Comics Aren't Just for Fans, Anymore.

Here on the eve of the official American release of The Avengers: Age of Ultron, we'll examine how the film medium has impacted the comic book medium, what truly motivates them, and maybe, time permitting, we'll dig into the 'pataphysics of their eschatological mimesis.

Let's look at motivations first: Gillette has an ad running right now that sums up the condition of the modern superhero's multiversal constant of cash. It depicts a razor cycling through the superpowers of The Avengers, turning the bathroom of a faceless male onlooker into a war-zone.

"Sure! A razor could be built using Avengers-inspired technology," a steely-voiced narrator intones, "but it clearly shouldn't be." At this, the super-razor hulks out and collapses the sink into a pile of rubble.

Sure, cinematic mega-franchises could be built using comic book inspired story-lines, and maybe they shouldn't, but they certainly will.

The primary motivation for the excess to be found in the film's plot and performance, as well as the accrued product placement in and around it is nothing new, and relatively simple.

THERE WILL BE A RETURN ON INVESTMENT.

All individuals involved in this new and terrible future have these words tattooed on their foreheads, in florid script like Leto's Joker, though visible only with They Live sunglasses. As the people funding these films seek a return on investment through megamillions grossing, so to does the individual moviegoer invest their time and money into visiting the temple of theater and losing themselves in an entertaining spectacle, for any number of reasons. But anyone with even a passive stake in the experience should know their place. An ant on the rim of a teacup perched on a giant pile of cash.

Imagine it's a gala fundraiser for fun. James Spader will be there. A small child will make a mess out of their Hulkbuster highchair with noodles shaped like Tony Stark's helmet.  Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver will disavow any ties to their father Magneto, holed up as he is in a revived 20th century Fox camp, while they are trading up for an Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Mickey Mouse Club Hydra tie-in origin.  A tiny Ultron will push a Target shopping basket filled with Subway sandwiches and T-Mobile phones into an Audi. The Fantastic Four comic book will be canceled (for a time), and placed in a tomb designed by Bob Iger, who will then do a jig to celebrate. This will compound the frustration of every fan still being trolled by the awful marketing campaign for the Josh Trank film due out in July.  Corporate synergy meets spite in the name of cash, as fictional families and cities crumble around warring corporate titans like so many Gillette-annihilated bathrooms, eerie echoes of America's own corporate-sponsored perpetual secret and public wars bouncing off the wreckage.

It's worth noting that this fancy robot mayhem is being released roughly in conjunction with the comic crossover rehash rebooting cosmic super-event Secret Wars, wherein the Marvel Comics Universe (Earth 616) collides and fuses with its Ultimate Comics counterpart (Earth 1610).  The timing for this has been carefully calculated, as new readers or prodigal ones are welcome to join in the "starting from a blank slate" offered by the eschaton/apotheosis, which will consume these two universes (and more!) for months to come.  Various titles offer renewed takes on dead or dangling plots from decades gone by, and will, in theory, infuse a renewed enthusiasm into readership.  Marvel even went so far as to provide a Secret Wars spread detailing (with ISBNs!) what books you should read from the past twenty years to keep up with the upcoming amalgam battles.

It may help to go over a bit of the retconning and ham water that led us to this point. The Ultimate Comics line was conceived in the early days of the Bush Administration as a means of proving the Marvel brand was capable of casting off the "immature baggage of the past" for the cultural cachet of the present and future, specifically in a more cinematic manner.

Decades of stagnant backstory on the part of this or that Status Quo superhuman can wear down the interest of that elusive and ever-expanding target audience, The New Arrival. The New Arrival is a more casual creature, chill, with none of the loyalties of a true fan, but also none of the bitterness or cleverness that comes with a critical faculty for the stuff, either. Movies, being more immediate in their presentation and proliferation (and profit margins), are an excellent bait for The New Arrival, with titles finding that unique balance of "blank slate" and Status Quo upheaval/reinforcement as the perfect hook.

