It’s Memorial Day weekend, time for a movie. We go online to Rotten Tomatoes and check out the current fare:

This is what we saw. Besides The Hunger Games, for which we had no appetite, Marvel’s The Avengers is head and shoulders above all the other ones. Must be good.

We got tickets for the 3-D version and plunged into a different world.

Word is that if you are a comic book aficionado, this will give you multiple orgasms. Maybe. But the rest of us out here, like me, who had never once looked at a comic book or seen a movie with any of Captain America, the Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, the Black Widow and Hawkeye, the whole production was simply a pointless, loud, spectacular, confusing, worthless bore.

Loki, the villain, comes from a different alien universe bent on taking over the earth as its king. He brings with him an army of alien soldiers with advanced technology to do the job. Lots of fake-science mumbo jumbo, posturing as science fiction, is supposed to make you believe it’s all possible. Predictably for cheap science fiction, the aliens, even Loki, are human or humanoid. The alien fighters, coming through a wormhole above New York City from the other side of the universe are iron-man-like armour plated humanoid soldiers that can be taken out by hand-to-hand combat with karate kicks by the Black Widow. The alien tanks are floating steel ships that look like lizards or perhaps fossilized whales, complete with teeth. What does an alien battleship need lizard teeth for?

In the time-honored tradition of science fiction epics, the real galactic wars are fought in hand-to-hand combat between bad guys and the heroes. There is a lot of  this in this movie. Arrows take down spaceships, fists hit aliens in the jaws and disable them, over, and over, and over, and over again.

I know, I know, it’s comic book stuff.

For two hours and twenty minutes I sat there watching pointless shooting with guns at heroes and aliens that are obviously made out of rubber and indestructible. Explosions small, large and gargantuan count in the hundreds, perhaps thousands.  The main human flagship is a hovercraft the size of an aircraft carrier that floats at an altitude of 30,000 feet. Taking out one of its four engines does not seem to harm it much. New York City gets a barrage of attacks and destruction making 9/11 look like a child’s play with a paper airplane in comparison.

The entire movie is full of spectacular special effects. There is no moral, no real story that captivates, no character development, no suspense. The movie is an excuse to blow up as much as possible in as short a period of time as possible.

Rating: *