I tend to believe my frustration with Marvel movies has less to do with the saturation of superhero cinema we have experienced as of late (and will experience to an even greater extent over the next several years) than it does with the fact I almost have to report on it to keep from having to shut this site down. That can be frustrating, largely because I think the reporting on superhero movies goes against everything movies are meant to do, which is surprise and excite us.
Most of the stories written about superhero movies seek to spoil the movies before they ever hit theaters, going so far as to look for plot details in the toys that are released and the names of the tracks on the film’s score. I try my best to stay out of that kind of reporting, but I also see a hit on the statistics as a result.
Now there is the other side of the coin, which is to say the most recent Marvel movies haven’t been very good… that is, in my opinion. Iron Man 3 devolved into another shipyard CGI fight fest, Captain America: The Winter Soldier was fine, but did nothing to move the dial and I found Guardians of the Galaxy to be rather boring. This doesn’t mean I’ve lost interest in big budget movies, but I would like to see them try a little harder, especially since Marvel is in a position now where the brand almost sells itself. Thus, exposing the audience to an elevated form of storytelling while still appealing to their comic book fantasies is well within the realm of possibility.
I say all of this as I will now introduce the opinion of director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, whose Birdman opens this Friday in New York. It’s a movie that finds Michael Keaton playing Riggan, an actor famous for portraying an iconic superhero. It’s a black comedy focused on Riggan’s struggle to mount a Broadway play. The fact it has anything to do with superheroes has obviously helped generate excitement surrounding the film, but it should be interesting to see how audiences respond to what they may perceive to be one thing, but may end up getting something entirely different.
In an interview with Deadline, Inarritu took a moment to talk about the superhero genre, first saying, “I sometimes enjoy [superhero movies] because they are basic and simple and go well with popcorn. The problem is that sometimes they purport to be profound, based on some Greek mythological kind of thing. And they are honestly very right wing. I always see them as killing people because they do not believe in what you believe, or they are not being who you want them to be. I hate that, and don’t respond to those characters.”
Okay, so they are popcorn pieces of entertainment and yes, they can sometimes be passed off as something profound, but I don’t think movies like The Dark Knight or Captain America 2 are necessarily trying to be profound, though I do think they each weave certain aspects of today’s culture and society into their stories rather seamlessly. Inarritu, however, doesn’t end his statements there.
“They have been poison, this cultural genocide,” he added. “Because the audience is so overexposed to plot and explosions and shit that doesn’t mean nothing about the experience of being human.”
It’s an interesting take because it is to assume they are attempting to say something about the experience of being human, though this is sort of the problem I was getting at earlier.
The first Iron Man was really good all the way up until about the midway point. I always consider the moment Iron Man kills the terrorists holding hostages to be the moment that film went from being something interesting to becoming the kind of Marvel movies we get today — movies lacking much in the way of substance. That said, I don’t think general audiences would have bought into something too heavy-handed and Marvel was attempting to build a cinematic brand, not create high quality cinema. They’ve since made plenty of movies that go down easy and no, they don’t have much to say about the experience of being human, but should they?
Personally, I would love to see movies as big and explosive as the Marvel movies or whatever DC and Warner Bros. are putting together right now and have them inject some level of cinema amid the spectacle, but I’m pretty sure the studios aren’t making these movies for me or Inarritu and they’ve found more than enough people to eat them up.
As far as them being cultural genocide… Well, I don’t think that’s an entirely unfair statement. It sounds really bad for certain, but I don’t think Marvel fans are ever going to try and convince any of us those films are high quality cinema that actually add to the culture. As a result, and with how widely consumed they are compared to films that would be considered high cinema, there may be something to say about the cultural degradation as a result.
No matter, what we must always remember is that while superhero movies may seem all anyone on the Internet and on movie blogs write/talk about, there are still several non-superhero movies to see. In fact, there are infinitely more movies that aren’t about superheroes than there are superhero movies, it’s just sometimes the chatter gets in the way of reality.
All that being said, I’m still somewhat excited to see what Joss Whedon does with Avengers: Age of Ultron and curious to see how this Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice turns out. I also liked X-Men: Days of Future Past when I saw it in theaters and still believe Thor to be the most continuously entertaining movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to date. I like seeing these big movies on the big screen and still get a little excited when I sit down to watch them, but I’ll never confuse going to see an Avengers movie with sitting down to watch Birdman.