Such was the motivating factor behind Marvel's Ultimate Comics, the Baby Daddy of the current Marvel Mega-franchise.

The slick wide screen action movie dialogue and pacing of Mark Millar (Kick Ass, Kingsmen: The Secret Service) and Brian Hitch's movie star appropriation schema made Marvel easier to digest for the simpleton movie executives and new (youth dollar) readers.

It was in this spirit that Nick Fury (1610) "traded up" for the likeness of one Samuel L. Jackson, who is more than willing to provide his talents for the character in as many films as they will pay him to do. In current continuity, the original Nick Fury (616), after killing The Watcher and stealing one of his eyeballs, became a haunt of the Blue Area of the Moon called The Unseen. A while ago, a convenient Nick Fury Jr. (also a Samuel L. Jackson lookalike) manifested in true soap opera/lost son/sad trumpet style within Universe 616, clearly to avoid confusing New Arrivals who didn't know (or can hardly bring themselves to care) about the fella that spent time with the Howling Commandos half a century ago.

As the pool of knowledge for the fictional universes expand, so too is the term "fan" itself watered down.  Two sets of knowledge, one obscure and clumsy, one overly slick and refined, vie for objective validity in a subjective reality. "Fandom" and its antagonistic social media camaraderie comes in many forms, and the bitter nerds of yesterday serve as models for the bitter nerds of tomorrow.

This New Arrival is broader and deeper than the pimply white male nerd specter that has dominated the market's attention for ages.  In an age where Spider-Woman shame-Googles her own butt and Twitter sees a hashtag campaign started to fire a writer started because a trauma victim lacked reading comprehension skills and tact, we find ourselves with a lady Thor who can make Mjölnir dance like a chitauri on a hot tin roof, and a certain Sam Wilson standing in for a powerless Steve Rogers.

The militarization of mainstream comic books has ever been tied to its origins and upbringing, and the devastation once contained to constraints of a paper-based media has been made more real in the expanded cinematic universe, a reflection of the standards set by the consumers voting with their cash and time.  As technology has advanced and the medium along with it, the narrative has adapted to fit the moral climate and political allowance of society at large, which can be seen throughout plots driven through every era of the industry as a whole. As a result, the corporate oligarchy is reinforced or reasonably deconstructed in the narratives, which gives strict rules over suspension of disbelief that fans can react or overreact to accordingly.

Once thought to be the childish arcana of nerds and simpletons, in years past comic books have shown their mettle for progressive storytelling, especially with independent publishers.  Yet the health of the mainstream industry is inextricably tied to that market, with many authors and artists seeking approval or at least a paycheck from the monolith before branching out accordingly with such beauties as Promethea, Saga, or East of West.  Furthermore, any melancholic nay-sayers should remember, the stakes have been raised since the first Avengers film grossed over a billion dollars worldwide, and with that, the ability to help the people funding these PTSD-flashback inducing Inception drum thrumming city-annihilating drama rambles get a major return on their investment.

Mainstream Comics are not just for fans of the comics anymore. They haven't been for a while. Mainstream Comics are for New Arrivals first.  Instant appraisal for the uninitiated is demanded, in all things.  Comics, by virtue of accounting for a lower percentage of sales than cinema, act now as a testing grounds for plots and ploys that may be reproduced digitally later, one way or another, which plays with the overall image society chooses to project unto its masses, in memes or simulacra.  The new mythology has taken root, and whether or not it will reach its saturation point sooner or later is, to some extent, dependent on the quality of the product provided.  No pandering, and no idiotic glad-handing, if you can manage it, Hollywood.  Will the time come that the vaunted Disney-cum-third-act-Tetsuo finally overtakes all major imaginary universes after Star Wars chokes out Star Trek with J.J. Abrams's hands, creating a monopoly over vast swaths of nerd entertainment, as if Pepsi and Coke fused, or DC and Marvel, for that matter?

