tight circle around a character from low to the ground so we see a lot of empty sky. There are also some strange audio choices, with once scene drowning out the characters' dialogue with music, and another featuring the faint and completely out of place sound of a heartbeat. Since we don't really ever get to see the creatures, sound is often the only way we know they're around, but nothing we hear is really all that ominous.

But the biggest problem with the movie is that it is not believable. The characters make too many obviously-bad choices, and the climax (if you can call it that, since there's no anxiety or sense of urgency) relies on a mistake that I simply can't imagine anyone making, even in the dark in an unfamiliar place and when being chased by unknown beings. The film has no respect for the intelligence of its audience, but perhaps the most intelligent ones are the people who don't see it at all.

Indie Game: The Movie

IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1942884/

Wednesday, May 23, 2012, Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar

Once upon a time, most video games were created by individuals. Even the first console games were more likely to be written by one or two people than big groups. It's true that not just anyone could get their game onto a cartridge that would show up on store shelves, but it was much more possible for people developing for home computers. And now that the major game consoles are connected to the Internet and can play downloaded content, anyone with the right skills and enough determination can get their games into the hands of the masses.

Jonathan Blow knows a little something about that, because he created Braid, which was the first of the truly successful "indie" games. At the time of its release, it was the top-rated game on the Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA), and one of the most highly-rated Xbox games period. Even if its revenue didn't match that of even a flop from a major game studio, it also didn't have to be split up amongst many developers, executives, and investors, and was therefore quite a profitable endeavor for him. Since then, others have tried to recreate that success, and although most are unabashed commercial failures, others have achieved great things in their own right.

Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes hoped to be one of the success stories with their Super Meat Boy, a platform game featuring a main character with no skin who must avoid all kinds of peril while trying to save his bandage-covered girlfriend from an evil fetus in a jar. Phil Fish had similar aspirations for his game Fez, in which a 2D character must learn to navigate through a 3D world. And Jonathan Blow hopes lightning will strike twice with his next game, The Witness.

The documentary primarily follows Edmund and Tommy as they work to finish Super Meat Boy in time for a promotional launch that could give them prominent placement in the XBLA where they've got the best chance of attracting buyers, and also Phil as he works to get Fez ready for the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) gaming showcase and tries to make peace with a former business partner who could create legal trouble for him if he tries to release the game. For both games, the developers are anxious to see what may come of the sleep, sanity, and social lives they've invested over the last few years of their lives. There's potentially a lot of money on the line if things go well, while failure could strike a blow to their reputations and psyches from which recovery may be impossible. And it probably doesn't help much that it's all being filmed so that their ultimate success or failure (not to mention the ups and downs along the way) will be put on display for potentially millions of people to see.

What you're not going to see in the film is a lot of encouragement for someone looking to break into the business. Making it easier for indie game developers to make their content accessible doesn't make it easier for them to create good games, and Indie Game does a pretty good job of showing just how much work really goes into creating even a relatively simple game. We're long past the days of Pac Man and Donkey Kong, so unless you've got a truly innovative concept that's easy to learn and doesn't require a lot of flashy graphics and expansive levels (think Tetris), you're not going throw together something great after only a few days of working on it in your spare time. And I think that's a good thing, because it thins the herd while highlighting the talent. If only the indie music scene had the same kind of hurdles, the world might be a better-sounding place.

The Turin Horse

IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1316540/

Saturday, May 19, 2012, Alamo Drafthouse Ritz

Prior to The Turin Horse, I'd never before seen a film by Hungarian director Béla Tarr, but I was familiar with his reputation for dark, slow-paced films, was aware of his highly-praised film Satantango (primarily because of its 7.5 hour runtime), and knew that he'd said The Turin Horse (a mere 2.5 hours long) is to be his last feature. I also knew I may not get another chance to see a film like it on the big screen.

The film opens with Hungarian dialogue over a black screen (save for the English subtitles) which explains that German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche went mad after seeing a man beating a horse, but nothing is known of the man who owned that horse. It then proceeds to depict one possible account of his life, starting shortly after his encounter with Nietzsche. The man arrives home, puts away the horse and cart, and goes inside to his daughter. Dinner that night, and every other meal depicted in the film, consists of a single boiled potato, eaten with bare hands while it's still so scalding hot that they have to blow on their fingers while pulling off the peel. The man's job is hindered by the fact that he's had a stroke and is unable to use his right arm, and despite his impatience at tearing into his potato, he never seems to eat more than half of it. Entertainment is primarily limited to staring out the house's lone window watching the constantly-raging wind blow leaves and dirt about the yard, and conversation is at a premium.

