When I saw the confirmed list of actors and the characters they will be portraying in the upcoming Avengers film I couldn’t help but feel that the team seems rather strange to me. Of course there is the obvious fact that Nick Fury and the Black Widow aren’t members of the Avengers, which is explained in the movies as the Avengers being a SHIELD project, but I don’t think that’s it. It could also be the absence of Ant-Man and Wasp, but I don’t think it’s that either. I think what bugs me about the ensemble is the lack of female characters in the group.
Joss Whedon as a writer/director/whatever-else-he-is is known for creating diverse ensembles of characters which generally include equal male and female members. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s the one directing the film, and in my mind when I hear his name I automatically think of strong female characters like Buffy, Zoe, etc. which irks me when I look at the cast. It seems to be heavily stilted towards strong (literally) male characters.
Sure, Scarlett Johansson is there but does anyone really care about her Black Widow that much? In Iron Man 2 she was rather boring and felt crammed in there, as she does again in this film. The Black Widow from the comics is a no nonsense, commanding type of person and I didn’t really feel that coming across from Scarlett Johansson.
Strangely enough I don’t feel that the answer is cramming more characters into the movie either to even it out. Sure, I would love to see She-Hulk, Spider-Woman, or Miss Marvel on the team but I would also want them to get a fair amount of screen time, and more characters would just clutter the movie. Just think of how bad Fox’s X-Men franchise is at throwing characters all over the place just to have them in there. I just thought of X-Men Origins: Wolverine and shuddered.
The problem, therein, lies in the fact that it’s much harder for a movie which is a couple hours long and cost millions of dollars to include the same amount of content that decades of comic books have built up, even in a rudimentary form. The characters which make up the team now, aside from Hawkeye, have all been set up in their own films or at least another film in Nick Fury and Black Widows case. Hawkeye gets a pass because it’s not really hard to explain that someone is a really good archer. I just did it, and it took one sentence. Characters She-Hulk and Miss Marvel probably aren’t going to get their own films, and require too much explanation to be shoe-horned into another film.
Actually, take back what I just said. She-Hulk could have totally been in the Avengers movie. Audiences have already seen enough of the Hulk to know what he’s about, I think they could wrap their minds around a simple origin such as her gamma blood transfusion. Her name is also very simple, and conveys that she is a she, and she is also a hulk. She-Hulk. Makes sense.
I’d like to end by saying that I’m not pre-judging the Avengers film or condemning the cast. I think the actors they have gotten together are amazing, and seem to be perfect fits for the roles (aside from Scar-Jo, or at least from what she showed in Iron Man 2). Who knows, maybe there will be more characters included that have yet to be mentioned. The thing still is two years away. We may not even be watching movies in 2012. Maybe we’ll all have hover skateboards.