At times it seems Marvel is capable, with their plot-driven characters, of moving more freely than DC.  While the metahumans of DC Comics shift more subtly due to their greater iconic and cosmic ties, they are to a certain extent incapable of the frailties of folly Marvel Studios has found success with in rehashing, for instance, The Guardians of the Galaxy (the key is always a relatable protagonist).  Common sense has it that competition between companies is positive for the market and the consumer, and it helps the industry at large if they are both successful and strong in their undertakings.

We will see massive adulation and careful criticism of the hooks and MacGuffins produced in this Whedon-soaked romp of robots and responsibility. Those that contributed to this spectacle will find that they will be richly rewarded for doing so.  The strength of mythology found in comic books will find its proving ground once again, as a marketable venture for Hollywood and beyond.

What of the small folk in the two respective universes, hung in stasis between Wednesday shipments? What about the minor nuances of a stable environment wherein characters can grow, change, and adapt in a manner that audiences will respond to?  Are the laws governing the metaphysics of flying men off limits to everyone but Benedict Cumberbatch's rendition of Doctor Strange?

As the abyss stares also, so will the commodification of superheroes continue to gain steam in the world of cinema.  In this brave new age, medias blend into one another as through a semi-permeable membrane, fundamentally altering one another, and the results are given relevance by Vox Populi in the form of cash.  Cash enough to buy a small country.

The future of Mainstream Comics could be presaged in the speculation bubble that arose in the 1990's, or perhaps it can be best summarized by commercials for razors and shopping outlets.  In either event, there is a potential for pleasant growth or vapid regurgitation.  We could see Lazarus or Frankenstein's monster, in the wide-screen mega-events yet to unfold.

Whatever the case, remember, we watch these things to enjoy them.

Watch carefully, see if you can spot the strings.

15 hour Avengers Party.

The idea was simple.  For twenty American dollars plus tax apiece, Mr. So and I would partake of fifteen hours of comic book movies.  The offer stood as Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America, and finally, at midnight, the long-anticipated Avengers (in 3D), written and directed by this summer's cinema success story, Joss Whedon.

I got this swag.

When the first film (Iron Man) ends, a sweaty female attendant with a broken voice informs the theater that parking will only be validated for four hours.  A mild panic rises in the crowd when a rumor passes around that the show is going to exclude The Avengers itself. A quick check on the cell phone confirms the film is indeed playing.  Calm returns.

The crowd consists of much as you might expect: largely male population, with standard skinny bespectacled nerds, geeks that choose to wear their Captain America hoodies or thrift-store condition Avengers t-shirts (thus being the guy at the concert that's wearing the t-shirt of the band that's playing at the concert), a handful of stoner stereotypes, dorks that bred and brought their precocious children, and of course, samples of America's grossly obese, providing the sour milk fat flesh fold smell that over the course of the day sinks into the theater like scared-skunk stink.  Swag in the form of buttons and posters are passed out.

We're all sold on it.

What's not to like?

Admittedly, the only movies of the bunch that I go into the event having already seen are the Iron Man films, due in one part due to an odd affection for Jon Favreau, in another part because of an active attempt to avoid the genre of superheroes as much as humanly possible.  So often one gets burned. Ask anyone that has ever seen Spider Man 3.  In the cocaine-fueled executive rage for commercial success, many comic book adaptations could easily be viewed as escapism done wrong, a less refined, mostly immature attempt at pandering to the lowest common denominator, resulting in critical flip-floppers.

Most of all what I never enjoyed was the preening sense of inevitability concerning militarism that the Marvel franchise seems to endorse in each film it makes, while simultaneously (and only sometimes) pretending it does the opposite.

The Edward Norton version of Hulk doubles down on the concept of military run amok to the point of absurdity, blowing up a college campus with no accountability, while the Thor movie mythologizes it with a sanitized and shiny Asgard run by Anthony Hopkin's master Kenneth Branaugh (and in this you could extrapolate Thor being the brutish America proxy, Loki being the snotty British Gog, and the entire Middle East as a frosted mirror-glass land of the Frost Giants).