When every day is usually the same as the one before it, differences are generally welcome. But the second day of the film shows that's not always the case. On this day, and the several that follow, the horse refuses to pull the cart. It also refuses to eat or drink. And so the man can't do whatever it is he usually does during the day, so it's just more staring out the window and drinking palinka while the wind howls outside.

The Turin Horse is one of the most deliberate and pensive films I've seen in quite a while. There are only about 30 shots in the entire movie, so there's no fast cutting or back-and-forth exchanges like in most films. It doesn't try to fool the audience into thinking it's one long, seamless shot -- the cuts are obvious, and often the camera lingers when the action has ceased as if forcing you to reflect on what you've just seen. And what you've seen will have been a bleak, low-budget, minimalist representation of daily life for these people that's hard to call beautiful but is nonetheless raw and effective. The soundtrack has a similar single-minded focus to it. Most of the time, you hear the wind, but occasionally that's replaced with a simple and repetitive cello score, and on the rarest of occasions we may hear someone speak. But none of these seems to happen at the same time, so when there is something to be said, the other sounds are diminished.

The lack of color, the scant visuals and sounds, and minimalist plot all work together to ensure that you suffer along with the man and his daughter. Further, there are elements of the story which seem to have been left intentionally vague as yet another way of torturing the audience. It may blur the line between art and boredom more than any film I've seen in recent years, but it also somehow manages to have a powerful lasting effect on the viewer.

Mansome

IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2294729/

Saturday, May 19, 2012, Regal Arbor Cinema

In the opening song to the classic TV program All in the Family, Archie Bunker longs for a time in which "girls were girls and men were men", and that was in the 1960s, back when only women wore earrings and used beauty creams, and when there was no overlap between the body parts that men shaved and the parts that women shaved. I can't imagine the stream of curses and bigotry that would come out of his mouth if he were around to see modern society.

We may not have Archie Bunker, but we do have Morgan Spurlock, and he's willing to talk to people about hard-hitting topics like facial hair and body hair and hair replacement. In fact, while the documentary is supposed to be an exploration of masculinity in the face of things like manscaping and metrosexuality, it doesn't seem to stray all that far from hair. There's a long discussion about moustaches, followed by an even longer discussion of beards. Many of the same people (Judd Apatow, Paul Rudd, Adam Carolla, Zach Galifianakis, and Isaiah Mustafa aka the Old Spice guy) are interviewed on both topics, but we get special moustache attention from director John Waters, and beard love from Jack Passion (winner of numerous beard competitions) and members of the band ZZ Top.

The film also takes an extended look at other topics like the hair that's supposed to be on top of your head and what you can do if your body stops putting it there, and the hair that's not supposed to be on your back and what you can do if your body keeps putting it there. It has a brief discussion of a cream intended to address a male affliction known as bat wings (consult Urban Dictionary at your peril), a professional wrestler of middle-eastern origin who feels the need to shave his entire body before each match, and another man of middle-eastern origin who is only about halfway through his own ten-step process of fine-tuning his appearance. And throughout the entire documentary, Jason Bateman and Will Arnett mock and trivialize all of the topics being discussed while they spend the day together relaxing at a spa.

The film doesn't really take itself very seriously (and for good reason, because none of the topics has any degree of importance), but it seems kind of cruel to some of the subjects who clearly feel differently. Despite the heavy reliance on popular comedians, nothing really makes it past the point of mild amusement, although there are a couple of moments that devolve into the disgusting. But the vast majority of the 85-minute runtime is sheer boredom. There were only two other people in the theater for the screening I attended, and while all three of us (lone men, by the way) stayed until the credits started rolling, we also all left immediately, completely apathetic toward the remaining interviews playing during the credits.

Battleship

IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1440129/

Thursday, May 17, 2012, Alamo Drafthouse Slaughter Lane

The first two words Samantha Shane (played by Brooklyn Decker) says to Alex Hopper (played by Taylor Kitsch) are "I'm hungry." By that right, the film could have just as easily been called "Hungry Hungry Hippos", because that gives it about as much similarity to that game as it has to the other Hasbro board game for which it is actually named.

We quickly learn that Alex is a complete screw-up. His brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgård) is a commander in the Navy who has come to regret forcing his brother to enlist because he creates a lot of headaches. His latest infraction, a skirmish with a Japanese sailor during a soccer game, will likely net him a dishonorable discharge (from Liam Neeson's character Admiral Shane, the father of Alex's girlfriend Samantha), but before that happens, he's to participate in a set of international war games off the coast of Hawaii. And despite his detestable personality and utter incompetence, he somehow managed to get command of one of the ships.

