The Avengers

The huge crossover film which the Marvel movie continuity has been building up to, The Avengers is a Joss Whedon blockbuster about Captain America (Chris Evans), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) teaming up to fight Thor's evil brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who is poised to take over Earth. However, "teaming up" is easier said that done, and Director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) has to do a lot of managing to keep the team from tearing itself apart before Loki and his allies from another dimension can.

Finally, we get a movie that depicts superhero comics accurately: you need to know the central characters and premises of about half a dozen different stories to understand anything that's going on. Yay!

I was kind of wary about this film because of two things: The trailers mostly focused on a huge metropolitan battle that was cut so that it looked like it was taken right out of Transformers 3, as well as Robert Downey Jr. doing his thing, which I feel is starting to get old. Well, screw marketing, because once again it has done a great job at making a good movie look bad. Not only is that action scene they hyped way better when you don't have to butcher it to keep the invading army from appearing on screen, but they picked the worst jokes in the movie for their adverts. Not only does Downey get a lot of good lines, but everyone does. There's a surprising lot of comedy, and every character gets to crack jokes, not just the clown.

Thor and Captain America both had pacing as their biggest issue. Cap had way too little stuff happen in between his becoming a superhero and the final battle. Thor took its sweet time starting, and then had way too much build-up to a way too small climax. Avengers gets this just right. We already know these characters, there's no need to establish them any more. Let's just start off with the crisis presenting itself, then get the characters together, and then see what we can make happen with them. I'll admit I was getting worried about a quarter way in that the movie is going to suffer from having too many subplots, but thankfully most of them are resolved by the way the final action climax hits home. The movie is two hours and a third, but it accomplishes so much that you'll swear there's no way they fit all that in one hundred and forty minutes.

The performances are really good. I never saw Ed Norton's Hulk for comparison, but Mark Ruffalo is a fantastic Bruce Banner. He has the body language of a person who's trying really hard to keep themselves in check. All the returning cast keep up the high quality up, but to my surprise the standout star of the film was Tom Hiddleston. I was kind of indifferent toward Loki in Thor, because he was way too obviously evil but they tried to play him as this tragic character. Here, he's past being sympathetic, so Hiddleston gets to be a straight-up villain, and it works greatly. He does his slimy villain speeches, he addresses the people he wants to rule, he gets arrogant and he gets furious. It's just a really good basic evil villain, who is still kept fresh with expert writing.

The action is really well-done. All the characters get to shine, and their individual superpowers are used well together and never conveniently discarded to fit a scene better. The big battle scenes flow well, and you can keep track of where everyone is and what they're doing. There's this really great sweeping battle shot that I can't really describe to you all: it has to be seen to be believed. I think that Loki's evil army allies are maybe a little bit too... Stormtroopery, though at least unlike Stormtroopers, they don't get taken down by teddy bears (who would be the New York police department in this allegory, I guess).

The 3D was... okay, I guess. There was one scene early on where I had trouble telling what was happening because it was so dark, but other than that I was never bothered. There were a couple of cool 3D shots, mostly having to do with Hawkeye's crazy arrow skills, but I doubt you'll be missing much if you see it in regular 2D.

Overall, it's just a damn good film, with a tightly packed and well-crafted plot, lots of interesting and memorable characters, some good humour, great action and superhero goodness. Dark Knight Rising has to work its ass off to surpass this for the best superhero film of the summer.

The Cabin in the Woods

This is gonna be a tough one to review, because I honestly don't want to spoil anything. I went into this movie without so much as having seen a trailer. I knew from other sources that it's a Joss Whedon film, that twists are a huge part of it, and that it's about a cabin in the woods. Honestly, I think it benefited me to go in blind. If you have seen the trailers, you can probably tell whether you'll like it or not. If you haven't, please don't watch them.

You know, I think I have to confess right here and now that I this is the first Joss Whedon product I've seen. Well, aside from the ones he co-wrote (Titan A.E., Speed, Captain America) or originally wrote but had his script basically rewritten entirely (Alien Resurrection). I have a bunch of friends who watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer religiously, though, so... whatever.

So, Cabin in the Woods is about five teenagers (played by Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz and Jesse Williams) who go to the countryside for a camping trip. While there, they awaken something evil, which tries to kill them... but all is not as it seems.

Yeah, that's all you're going to get from me.

