On Marvel Movies

Author’s Note: This post includes some spoilers related to a number of Marvel films, perhaps most relevantly Avengers: Endgame. Spoilers, particularly for the most recent film, really pick up after the Avengers image midway through this post. Please don’t read past that point if you don’t want anything from Endgame spoiled.

A confession: I have by-and-large not much liked the Marvel movies of the last decade or so.

It’s not that I don’t like super hero movies as a genre--I do. In fact, I suspect some of anti-Marvel sentiment comes from just how much I loved the Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale Batman movies. The Dark Knight, in particular, captured my ideals around the super hero film in combining gritty realism with the absurdities of heroes and villains who could, for the most part, exist in our real world. Sure, there are moments that require some suspension of disbelief, but I’d argue they’re relatively few and far between in the latter two-thirds of the Dark Knight trilogy, whereas they come up pretty constantly in most Marvel efforts. Whereas the Nolan films feel as though they have real stakes of life, death, and other forms of loss, I’ve found the Marvel films all too often suffer from contrived circumstances built to suggest threats that no viewer can honestly believe will yield meaningful consequences.

The best of the Marvel films demonstrate more ambition. Namely, Captain America: Winter Soldier turns the franchise mythology on its head in interesting ways, and Black Panther features a primarily black cast and dares to unapologetically remove itself from western culture. Guardians of the Galaxy strikes the right balance of not taking itself too seriously while still delivering a fun space adventure, largely built on Chris Pratt’s broad back.

The other thing I’ve tended to have against Marvel movies, though, is how heavily hyped they tend to be. I’m entrenched enough in nerd culture to have a wide swathe of people in my life who are super invested in the Marvel universe and all too ready to proclaim the greatness of each new release.

I first experienced the disappointment of a Marvel film that I was ready to believe the hype about, only to wind up profoundly disappointed for in the original Avengers film. After all, this was a best-of super hero collection, cultivated by Joss Whedon, whose television writing I held in such reverence at that point, based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and Dollhouse.

And the movie was… OK.

Had I gone in without any expectations, I imagine I might have evaluated the original Avengers at a solid B+ popcorn super hero movie—maybe even a smidge higher for Hulk’s scene-stealing antics—but coming in with all that hype, it felt more like a C+ effort, mired in too-long action sequences that said too little, for a movie woefully short on heart.

Age of Ultron had a lot less hype. I found it to be a bore that lived down to what little I expected of it--maybe less. I was ready for something emotionally powerful to come out of Infinity War, and while I’ll admit to the circumstances in which I saw it limiting how engrossed I could be--already having significant elements of the ending spoiled by a student paper I had to grade before I saw it, and watching on my phone with a screen too small to do justice to the (gratuitous) fight scenes. Nonetheless, in the ending movements, when characters turning to dust seemed as though it was meant to render such emotional devastation, I found the whole thing ringing hollow, not least of all because I had the sense that this tragedy couldn’t be permanent. That’s a big part of my beef with these movies--that the stakes never seem real, and so what losses do come about don’t feel meaningful.

I hate to deny others their joy. Life is too short and the world is too hard not to like what you like, whatever your reasons, and if I claimed to demand artistic perfection from entertainment, my own enduring fanship for pro wrestling would feel awfully hypocritical. Nonetheless, as the hype built for Endgame, I found myself increasingly annoyed. Getting excited for a climactic film in a series is fair. But acting as though this film were an event when its three predecessors had been so middling felt all but wrong to me.

A funny thing happened, though. Endgame dominated my social media feed. It was the it movie, garnering universal and glowing praise. The endorsements, combined with knowing this movie would be best before anything got spoiled for me, and all the more so on the big screen, led me to the theater.

Going to the theater for Endgame was no small thing. Unlike my college self who often went out to the movies once a week, often as not to some objectively bad movies, when I stepped into a theater this time, it was for the first time in over two years, since before the birth of my son and those busy months that preceded his arrival.

But I went, after he was asleep, the night after I had finished teaching for the semester, readied for a rare irresponsibly late night out. I bought popcorn and a Coke, not least of all so the snack and the caffeine would help keep me awake.

Endgame felt immediately different from what I knew of Marvel movies. The quiet opening scene of family vanishing, followed by the time spent on people in mourning--it all felt like a far more real rendering of a world with half its people gone than I had anticipated.

The “time heist” felt a little silly in concept, but reasonably original and fun just the same, besides setting up a tour of past films in the Avengers series--a heavy-handed, if nonetheless nostalgic sense of coming full circle for fans who did appreciate those films more.

By the climactic battle scene in which an army of heroes returned from dust banded together with heroes left standing to battle Thanos and his troops, I felt an unanticipated surge of emotion. Some of it was dramatic character reveals and swells of the score. But some of it, too, was watching a higher level super hero narrative play out. It was unusually difficult to find obvious holes to poke in the set up or in the fight itself, and where so many Marvel big budget battles have left me cold, I found myself uncharacteristically riveted from the moment Black Panther arrived straight through Iron Man snapping his fingers.

The many high points of the battle, to be followed by the quieter revisiting of so many Marvel movie clusters of characters in the funerary scene to follow, achieved the least likely result of all. My cynicism fell by the wayside and I thought I’d really like to see more of these Marvel movies I’d let pass me by to get the full scope of these characters. I though I might even want to re-watch some of those films I’d dismissed before.

Endgame doesn’t touch The Dark Knight in my estimation of great super hero films. However, from my non-comprehensive point of view (as the kids say, don't @ me), it probably does rank number two for its ambition, scope, and ability to make me feel something and to think. Endgame represents the best of what a movie its ilk can do, perhaps most importantly of all standing up for its whole genre to defy those critics who would dismiss a Marvel movie out of hand.

Even me.