But the war games are interrupted when actual war breaks out. But this isn't war with another country or independent rebels, but with aliens who come from a planet very similar to Earth and are now intent on taking over our planet as well. They've come in vehicles that work equally well in space, in the air, and in the water, and are armed with some pretty advanced weapons and defenses. One of the ships is able to serve as a kind of force field generator, and while its force field is able to keep out most of the world's armed forces, it just so happens that the ships piloted by Alex and his Japanese soccer rival are inside it and may be humanity's only hope.

Battleship is basically a naval version of Independence Day, complete with a Jeff Goldblum equivalent communications nerd in the form of Hamish Linklater, a Vivica A. Fox equivalent in the form of Rihanna, impenetrable energy fields, and a black man punching an alien in the face. But they also "borrowed" liberally from other sources, like giving the aliens a stupid and implausible weakness a la Signs and getting assistance from a bunch of over-the-hill veterans like Space Cowboys. They took the appearance of the alien suits from Halo, and the appearance of the aliens inside the suits from humans. They even managed to rip off Matt Damon's face and put it on the body of Jesse Plemons.

About the only source material that appears to be largely safe from plagiarism is Battleship the board game. I know that the artillery fired by the alien ships is supposed to resemble the pegs players stick into the game board, but unless the filmmakers had a different version of the game than the one I played as a kid, they didn't go out of their way to make them too similar. And only a couple of the movie's 131 minutes involve targeting alien ships with grid coordinates, but even then they chose to obscure the reference by using words like "bravo" and "echo" instead of letters like "B" and "E". And of course the one phrase that comes to everyone's mind when thinking of the game is nowhere to be heard.

At no point does anything in Battleship approach the vicinity of a good movie. It's possible that it could be fun with an audience that enjoys watching bad movies, but it's completely out of place in its attempted position as one of the summer's flagship films.

Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters

IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1836974/

Monday, May 7, 2012, Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar

As with most games, Tetris has a lot of casual fans. It's believed that two out of every three Americans have played the game at some point. But few are truly experts. If you've never reached the maximum possible score of 999,999 points, or if you've never reached level 29 (by clearing at least 290 lines, where the blocks are falling so fast that it's believed to be impossible to maneuver them into place quickly enough), then you're just like virtually everyone else on the planet. There are only a couple of people in the world who can claim those accomplishments, and not even some of the super-elite players have achieved those milestones.

Thor Aackerlund is one of the first people to be able to legitimately claim himself to be a Tetris master. He won the 1990 Nintendo World Championship (the same competition featured in the 1989 film The Wizard) where Tetris was the featured game, and he had made some pretty impressive claims about his abilities over the years. But Thor was something of a recluse and never submitted any kind of evidence to back up his statements, so many in the Tetris community were skeptical. Robin Mihara had played against (and lost to) Thor in that tournament, and had spent much of the two subsequent decades wondering who really is the best Tetris player in the nation.

The invitees were the cream of the crop in the Tetris world, many of whom held (at least at one time) some kind of record. This included Jonas Neubauer and Harry Hong, the only players to have confirmed scores of 999,999 points. It also included Ben Mullen and Jesse Kelkar, who had reached level 29. Other top players like Dana Wilcox and Chris Tang were offered slots. And Thor, despite his reluctance to provide evidence to back up his claims of recent exploits, was invited if for no other reason than curiosity among the others.

There are a lot of similarities between Ecstasy of Order and the great Donkey Kong documentary King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. However, there are also a lot of differences. While both films focus on people vying for greatness in video games, it's surprising to see the degree of camaraderie among the Tetris players in contrast to the animosity between the Donkey Kong combatants. While most people likely find themselves rooting against Billy Mitchell in King of Kong, I was surprised to find I was rooting for everyone in Ecstasy of Order. The players are absolutely focused on winning, and yet there is a great deal of civility and mutual admiration between them which makes the film a joy to watch.

There is a lot of great content in the interviews with and interactions between the players, but it's also a lot of fun to just watch them play, and there's plenty of that to enjoy. As I learned from the mini Tetris tournament held at the Alamo Drafthouse after the film ended, it's fun to watch even awful players try their luck. It makes the achievements of the top players even more impressive when immediately followed by "regular people" who fail to score any points or complete any lines. It's interesting to see the differences in skills and strategies of the best players in the game, and the differences in personalities and knowledge of the game.

It's hard to say anything bad about Ecstasy of Order, unless perhaps you find yourself frustrated by not having ready access to a quality version of Tetris. But even that's a problem that can be overcome without too much effort or expense.

