archive | I’m NOT interested in the review, but in the complaint about a generalized movie trend. The author, Louis Chilton, goes on a rant using about what he sees as having gone to far in and overly exemplified by the latest Marvel release:
If we are watching, as some critics have suggested, the death of cinema happen before our eyes, then it’s taken the form of a public execution.
It is a film that is about absolutely nothing – a film with no discernable purpose or artistic ambitions, beyond the perpetuation of its own corporate myth.
He explains a little:
Audiences didn’t love Blade because Snipes just showed up, stood there and barked catchphrases – he was part of a story, with a proper character, and stakes, and intentionality. That Marvel cannot see the difference – or, even worse, if it can see the difference but chooses to ignore it – is surely damning.
We call Deadpool & Wolverine a movie because it is released in cinemas, and is two hours long, but other than these technicalities, it shares almost nothing with a traditional blockbuster, when it comes to intent.
And finally concedes with admonishment:
And of course, people are allowed to enjoy what they like. But freebasing cocaine is surely enjoyable to many people; that doesn’t mean we should all get on board with its production and distribution.
I thought the movie was great and so did my absolute cinephile friends. The author is just being contrarian to get clicks.
Nah, he’s read The Hero with a Thousand Faces and/or subscribes to Suber’s ideas in The Power of Film and is doing a mental checklist of what Marvel lacks.
Marvel hits the main points of a Hero story most of the time – where we have a Hero who comes from one place, goes ‘adventuring’ elsewhere and ends up doing a ‘thing’ that benefits the ordinary folks – but the frequency of needing a HERO over and over, and the escalation of what’s at stake (the whole world, the galaxy, universe, multi-verse, existence itself) means that after you’ve seen a few Marvel movies, the characters aren’t doing things that are new or different from what they did in other movies. Saving ‘normies’ is their day-job. Yeah, the path is different each time, but we keep seeing the same Heroes and most of them aren’t getting transformed by the journey and there are too many cases where the ‘sacrifice’ they make doesn’t have any real choice involved (if you can opt walk away from the drama then staying or doing ‘X’ is a sacrifice, but it’s no sacrifice if leaving means you die anyway).
Suber suggests that a hero often has to GO AWAY at the end of the story. The normies are happy for help, but then they want to get back to raising their kids and the Hero is not good for that. I like that idea. More than that, I think that is the critic’s actual complaint. He sees this as another story in the same universe (multiverse) with the same characters and he wants something new rather than something comfortably familiar – and that’s HIS problem because lots of us would like more stories about the Heroes we’ve come to know and love.
If it matters, my favorite Marvel story is the Loki TV series. It hits many of the expected markers and both the lead-up to- and the actual-ending both really resonated for me.
Has the author ever read a Marvel comic book, especially those from the 1960s-1980s? That’s what these Marvel movies are based on.
Also, movie studios that find a formula that sells tend to beat that formula to death until sales plummet. Hence why they are still making Transformers movies despite them being garbage since the very first one with that Holes guy.
Well he liked Blade, so I’m guessing his issue isn’t with comics in general.
I wasn’t suggesting he doesn’t like comic books. I’m suggesting he doesn’t understand that the Marvel movies are essentially following story, theme, characters, etc. from the Marvel comic books of those decades.