This uneasy feeling of being sold a toy of the military industrial complex is reinforced as we are treated to the same opening sequence of commercials six times at the event.  An ad for the Navy, an ad for the Navy-sponsored boardgame-turned-film Battleship, an ad for the same film, this time sponsored by Coke Zero, an ad for the Marines, an ad for the Hatfields vs. the McCoys on TNT (Kevin Costner in a bloodfeud), an ad for the new remake of Dallas (the words BLOOD and FEUD and BATTLEGROUND flash on the screen, almost subliminal), then a review of each preview, plus an oddly racist Ultrabook ad.  All of that, six times over.

Imagine an army of Purple Hulks.

So the twelve hours and five movies pass, with twenty minute breaks between films, and we devour the food we snuck in, sip on caffeinated beverages loaded with vitamin B and Guarna and Taurine, and I can feel myself becoming accustomed to the changing eye-patches of Nick Fury in each post-credits teaser, and I can see that the people involved are attempting to make something more than a two hour long advertisement for the military industrial complex, but at the end of the day, they're stuck in a system they never named, but were made by, much as in the Captain America movie, where after being dosed as a super-soldier, he spends the first stretch of his career spinning propaganda on the newsies.

When a true subliminal flashes after the word "compassion" at a certain point (Thor, I believe), I recall the recent Star Trek remake, where James T. Kirk's older father-proxy tries to convince him to join Star Fleet after a bar fight. I flash across the crass, commercialized, and crypto-fascist overtones of 300 and the Transformers franchise.  Michael Bay conditioning pods.  Though certain elements of Captain America call to mind the best elements of Star Wars as well as the quality of film making from the era it depicts.  Captain America is the best, most refined of the Marvel movies leading into The Avengers.

About midway through The Avengers, when the S.H.I.E.L.D Hellicarrier raises out of the ocean, I find myself compelled to join the Navy, for some reason.

I also find myself cheering with the crowd around me.

The Avengers, it should be said, calls forth all the elements of a comic book superhero team, and paces them in an order that should be just complex enough to satisfy critics and just simplistic enough to appease brohams.  It's a crowd pleaser. It will break box-office barriers.  I love comics. I know comics.  My conscious attempts at avoiding comic book movies came after a dissatisfaction borne out of constant disappointment.

The Avengers gets it right, in a big way.

[Perhaps that lengthy an exposure to such materials was never intended for public consumption. Perhaps I have overdosed.  I need to start a blood feud, right after I join the Navy.]

I'll admit, all of my resistances were worn down to some degree in the twelve hours leading up to The Avengers, but this is a first rate A+ film for being a comedy, an action movie, and a superhero movie that puts all others to shame.

The Tesseract (which sounds better than Cosmic Cube, perhaps) is our movie's objective correlative, first introduced in Captain America, a limitless power source, and a source of interest for the villain Loki and his unnamed benefactor Thanos (who we only see in the first of two post-credits scenes).

The entire film, I wanted Samuel L. Jackson, playing Nick Fury, to start screaming a litany of curse words, out of nowhere.  SHIELD Agent Phil Coulson (calling to mind Charles Colson) played by Clark Gregg, is the thread running from Iron Man through the rest of the films and on up into The Avengers, where he plays the part of Captain America's biggest fan and, later on, "the avenged".  Scarlett Johansson manages to explain why Black Widow is essential to the team dynamic by being the world's best interrogator.  Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye gets only a few spots to shine in the film, but he uses them effectively.  Bruce Banner is played for the first time by Mark Ruffalo, who does a bang-up job playing the eccentric gamma-irradiated scientist.  Better by far than any previous actor that filled the role, if you want to come down to it.  Tom Hiddleston is the core of the movie as Loki, and in the final analysis is one of the best actors in the film.  Something about Chris Hemsworth as Thor strikes me as a little too simple. Maybe that's the point. He has a good laugh for Thor, it's just that he walks with just the wrong degree of swagger to pull off "god of thunder", in my humble opinion.  Chris Evans, on the other hand, manages to sell Captain America's soldier boy appeal effortlessly, and of course, Robert Downey Jr. embodies Tony Stark to the extent that at certain points it doesn't feel like he's bothered to read the script, he's just channeling a genius billionaire philanthropist from a parallel reality.