Sound of My Voice

IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1748207/

Saturday, May 5, 2012, Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar

As an outsider, it's hard to understand how people can get caught up in a cult. And yet, people are very impressionable. Under the reign of Kim Il-sung, North Koreans believed him to be a god and were dumbfounded by his mortality when he died in 1994, but nevertheless immediately assigned the same status to his son Kim Jong-il, only to be shocked again by his death last year. And yet this kind of thing happens (albeit on a much smaller scale) even in environments where people are allowed much more freedom and in a society that generally looks down on them as kooks and weirdos.

In the film, Peter (Christopher Denham) was all too familiar with this phenomenon. His mother had been in a cult when she got cancer, and was convinced to try to heal herself through faith rather than medicine. When she died, Peter was traumatized and developed a great hatred for cults, which only grew over the years. Now that he's an adult, he wants to ensure that others aren't suckered into making the same kind of mistake. When he and his girlfriend Lorna (Nicole Vicius) learned of a cult in their area, they decided to try to infiltrate it and expose it (and its leader) as a fraud.

The process of infiltrating the cult wasn't as easy as they'd hoped, because this particular cult was very secretive and very exclusive. But their diligence paid off, and eventually they found themselves face to face with Maggie (Brit Marling). Maggie claimed to have traveled back in time from the year 2054, after war had ravaged the nation and created a post-apocalyptic dystopia. But despite Peter's intelligence and enlightenment, it's hard to get past her charisma, and sometimes she even seems to make a little sense.

Sound of My Voice is a beautifully haunting film. Despite going in a kind of predictable direction (and having a trailer which unfortunately gives away more than I would have liked), it somehow manages to maintain a degree of tension and uncertainty. We're not only concerned about the cult taking an unpleasant turn (e.g., a Jonestown-style mass suicide or a Waco-like militia), but also the possibility of Peter and Lorna getting discovered or sucked in too deep. Its 85-minute runtime and chapter-based progression keep it moving quickly, but it doesn't feel rushed or like we're getting short-changed.

I've actually seen the film twice now, and was surprised to find how well it holds up to multiple viewings. Even when I knew exactly what was coming, it still had a couple of riveting moments and a high degree of emotional impact. It's not at all heavy or overpowering, but just like a couple of great moments in Jaws that can still make me jump no matter how many times I watch it, I suspect that Sound of My Voice is something that will have an effect each time you see it.

My Way

IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1606384/

Friday, May 4, 2012, Regal Arbor Cinema

I don't usually get into war movies, but I usually really like Korean films. There's kind of a dichotomy there, because there are a lot of Korean war movies (many of which are about the Korean War, but others are simply war movies created by Korean filmmakers). Some of them, like J.S.A. and Tae Guk Gi, are phenomenal, but others like The Front Line (which was inexplicably South Korea's submission for best foreign film last year) are underwhelming. Fortunately, while I would have preferred My Way to be a little shorter, it turned out to be one of the good ones.

The film opens in the 1920s, at a time when Korea was a colony of the Japanese Empire rather than an independent nation, and certainly before it was split into two countries. The Japanese living there (primarily as representatives of the imperial government) saw the Koreans as a lesser class of people, but they still mostly got along. Jun-shik Kim (played by Dong-gun Jang, who was also in Tae Guk Gi) was just a boy at the time, and he loved running. He was the fastest around, and had aspirations of one day running in an Olympic marathon. But when Tetsuo Hasegawa moved into the village with his father, Jun-shik found that he had some real competition. Over the years while they were growing up, they kept running against each other, and each repeatedly lost and reclaimed the honor of the village running champion.

As the years passed and the risk of another world war began to rise, there was also a rise in tension between the Japanese and Koreans. In Jun-shik's village, this tension came to a head when war was imminent and Jun-shik emerged the victor after a close race for Olympic eligibility, only to be unfairly disqualified by the Japanese race officials. The Koreans began to riot, and after the dust settled, all Korean men involved in the fight were ordered to fight alongside the Japanese in the war. This included Jun-shik, and he found himself assigned as a subordinate of Tetsuo, who quickly acquired a reputation as a merciless taskmaster with little regard for the well-being of his underlings.

Although it's probably an unusual comparison, My Way reminds me a bit of War Horse. Clearly all the main characters are human rather than equine, but there are actually a number of similarities between plots. But where I strongly disliked War Horse (because of a protagonist that didn't do anything beyond self-preservation, and nothing at all that would be considered heroic), it worked better in My Way because of the humanity of those involved and their ability to make choices beyond themselves. The lines of "good" and "bad" weren't always clear, particularly from the perspective of an American, but that helps underscore the reality of war.

