The new Avengers movie: How your studies in Late Antiquity helped you understand Joss Whedon's plight

This is wonderful, wonderful. Thanks, Salon and Mr. O'Hehir:

It might be accurate to say instead that superhero cinema has reached a decadent plateau, a long-term steady state of self-nourishing bigness and reverberant meaninglessness. Whedon moves on from the Marvel empire not as its Augustus or its Spartacus, but more like one of the later, non-terrible Christian emperors who won some battles, made some reforms and convinced everybody that the glory of Rome would endure forever. Was it worth doing? That depends on what you think of Rome.