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May. 29th, 2012 03:35 pmI've been thinking about movie SHIELD. Specifically, I've been thinking about the nature of the institution in the pre-Iron Man era. What was its charter? Things like "Nick Fury's Big Week" and tiny bits of Iron Man 2 and Avengers canon suggest that before the Avengers Initiative, SHIELD wasn't big in the superhero game. The implication I got is that the sudden confluence of Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, led a sleepy think tank-type agency focused on gameplanning unpredictable homeland threats and trying to prepare the government to respond to them suddenly reconfigure to respond to those homeland threats. On the other hand, there's Nick Fury's line at the end of Iron Man, when he suggests "Mr. Stark, you've become part of a bigger universe." The implication of that line is that SHIELD has long been involved in dealing with other superhero-related threats, etc...
But in Marvel movieverse, what are those threats? There's the Hulk, but that's clearly not under SHIELD purview initially, as "The Consultant" shows. I try to figure out what else SHIELD was doing and I come to Fantastic Four, X-Men, and maybe tangential involvement in Spiderman. Before ~2008, SHIELD must have basically been an agency that supported the Fantastic Four and surveilled mutants it considered potentially dangerous. With a major part of their resources dedicated to trying to dig up Captain America.
So this raises questions I think are interesting. As the Avengers Initiative starts to take up more and more of Nick Fury's focus, what does that do to the Fantastic Four's relationship with the agency? Does Reed's toy budget see cuts? How does Ben feel about the Hulk just being out there? Do Johnny and Tony get into superhero fights at clubs all the time, or only every other week? Ultimately, the overly cute crackfic writer in me is going to want to read Johnny meets Steve, but we already knew I'm a bad person.
But beyond these simple questions about fitting the FF movies into the Avenger movieverse, what I find interesting is SHIELD itself, and the reconfiguration it must have had to do to reorient itself for its new mission statement in the Post-Thor world. "Every Hero" hypothesizes that Coulson was recruited for SHIELD only a year or two before Iron Man, and I think given his quip about working on the name, that's likely true. Natasha obviously also, as someone relatively young and with the backstory she shared with Loki, joined SHIELD fairly recently, and while Hawkeye has been with SHIELD longer than her, his skill-set speaks of significant military special-ops experience. This is a group of agents that is incredibly competent, incredibly comfortable with each other, and yet they haven't been together for all that long.
My best explanation for this is Nick Fury, leave it at that. You have to figure SHIELD was some sort of internal exile for Nick Fury. He was too competent and held too many secrets to just get rid of, but they wanted him out of the way so they dumped him in a sleepy agency charged with dealing with problems most people thought of as jokes. "Ha ha, we put Nick Fury on the Roswell Project." But Nick Fury was so competent and so compelling that he figured out how to sell his agency to competent people who were frustrated with other government agencies. He told them that yes, all they'd be doing was dreaming up imaginary threats, or maybe they'd be babysitting the Fantastic Four for the inevitable cock-up, but they'd get to develop all their own tools, work the way they wanted to work alongside other smart, competent people, and somehow he got people like Coulson and Hawkeye and Sitwell and Maria Fucking Hill to work for him, and with people like that, when the shit hits the fan and suddenly you're leading a group of loose cannons with superpowers against an alien invasion, you're ready to figure out how to change everything on the fly. I think the way SHIELD responds to the rise of the Avengers is a story worth telling in more detail than the movies do. Maybe the rumored Nick Fury movie will deal with some of that.
But in Marvel movieverse, what are those threats? There's the Hulk, but that's clearly not under SHIELD purview initially, as "The Consultant" shows. I try to figure out what else SHIELD was doing and I come to Fantastic Four, X-Men, and maybe tangential involvement in Spiderman. Before ~2008, SHIELD must have basically been an agency that supported the Fantastic Four and surveilled mutants it considered potentially dangerous. With a major part of their resources dedicated to trying to dig up Captain America.
So this raises questions I think are interesting. As the Avengers Initiative starts to take up more and more of Nick Fury's focus, what does that do to the Fantastic Four's relationship with the agency? Does Reed's toy budget see cuts? How does Ben feel about the Hulk just being out there? Do Johnny and Tony get into superhero fights at clubs all the time, or only every other week? Ultimately, the overly cute crackfic writer in me is going to want to read Johnny meets Steve, but we already knew I'm a bad person.
But beyond these simple questions about fitting the FF movies into the Avenger movieverse, what I find interesting is SHIELD itself, and the reconfiguration it must have had to do to reorient itself for its new mission statement in the Post-Thor world. "Every Hero" hypothesizes that Coulson was recruited for SHIELD only a year or two before Iron Man, and I think given his quip about working on the name, that's likely true. Natasha obviously also, as someone relatively young and with the backstory she shared with Loki, joined SHIELD fairly recently, and while Hawkeye has been with SHIELD longer than her, his skill-set speaks of significant military special-ops experience. This is a group of agents that is incredibly competent, incredibly comfortable with each other, and yet they haven't been together for all that long.
My best explanation for this is Nick Fury, leave it at that. You have to figure SHIELD was some sort of internal exile for Nick Fury. He was too competent and held too many secrets to just get rid of, but they wanted him out of the way so they dumped him in a sleepy agency charged with dealing with problems most people thought of as jokes. "Ha ha, we put Nick Fury on the Roswell Project." But Nick Fury was so competent and so compelling that he figured out how to sell his agency to competent people who were frustrated with other government agencies. He told them that yes, all they'd be doing was dreaming up imaginary threats, or maybe they'd be babysitting the Fantastic Four for the inevitable cock-up, but they'd get to develop all their own tools, work the way they wanted to work alongside other smart, competent people, and somehow he got people like Coulson and Hawkeye and Sitwell and Maria Fucking Hill to work for him, and with people like that, when the shit hits the fan and suddenly you're leading a group of loose cannons with superpowers against an alien invasion, you're ready to figure out how to change everything on the fly. I think the way SHIELD responds to the rise of the Avengers is a story worth telling in more detail than the movies do. Maybe the rumored Nick Fury movie will deal with some of that.
