Movie Review: The Avengers

The Avengers
2012

This movie is a revival of the Marvel comic characters that have been part of the media propaganda for generations. It was another case of white superheros saving the world from villains. What’s a little different in this movie is the pseryn calling the shots for the unit of superheroes, the Director, is Black.

The Director is the commander of The Avengers which is a group of six superheroes. The Director is advised by a shadowy group called “The Counsel.” The Counsel is a group whose faces are always in the shadows but they are men and wimmin who are dressed in business suits and so they obviously represent the ruling class from the boardroom.

The Superheroes include the Hulk, Captain Amerika, Thor, Stark, Black Widow and Hawkeye. These six Avengers are dispersed all over the world living their lives when these assassins are activated by the Amerikan government.

The premise is that aliens invade Amerika so the Avengers are called to save the country. Amerika is harnessing energy from space at a top secret laboratory called “joint dark energy” where a portal is created that opens into the other side of space. It is through this portal that Amerikans seek to exploit resources from space, but instead a white man known as Loki comes through the portal. (Loki by the way is a word from a First Nation language). Loki in this movie is the villain.

This film is set in New York City and has a lot of shooting and blowing up buildings in it. The one female superhero, Black Widow, is a spy of Russian descent now working for Amerika. She is of course highly sexualized and starts off in a skirt beating up a few men.

At one point Loki shape shifts into a viking-like persyn and has a crowd of people kneel in front of him while he declares rather arrogantly that humanity was “made to be ruled, in the end you will always kneel!” Loki is portrayed as an alien with a British accent who wants to rule Earth, but it turns out Loki and Thor are brothers, in a classic case of inter-imperialist rivalry fighting over resources that are not theirs.

The aliens invade Earth for a war that takes place in New York City that has the six Avengers fighting a whole army of space aliens with captain Amerika at the forefront. It’s interesting to see Captain Amerika brought back to the movies, originally Captain Amerika was a comic character used during World War II as a propaganda tool that showed Amerika saving the world. Created in 1940 the Captain America comic book initially had him fighting Hitler. More recently, starting in 2005, Marvel Comics has turned Captain Amerika and its other superheros to participating in Amerika’s modern wars. During this time Marvel Comics even created a series of comic books specially for U.$. soldiers in the Middle East, so the use of comic book characters for the advancement of imperialist interests is nothing new as this has been going on for decades.

At one point in the movie The Counsel asks the Director to nuke New York City, arguing that this is the only way to save earth, but the Director refuses and the battle continues. The battle has many “foreign” aircrafts flying into skyscrapers, an obvious allusion to the twin towers getting destroyed. The movie ends with a nuke being shot into New York City but it is intercepted by one of the superheroes named Stark who is also a millionaire who changes into a robotic superhero at will. Stark grabs the nuke and flies it into space, saving New York City. So it was finally delivered - a millionaire capitalist superhero saved the world, and so The Avengers plays out as a classic Amerikan propaganda film. One thing this movie did get right is there will be a final battle and Amerika will be one of the participants but the fighting army won’t come from outer space, rather the fighting army will be the oppressed on the ground and the result will be much different for the oppressor.