Part of what can tell you how good a band is is how well the audience responds to their performance. By that measure, and given that the entire theater withstood fifteen hours of cinema for The Avengers, the movie is a rousing success. Big laughs from the audience.  Spontaneous applause. Bigger action.

Joss Whedon has proven something great about himself this summer.  He's the current nerd king of Hollywood, and we shall all bask in his light until the cycle of cinema degenerates again, in a new flashier more gimmicky Tour de France.

I want to give him a firm handshake for a job well done, right after I sign up for basic training.

The Cabin in the Woods: A Final Comment on the Horror Genre

Frickin' Rubik's Cube of the Damned, this is.

Fair warning: with this assessment of Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard's "Cabin in the Woods", there will be a certain amount of plot point divulging, meeting somewhere between a review and a summary.  It's been interesting to note the reaction of people that have seen the film, in that they do not seem to want to give away too much to those that have not seen it.  In that spirit, it's a thin line that critics must walk in order to properly examine a film who's layered approach entertains audiences best when they have less information going in, while not fully divulging too much actual content.

While we're at it, let's look at this brief reversal of standard gender roles in slasher flicks, through a one way mirror.

The initial premise is very basic.  It is, on the surface, the most trite cliche of the horror genre.  Five fresh-faced college students go to a cabin in the woods for a weekend of fun and things go horribly wrong.  Any viewer remotely familiar with this premise can guess that they are in store for a little sex and a lot of violence.  Anyone familiar with Goddard's work on the ABC series Lost or Whedon's with Buffy the Vampire Slayer can also make a safe bet going into the film that there will be a twisting convolution of the initial premise and an honest love of the horror genre, for all of its faults.

The five characters are designed as archetypes, distinct from the usual stereotypes prevalent in every single film following this one's basic premise.  The fool, the warrior, the scholar, the virgin, and the whore. In the first five minutes of the film, however, we are introduced to two other character types that are more uncommon in horror and actually seem more suited to office comedies.  The older project head and the office joker with woman problems, Sitterson and Hadley.  These men and the project they are working on are interspersed with the plot, since it is obvious that they are the masters of ceremony for the events taking place.  They also serve as ample comic relief throughout the film, and can be interpreted as in-film proxies for the writers as well as the audience.  But more on that in a moment. Elements of The Truman Show and The Matrix bleed through almost immediately upon our exposure to the banks of computer monitors that Sitterson and Hadley are surrounded by, but these similarities are compounded when it's established that they can pump mind-altering substances in through the cabin's vents as well as the forest floor, that they run environmental controls around the cabin, that they are the ones that open the cellar door kick-starting the horror, and that every nook and cranny of the cabin and forest is lined with tiny fiber optic cameras. "Watch the master at work," indeed.

Where we, as the audience, are expected to do our part, comes in our exposure to any horror movie that has ever been written prior to this one, a partial awareness of each trope.  There are standard reactions to be expected from us, outside of chainsaw-themed dreams after the film.  We flinch, we squeal, we yell at the screen, we laugh, we curse the idiotic heroes and we cheer the villains that lay out brutal justice on horny half-wits and jerks.  We, as the audience of individuals, relate to certain characters while loathing others.  We invest ourselves in the movie's aura,  whether in the shrine of a cinema or the pale glow of a computer screen, and we react to the input with output.  Even though we suspend disbelief and dislocate reality, and in doing so buy the mythology laid out by the film-maker, we must ultimately embrace the real one.  

