Oh, oh, and I admit that I totally expected that Natasha would die to close the portal. All that set-up with the conversation about the red on her ledger, and Steve's argument with Tony about putting your life on the line, and so forth. It would not have surprised me a bit--although I would have been pissed off.

And the trailers did, in fact, spoil that one final rescue by Hulk. Bad trailers, no biscuit!

So, yeah. On the one hand I see everyone's anger about Coulson's death (or possible death, although he looked pretty dead to me): on the other, a battle that big needs a sacrifice, and as one of the folks I saw the movie with pointed out, we never saw any onscreen deaths, except for Coulson.

So it was oddly bloodless, for all the damage that was caused. Which I found kind of ridiculous, really: there should have been bodies all over the streets, and the movie really dodged that. At the end, you get the glimpse of a memorial wall, but that's it, when in reality all the press coverage should have started with: "In New York today, over seven hundred people were killed by an alien invasion, turned back by the combined forces of the nation's superheroes..."

I know it's Disney, and PG-13 and all, and yet.

My other complaint is:

Well, Joss wanted all the Avengers to be alone; that is, without any support from non-Avenger folk. Joss didn't even want Pepper in the movie, but RDJ insisted.

Also, they wanted to save Thor/ Jane scenes for the next Thor movie.

That makes sense, tommyrot. Except I end up blaming the comics industry for not having enough women superheroes to begin with.

Where is that Wonder Woman movie, damnit?

I do love that Chatty!co-worker is a huge comics nerd (he saw Avengers at 9:30 Friday *morning,* and again on Sunday). We have a shitton of work to do today, but every 15 minutes or so, one of us will say, "Oh! The whole thing with Banner saying he put a gun in his mouth! Pretty fucking dark, huh? I didn't expect that!" (Which I totally didn't, and it was.) And the other one will say, "Yeah, but the other guy just spat the bullet out, which is fairly badass." (Which it is.)

Our other co-workers might be ready to kill us.

That was, in fact, totally badass, Steph.

I don't know why Banner's comment about putting a gun in his mouth struck me as so very dark, in a movie where the Earth is in peril. But it really threw me.

I really want to see it again now. Like, right now. But I have to get ready to fly back home (I've been in San Jose visiting family for the weekend), and then I have a bunch of work ahead of me. Must see it again at the soonest possible opportunity.

But it really threw me

Well, because it's so personal. That's an emotion most of us can and might experience, whereas the feelings associated with defending the Earth from alien invasion? NSM.

I mean, that's why most action movies have an individual character at direct risk, so the audience can identify with the fear for that person; generalized fear for an entire population is less, um, incentivizing.

Pentagon Quit The Avengers Because of Its ‘Unreality’

The Pentagon halted its cooperation with Marvel Studios’ blockbuster movie The Avengers because the Defense Department didn’t think a movie about superheroes, Norse Gods and intergalactic invasions was sufficiently realistic in its treatment of military bureaucracy.

Moviegoers and comic fans know that S.H.I.E.L.D., led by Samuel L. Jackson’s super-spy Nick Fury, is an international peacekeeping/global surveillance/crisis response/quasi-military organization. But its relationship with the United States is murky. And that basically stopped the U.S. military, which is normally eager to cooperate with the film industry on blockbuster movies, from teaming up with the Avengers.

“We couldn’t reconcile the unreality of this international organization and our place in it,” Phil Strub, the Defense Department’s Hollywood liaison, tells Danger Room. “To whom did S.H.I.E.L.D. answer? Did we work for S.H.I.E.L.D.? We hit that roadblock and decided we couldn’t do anything” with the film.

...

But the ambiguity around what exactly S.H.I.E.L.D. is provides a vexing complication. If it’s an American governmental agency, what kind of constitutional authority does it exercise over the military? If it’s an international body, as the movie text suggests and Strub determined, are U.S. military personnel and equipment on loan to it through some kind of United Nations Security Council resolution? The questions may seem picayune, but they’re precisely the stuff that can cause an image-conscious military to yank its cooperation from a movie.

eta: Rest of article is a little spoilery.

Oddly enough, Law & the Multiverse talks about SHIELD today: [link]