AVENGERSing

Watching AVENGERS again.


Cap's introduction is entirely wrong. It's fun and full of nifty dialogue, which are Whedon's trademarks. But it's just not right.

First thing: Cap is in a gym, pounding a heavy bag. We get all these flashbacks from the CAPTAIN AMERICA movie, plus one brief scene we hadn't seen before showing someone waving some kind of sensor over Cap's unthawing body and saying "This ...guy is alive!" At that point, Cap loses his temper and hits the heavy bag so hard he breaks its chain and sends it flying.

The flashbacks are okay, except for one thing: Cap would be thinking about Bucky's death. That's what would make him hit the bag so hard he sends it flying. At that time in Marvel continuity, all Cap ever thought about when he had time to brood was Bucky's death.

The dialogue is all right... "When I went under, we were at war. I wake up, they tell me we won. They didn't tell me what we lost." That's okay; all of Stan Lee's characters in the Silver Age eat, drink, and breathe self pity. But Cap would have mentioned Bucky, and he would have been thinking about Bucky.

Beyond that, though, the whole scene is... weird. The boxing gestalt is Daredevil's, not Cap's. Leaving that aside, why all the heavy bags lined up on the floor? This essentially says, Cap knows that he's going to keep breaking bags, so he lines up a lot of them so he can keep punching them and punching them and punching them. Apparently, this is how he spends all his time. That's not right at all for Cap. No matter how out of his time and alienated he's feeling, Cap is an intellectual... a man who's primary weapon is his brain, not his fists. He was a 'little guy' all his life; at this point in his experience arc, he's been a super competent fighter, a very physical soldier and superhero, for maybe a few years. He's not going to spend hours smashing heavy bag after heavy bag... that's something a jock would do. And Cap wouldn't do it anyway, if for no other reason, out of respect for someone else's property.

And why does he pick up the next heavy bag in line and carry it out with him, along with his gym bag and the folder Fury has brought to him? Does he need a heavy bag back at his apartment? Seriously, what the fuck?

I know Whedon is trying to quickly demonstrate Cap's martial abilities and somewhat superhuman strength along with some character points, but this scene doesn't really do any of that. A better scene would have been Cap in a SHIELD armory somewhere, assembling and disassembling some modern weapons, while a SHIELD instructor stands there, astonished at how fast Cap learns and how incredible his dexterity and hand-eye coordination are.

Or, even better, Cap sparring with some young SHIELD agents, throwing three or four of them around at once while bounding around the room off the walls and various pieces of equipment... and then some young hero worshipping kid asks for a demonstration of how he throws his shield, so Cap says "Not a problem" and tosses his shield so it bounces off six different things and comes back to his hand... turns around... and the young agent who asked him to do it looks like Bucky. And we get the flashback of Bucky dying, plus a few others, maybe. Then Cap just turns and walks out of the room, leaving everyone behind him going 'WTF'? And then Fury comes up to him in the hall.

Anyway. Hindsight is always 20/20, I guess.