This movie plays with all that while maintaining a cool comic timing, but it expects more.  The question is asked, where does our fascination with horror come from?  What is the root of fear? We see certain lines blurred and expectations burned, right from the start.  Sublime terror of suburbia, Hadley at the water cooler, complaining that his wife has put child safety catches on all the drawers in their house, even though they just started fertility treatments.  Just another job, just another schlub.  The familiarity of this banter and the humorous nuance of the kids preparing to go to the cabin is set up to endear us to them, early on, in a manner that many horror movies fail to even hint at in an entire course of the film.  Laughter.  The genuine laughs throughout this film are what draw us in more than anything.  The horror genre has been bent off its axis and fused with comedy, without losing our interest. The game has officially been changed, or rather, it returns to the purpose it should serve, which is catharsis.

The distinction of course being that we are dealing with professionals here, both on-screen and off.  The operation that brought these kids to the cabin in the first place is a strong part of the social system that binds, an idea pointed out by the fool character early on.  The production company that made this film is part of a similar social system that plays itself out in all media, just as binding, but less Ancient Evil God oriented.  Or is it?

At a certain point, a Marine guard, the audience's stand-in for a fresh point-of-view in the operation cut-away, asks why the nudity of the whore is necessary.  The response could very well be a representative of the movie company, speaking for shareholders. "We're not the only ones watching here. We got to keep the customer satisfied. You know what's at stake here."  Being prepped is not being prepared.

In any event, rather than giving a simple play-by-play of the entire film, we'll continue our analysis by touching on a few major points where The Cabin in the Woods intersects with other films of its genre, while sussing out the resonance of certain lines and scenes with their "meta value", then break down the overarching impact of Lovecraftian mythos, and how, with this film, they trump all other forms of horror.

When the characters arrive at a gas station and meet the Harbinger, a throwback to the angry spirit of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, we get our first clue of titles and intents, set up in plain sight.  Soon after, this tension is diffused into comic relief when the Harbinger puts a call into Sitterson and Hadley, ranting about blood sacrifice for a while before realizing that he's been put on speaker phone.  This sort of undercut is played out with almost every tension built by the horror element of the film, working for it on first viewing, but perhaps not on successive ones.

Our textured protagonists, meanwhile, are enjoying their arrival at the cabin.  A scene is inserted to play off stereotypical gender roles from slasher flicks gone past; the scholar character removes a disturbing painting from the wall of his room to discover that he's on the transparent side of a one-way mirror. Of course, the virgin character enters the room and start primping herself in the mirror. Then undressing.  The natural conclusion is curtailed for a moralistic flip flop, where after switching rooms, the virgin sees the scholar undressing, and he is ripped.  While this is not akin to any specific film from the horror genre, it is a blatant commentary on standard stereotypes in the "slasher sub-genre",  famous for idiot starlets getting naked for a brief visceral thrill before dismemberment.  The one-way mirror scene subverts and twists that, backhandedly but uniquely.

Bypassing a silly tag line repeated throughout the film ("Let's get this party started!"), the inevitable game of Truth or Dare finishes up with the cellar door banging open, immediately reminiscent of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead, which from the first shot of the cabin soaks this film like brine soaks a pickle.  After daring the virgin to go down the stairs, the quintet discovers a collection of interesting items immediately familiar as the objective correlatives to monsters from horror movies: a conch shell, an amulet, a puzzle box, a ballerina music box, and of course, a diary from which an ancient Latin invocation is read aloud by the virgin.  This invocation summons a family of zombified pain-worshipping backwoods cannibals, whose dramatic arrival is undercut, as is standard, by Sitterson and Hadley's "monster betting pool".  This is them blowing off steam in the same way that we, the audience, laugh at the on-screen brutality.

At the end of the day, though, the humorless cosmic toxicity of H.P. Lovecraft's Ancient Evil makes its presence known in the film, and ends up subsuming all that came before it, literally.  Less blatant than the Necronomicon of Sam Raimi's day, the construct of this film, the bound-in sacrificial pit of the forest and the cabin, serves as a sacrifice of the archetypes to a sleeping Ancient One.  Since the operation our movie is involved in is global in scale, we can presume that there are multiple Ancient Ones throughout the world, accepting their yearly offerings in exchange for relative peace.  This is exemplified best in an invocation made by our goofy office-mates after the death of the whore. "This we offer in humility and fear, for the blessed peace of your eternal slumber. As it ever was."  The key line of course being the last, for in the Lovecraft mythos we find the invocation of the Old Ones as "The Old Ones are. The Old Ones were. The Old Ones will be."

