Fresh when it gets here from
Julie Barrett
Monday, May 7, 2012
Why yes, we DID see The Avengers last weekend.
I'll try not to be too spoilery, but I will say right up front that it was one amazing movie.
The opening kind of dragged for me until Nick Fury showed up. Then the ass kicking could commence, I suppose. From that point on it was a non-stop action thriller with more hilarious one-liners than you could throw Loki's staff at.
The movie had one of the best death scenes ever. I won't spoil that.
My only quibble was that there was one scene where the blood was a lot redder than it should have been, given the circumstances. But that's a pretty teeny quibble.
I haven't had this much fun at a movie in a long time. I want to see it again.
And now the rant. Even if you haven't seen the movie, you can guess that things get bad. Stuff blows up. People are in danger, and you know that this is going to be on a large scale. So large, that the President of the United States is going to have something to say. This was a quick bit of a news clip among many news clips. Yet, when Obama's face was on the screen, I could hear members of the audience hissing.
What's up with that? It's fine if you don't like the president, but this is movie is set in the present. If Bush had been on the screen, I'd have had a bit of temporal whiplash. Nothing against Bush, who I thought stepped up to the plate in 2001 and did a fine job of comforting the nation.
But that was then. He's not in the White House. This is about telling a story, not politics. If you're going to set a story in the contemporary world and take pains to integrate all the fantasy with our world, then a fake president would just blow that premise right out of the water. And if you do have a fake president, you establish his - or her - presence early on so the audience will accept it at that point. And, IMO, the simple act of establishing an alternate president probably would have slowed the pace. This was not a story where things slowed down. (Until the credits. But that would be spoilers, sweetie!)
So if you can't stand Obama, there's your spoiler alert. Just hold your tongue. Your fellow audience members will thank you.