As you might have guessed, Cabin is a parody of horror films. It even becomes a satire at points. However, its particular brand of satire never has the characters be meta-aware. Scary movies are never mentioned in the film, and the heroes never say "This is like a crappy horror movie!" only to have the film follow the conventions anyhow. I can see why some people have criticised it for being less clever than it thinks it is, but I really liked the humour here, and the third act is so completely out of control, I'm not sure if it's awesome in a hilarious or badass way.

The actors all do a great job, though Kranz's take on "the stoner" is especially memorable. I think that the other character pool, whose existence is a spoiler, is a little bit too excessive. They could have done it with fewer people there, but it's not really a flaw that hurts the overall product much. The special effects are fantastic. There are a few too many jump scares, in my opinion. If you're going to assault and destroy one overused convention from modern horror, then please kill jump scares.

Anyways, I think it's a fine, fine film. I dunno if I can call it game-changing, visionary or masterful, but I really liked it. Please keep this pace up, Joss Whedon, as The Avengers gets nearer and nearer.

Iron Sky

You guys saw Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, right? I hope you did. That movie kicked ass, considering it was made for practically no money during the makers' free time.

So, what if the same guys made a movie with a budget of 7.5 million €, and decided to skip the specific parody and instead focus on a more broad sci-fi concept?

You'd get Iron Sky, a movie about space nazis who escaped WW2 to the moon, and now decide to bring the fight back to an Earth that forgot about them.

And it is fucking awesome.

I'll admit, I'm not impartial about this film: it's a Finnish production, and I'm a huge fan of Star Wreck. However, I think Iron Sky has a lot going for itself in addition to the freaking awesome concept. The C-list actors they got to play in the movie are really good, the script is unconventional and has some really clever satire, the music is fantastic and the special effects are almost perfect. I really hope this film gets any kind of proper distribution around the world.

Okay, but in an attempt to be a bit more objective: The main plot of the film is about an astronaut named James Washington, who gets sent to the Moon as a publicity stunt to get the president of the USA reelected, and to snoop around for a sci-fi fuel called Helium 3. There, he runs into the aforementioned nazis, and gets taken prisoner. The two people in charge of his captivity are Klaus Adler, the second-in-command of the Moon-Führer, and his fiancé Renate Richter (no relation to the vampire-hunter family). Once they discover Washington's iPod, they find out it has enough processing power to run their ultimate doomsday weapon, and demand him to take them back Earth and show them where they can acquire a new palm-sized supercomputer (one with a full battery).

The movie's pacing and structure are interesting. Even somewhat troublesome. The first act of the film takes its time, making sure the audience understands the whole deal with the moon nazis as well as they should. However, when the characters arrive on earth the film suddenly jumps up in pace tremendously, and the transition to the final much-advertised battle is almost jarringly sudden. The structure makes it feel unlike almost any Hollywood movie, even though the production values are as good as a proper blockbuster's, and it's written so as to appeal to worldwide audiences. Star Wreck was originally just a bunch of silly internet videos made by a guy on his computer in the 90s, and a part of its parody was that Tampere, Finland is the central hub of all civilisation in the galaxy. In Iron Sky, Finland is only mentioned once, in what I consider the best joke of the film.

The most famous actor in the film is Udo Kier, who plays the Moon-Führer. Though he's been in Ace Ventura, Blade and Armageddon, to me he will always be Yuri from Red Alert 2. And really, when he commences der meteorblitzkrieg, the silly-yet-awesome craziness is like something right out of the Red Alert series (and RA3 had parachute bear troopers, so that's saying something). No one else present has any kind of cred I'm aware of, but I think the performances are really good overall. I respect that the creators of the film kept themselves out of the screen, lest they break disbelief with their accents.

The comedy is somewhat hit-and-miss. There's a couple of low-hanging-fruit gags here and there, and I know some people have criticised the film for making the president of the USA a Sarah Palin parody. However, I really liked a lot of the gags, even though they represent a kind of humour that may not work so well to audiences on the other side of the Atlantic. My main problem, though, is that the main characters aren't that interesting or well-developed. I didn't really care whether they survive in the end.

If this film is shown anywhere near you, go see it. The guys who made it deserve the success, and big Hollywood studios need to be made aware that there's an audience for over-the-top silly sci-fi fun.