U.S. Troops Won’t Answer To Liberal U.N. Secretary-General Nick Fury

Sure, every single human shelled out good money this past weekend to watch their nerd fantasies come true and all of their favorite funnybook superheroes (at least all the ones owned by one specific media conglomerate, and not counting Spider-Man because he has his own movie coming out later this summer, we guess) come together to fight evil, together, as a team. And sure, pretty much everyone seemed to enjoy this exercise in superheroics, and even thought it was kind of well written, for once. But everyone experienced a nagging feeling that maybe the non-super-human-operated kill-machines weren’t the same physical kill-machines that our U.S. military uses, to protect us (by killing). And that’s because the U.S. military wisely kept their kill-machines out of this movie, because the Avengers are a one-world-government U.N. plot to undermine American sovereignty, for real.

Spencer Ackerman over at Wired has the whole important story about how, like most Hollywood epics, The Avengers was working with the U.S. military so that actual sweet-ass fighter jets and shit would appear on camera and bring “gritty realism” to the film AND convince people to join the Army. But the military ended the relationship before the film was completed, due to the plot’s “unreality.” That “unreality” involved not robot suits and rage-mutants and space monsters or whatever, but rather the hint that maybe S.H.I.E.L.D was coordinating with the U.S. Armed Forces to save all of humanity, not just the America part.

“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.

Right-wing nuts (and the Pentagon brass!) have been anxious for years to prevent any foreign commanders from giving orders to U.S. troops. Lots of foreign military units take orders from different-kind-of-foreign (or even American!) commanders in international peacekeeping efforts, of course, but this doesn’t apply to us, because, you know, exceptionalism. And now it doesn’t apply in magical comic book land either!

Anyway, the Avengers just drew all the warplanes with computers and it still made a gazillion dollars, so whatever. But just wait until the highly anticipated Battleship movie, based on the extremely boring board game, comes out later this summer! That one is totally Pentagon-approved and has a cameo from the Secretary of the Navy in it, so it’ll make a gazillion dollars times infinity. [Wired via Pareene]

(Awesome Captain America pic from MrPhilDog/Flickr)