I finally got around to seeing The Avengers, and it made me realize how utterly useless 50% of super heroes are. Every super hero team has a mix of heavy hitters and regular Joes, and the ones on the other end of the spectrum are just wasting valuable screen time. When New York was being overrun by aliens, Captain America’s only power was delegation. He had to show true leadership and find a role where everyone could feel important, so he told Hawkeye to go up the rooftops and scout out the situation. He didn’t bother to plan how Hawkeye, a guy who’s good with arrows and nothing else, was going to make it up there. He had to ask for a lift from Iron Man, and then he was basically stuck up there until he ran out of arrows. It also demonstrated how arrows were a terrible choice of weapon. Quivers are large and bulky, and can’t hold that much ammunition, unlike a gun. Plus, Loki straight-up caught an arrow in midair, which then exploded in his face. Awesomeness aside, that could have been a bullet, which would not have needed the extra advantage of exploding.
At the end of his orders, Captain America seemed to realize how screwed he was when he told the Black Widow they’d have to pair up and fight in the streets because they were part of the 50% of the team that couldn’t fly or jump over buildings. At least the Black Widow had a gun. Cap’t was just standing there with a shield. He had a gun in his own movie, but for some reason he decided to ditch it. Maybe today’s modern guns are just too new-fangled for a guy who’s used to fighting dude with disintegrators rays and flame-thrower bracelets.
The whole, “not being able to fly thing,” seemed to take way too much time for their part of the team to work around. The Black Widow had to highjack whatever the hell those alien things were flying just so she could get to the top of Stark Towers, which had a fully functioning elevator. It was established that Tony’s building had a self-sustaining energy source that was separate from the rest of New York, and there’s an entire scene revolving around Agent Culson coming out of the elevator uninvited. So to recap: 1: the elevator works, and 2: it’s really easy to use. It never once occurs to the Black Widow, because she’s too busy being freakin’ awesome.
Out of everyone, Nick Fury was the most useless human being of all. First he manages to lose the all-powerful tesseract and get his multi-billion dollar headquarters destroyed in the process. Then, after capturing Loki, he manages to nearly get his multi-billion dollar flying fortress destroyed. Then, during the entire attack on New York, his only contribution was not stopping a nuclear bomb. His own men tried to nuke New York, their native soil, on the orders of his higher-ups. There wasn’t even any pressing need for a nuke. Everyone could have waited an extra few hours and the army would have shown up and handled it all. None of the aliens weren’t so tough that bullets and bombs wouldn’t have stopped them. There was a giant mothership on the other side of the portal posing the most imminent threat, but the portal was clearly too small for it to fit through. Their freakin’ flying vehicles didn’t even have a canopy. Imagine having the ability to make ships, but you neglected to put any kind of protection or cover around it to protect the pilots. A passing flock of pigeons could have taken out half their armada. The evil bad guy plan was to basically show up and start firing wildly. They couldn’t even shoot that accurately. The first alien dude to crash through the window into the office starts shooting and hits the wall three times, missing the fifty people or so running around scared. Then one of the aliens fighting Captain America flubs the grenade he’s trying to set and nearly kills himself and the rest of his squad. In fact, I think he did.
While there’s a lot of team work going on, I don’t even know why it was necessary. I think the Hulk could have handled it all on his own.
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