In any movie where there’s a group of people who have to get a job done by working together and utilizing all their different skills and strengths, I always feel the most kinship with the expert/professor character. So The Monuments Men looks great to me, because its entire dirty dozen is made up of experts/professors. (Although I’m gonna make a wild guess that Bob Balaban is the most experty of all the professors; that just seems like his thing.) Art historians don’t get nearly enough chances to be action heroes in American cinema, and I’m glad George Clooney is righting that wrong.

Also, you know how Alfonso Cuarón said (and Clooney denies) that Clooney wrote that scene everyone hated in Gravity where [SPOILER ALERT] Kowalski comes back as a ghost and drinks vodka from a sippy straw and tells Sandy B she can’t give up on life? This movie is going to be like that for 90 minutes, except instead of talking Sandy off the space-ledge, Clooney is talking the Western world off the artistic heritage–ledge. When the first trailer came out I thought The Monuments Men looked too educational, but I’ve changed my mind. Educate me, Clooney. Now I’m just waiting for my Bill Murray Chicago Architect action figure with armored tweed coat and razor T squares for Nazi-chopping.