What really sold the film to me was the way that it ended. Because of the way the story is told, you've got an idea how things are going to turn out, but it's the way the pieces are put together, along with additional revelations, that really make things come together. Some may consider the ending to be a little too mainstream, but it worked for me. And since it's based on a true story, it's hard to call it out on something that actually happened.

The Avengers

IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0848228/

Thursday, May 3, 2012, Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar

Of all the films leading up to The Avengers, I loved Iron Man and Captain America, tolerated Iron Man 2, disliked The Incredible Hulk, and hated Thor. My problems with Thor stem both from the source of his power and his lack of heroism. I can buy into Iron Man because Tony Stark is a billionaire genius who's been designing weapons all his life, and I can accept Captain America and The Hulk because both Steve Rogers and Bruce Banner were transformed by medical experiments intended to create super soldiers. But Thor is a god from another planet (who just happens to look human and speaks English with a British accent despite being a Norse god), which is illogical and doesn't fit with the others. Further, while Iron Man and Captain America actively desire to protect others, The Hulk and Thor aren't at all heroic and only fight when they themselves are attacked. I was truly disappointed to find that The Avengers not only focused heavily on the supernatural storyline initiated in Thor, but that it also dragged the others further into its absurdity.

The film opens in S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters, where the mysterious Tesseract cube (which had been recovered by Howard Stark after Captain America sent it into the ocean during a battle with Red Skull) resides. The usually well-behaved cube has recently been acting up, and that's because Loki (Thor's adopted brother turned nemesis) is trying to use it to open an intergalactic portal so that he can invade with a newly-acquired alien army. Loki's attempts are successful, and not only does he steal the Tesseract from S.H.I.E.L.D., but he even manages to use mind control to turn a couple of them (including Hawkeye and Dr. Selvig) against the others. If he succeeds in using the Tesseract to create a portal for the alien invaders, then Earth is done for.

Fortunately, Earth is not without protection. Captain America is more powerful than ever after having been thawed out of his arctic coma, and Iron Man is his normal arrogant self, but with the technology to back it up. The Black Widow also gets in on the action and helps to track down Bruce Banner. They don't really want The Hulk, but Banner's expertise in gamma radiation may be the only way they can find the Tesseract and the bad guys who have it. And of course Thor isn't quite as stranded on his home planet as everyone (except of course for the audience) seemed to think. But even with their combined resources, along with the old standbys like Nick Fury and Agent Coulson, it's not going to be an easy fight.

The Avengers isn't a bad movie, and it does some things well. The Hulk is much more well represented in The Avengers than he was even in the whole movie dedicated to him, and although they can't manage to find someone who wants that role for more than one movie, Mark Ruffalo gave a great performance. Similarly, Black Widow has a much bigger role, and her fighting style has become much more fun than the "strike a pose" approach taken in Iron Man 2, although it seemed out of character for her to appear terrified of The Hulk when nothing else seemed to rattle her at all. It's also fun to see the characters working together and overcoming their differences to fight a common enemy, but it's unfortunately also the case that they spent far too much time quarreling amongst themselves.

But there are also a number of disappointments in the film. There are times that it feels too much like The Transformers, with a race of alien robots heading toward Earth in search of a cube of unlimited power, and the technology they use in their fighting (and for everything else) is pretty unimpressive. Natalie Portman's Jane character (sadly one of the best parts of Thor) is completely nonexistent, except for a single mention of how she's been stashed away to be kept safe. Hawkeye apparently has the bow-and-arrow equivalent of an old west six-shooter that never runs out of ammo, until it does. Nick Fury is still almost completely worthless, as we sadly realize that he is basically middle management and not someone likely to do awesome things, and even see him mislead and lie to others in order to manipulate them. Similarly, the newly-introduced Agent Hill (played by Cobie Smulders) is pretty but completely inconsequential. Some of the action and dialogue is quite predictable, and if you know what's about to come then seeing it happen just isn't nearly as much fun. And while there are a number of very illogical elements in the film's plot, they're in areas of the film that I can't really discuss without getting into spoilers.

Ultimately, my disappointment stems just as much from the film not living up to my expectations as from it being a weak movie. I had extremely high hopes for the film based on Joss Whedon's involvement (with my excitement even higher after his recent The Cabin in the Woods), and based on the over-the-top excitement from those who'd already seen it. It would have been hard for any film to meet the expectations I had set for it, but I think that The Avengers has enough legitimate flaws to justify my mediocre-to-decent perception of it.