After brutal deaths of all archetypes but the virgin and the fool, an elevator into the lower levels of the sacrificial forest is discovered.  Here, likely by design, we find elements of the movie Cube, as well as a hint of the anti-bureaucratic sentiment of that film.  There is a menagerie of monsters, too varied for a viewer to take in with only one sitting, set up and awaiting the activation of the appropriate objective correlative in the basement of the cabin.  The virgin finally establishes that they have been puppets all along, victims of fate, or rather, sacrifices to a vast creature of unimaginable evil.  Another exchange from earlier on in the film, between the Marine and a Chem Department scientist, gives us more of an idea of the puppetmaster the fool can only speculate on for most of the film.  The monstrous menagerie, or stable, is populated by remnants of the "old world" courtesy of "You-know-who" (pointing downward).

Lovecraft's Cthulu is often called the dreaming god, and the Ancient One addressed with sacrifice in this film is similar in scope if not location (Cthulu sleeps underwater, in R'yleh). Perhaps the concept of dormant but stirring cosmic evil controlling social norms behind a sticky curtain resonates with the core of humans more than we are likely comfortable with admitting.  It is not terribly far-fetched, the idea that society sits at the edge of chaos, binding, as it is, with laws and debts and pragmatic dismissals of pure autonomy, and it is rare enough that any horror film outside of a zombie apocalypse flick would approach this matter, let alone with such nuance as Cabin in the Woods manages.

In the final analysis, this movie is less about exploring the stereotype of Chris Hemsworth's "No matter what, we have to stay together" than it is about the less-lightly explored resonance of Sigourney Weaver's "It's our task to placate the Ancient Ones, as it is yours to be offered up to them."  In an interview regarding the film, Whedon cited John Carpenter as an influence, and likely the movie he was considering when he said that was the highly under-rated In the Mouth of Madness, perhaps the purest Lovecraftian movie to be made without being a direct translation. 

Before concluding, we'll dwell momentarily on the idea of the Ancient Ones presented by Goddard and Whedon, and  or Elder Evils, Lovecraft's take on a clearly Gnostic (and fittingly, very old) concept known as the Archons.  Imprisoned in gross matter, the souls of the world seek reunification with the Wholeness. The corrupted and complicated machinations of the Archons, rulers of this world, keep mankind from achieving spiritual fulfillment.  And as evidenced in our own world, the many must suffer for the few, and vice versa.  To this end, and along these lines, correlatives to Cabin in the Woods emerge, if you look at the content and themes touched, only slightly askance. 

We live in a world of true horror, and evil in the form of negligence and corruption and bigotry.  On grander scales, the still-mounting nuclear disaster in Fukushima, the ongoing Gulf of Mexico oil horror, the forever threat of terrorism at home and abroad, and so many other things brought about by society's trends towards mankind's detriment dwarf any mythological beast we can conjure with our most fevered imaginations, but they arise as a direct response to such things.  Our need for catharsis through control is our reaction to true dread, our desire is to undercut our feeble fragility in the face of pure and pungent terror.  So it is that we express ourselves through the opiates known as television and the movie theater.  The audience seeks control, the same as the operators of the sacrificial cabin, and they serve faceless entities with all the rights to and none of the joys of humanity.  The audience is the sacrifice to those faceless entities at the same time.  The idea of control is illusory and at best temporary.  Chaos runs rampant, regardless.  Like Cthulu, the audience dreams, unwitting, on the Plateau of Leng.  

The time will come that a tremendous hand shoots out of the ground and strikes you, ending your fantasy, your brief comfort.  Same as it ever was. 

Sweet dreams.   

I don't get it.