This is nothing new. For over a decade now—this summer and its lineup being the most recent and obvious example—critics, professionals and amateurs alike have locked their hawk–eyed gazes on the biggest fad in Hollywood. The fad in question? Turning comic books into epic, morally–charged, action–packed dramas and subsequently writing up clouds of pensive, pervasive analyses of what this means for cinema.
I don’t mind being repetitive in my decision to critically discuss this—namely because it is one of the most repetitive traditions the industry has ever seen. Perhaps the only way to accurately comprehend a movement that, much like the liquid metal dude in “Terminator 2,” keeps reproducing itself in slightly different forms (different uniform, different villain, different female, different moral quandary, different city that experiences billions of dollars lost in property damage) is to play the corresponding criticism again and again.
Though souped–up superhero movies are a thing of the millennium, Hollywood’s fascination with charismatic, masked vigilantes predates this era by a long shot, even though the melodrama of say, "The Dark Knight," didn’t materialize perhaps until Tim Burton’s 1989 “Batman” straddled the different realms of campy, comic–book pleasure and modern urban warfare. Until this point, the tradition was: George Reeves played cinema’s Superman through the 1950s, Adam West was Batman on TV, and J.D. Salinger’s only son Matt played Captain America, and superhero media, though enjoyable enough for sequels to be recycled through the Cold War into the ‘90s, were more frivolous. Now, superhero films take on the ethical questions they long have ignored—for example, “are super villains merely flamboyant terrorists?” and “should the American criminal justice system work with (caped) laypeople in the name of the greater good?” And in some cases, “what even is the greater good?”
The question is if the sobered–up superhero movie template can accommodate so many different superheroes. Every powers–packed movie from “The Avengers” to “X–Men” puts at least science, religion and love on this grand, cosmic canvas (look at how many actors known for their Shakespeare work are now in these films!). Forget the suspension of disbelief necessary to even understand the Thor/Loki relationship, or even the fact that when movies such as “The Avengers” link multiple superhero universes together on the same planet, it defies realism that at least the urban planners and construction workers haven’t boycotted because the buildings they have just rebuilt have been blown apart again—but now every movie in this mold is kind of the same. Perhaps the superhero movie that did it best, or most meta, is “The Incredibles”—representing both pop culture’s nostalgic fascination with heroes and moral need for them alongside the criticism that their enduring presence has, at least in a grand cultural metaphor, flown a tad too close to the sun.
