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Category Archives: Superhero Movies
In Batman: The Killing Joke, the Abyss Gazes Back
CAUTION: This review contains major spoilers for Batman: The Killing Joke
The traditional superhero story is a simple one. The bad guy threatens to do some bit of evil; the good guy comes in to stop it, and the day is saved. Lather, rinse, repeat. The costumes change, and so do the capers, but for a while, that was the dependable, well-worn blueprint for the battles between capes and criminals.
And then, somewhere along the line, that started to change. Writers like Alan Moore began to deconstruct those old stories. They started to look at the ways that these battles might not be so weightless, how those heroes and villains might still leave their marks on one another. These artists examined how the good guys could not fight evil day after day, week after week, year after year, and yet come out of those battles unsullied, unblemished, and unscathed.
Batman, after all, fights monsters. How long can you run headlong into battle with monsters before you start to become more monstrous yourself? It’s not every comic book adaptation that drops references to Nietzsche, even when it’s one of his most famous quotes, but it’s appropriate for Batman: The Killing Joke, an animated film adaptation of the Alan Moore classic. Because more than The Joker, more than Batman, more than Jim or Barbara Gordon, it’s a story about what happens to those who fight monsters. It’s a story about the abyss.
Posted in Animated Films, Movies, Superhero Movies
Tagged Alan Moore, Barbara Gordon, Batgirl, Batman, Commissioner Gordon, DCAU, Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joker
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Captain America: Civil War Brings the Superheroic Back Down to Earth
CAUTION: This review contains major spoilers for Captain America: Civil War.
Before Anthony and Joe Russo were directing superhero movies, they worked on a little show called Community about a group of misfits at a community college. The series, oddly enough, had a surprising amount in common with The Avengers. Both were about seven people from different backgrounds who bounced off one another in interesting ways, carried their own unique psychological baggage, and who would still, now and then, come together and do amazing things.
One of the most remarkable things about Community was its mastery of tone. The series was pitched as a comedy, and true to that billing, it was a funny, creative, and occasionally off-the-wall show. And yet it could just as easily shift into something quiet and personal, something unremittingly dark, or even something difficult and complex that lacked the sorts of easy answers seemingly required of all network sitcoms. The Russo brothers brought the same incredible ability to mesh different tones and characters to Captain America: Civil War and translated it onto a much bigger stage without missing a beat.
Because Civil War is hilarious, action-packed, and all kinds of fun. It’s has tons of inventive sequences and fights big and small that are filled with humor and imagination. But at the same time, Civil War is, in its own way, a very dark film about fear, regret, anger, a deep divide and a personal loss. It touches on big ideas like moral responsibility, individual guilt for broader actions, and the dangers of power without boundaries. The film, however, grounds these ideas in its well-developed characters, intimate individual moments, and personal relationships. It’s a smorgasbord of different scenes and settings and moods that can make you laugh, gasp, and feel the tragedy of a given moment, without letting these varying tones clash. And that is one hell of an achievement.
Ranking: Every Marvel Cinematic Universe Hero and Villain
Ahead of the release of Captain America: Civil War, Andrew Bloom and Allison Shoemaker rank every Marvel Cinematic Universe hero and villain–both in film and on T.V.–and decide who would win in a hypothetical fight between each good guy and bad guy.
Batman v. Superman Is a Well-Intentioned, But Deeply-Flawed Mess of a Film
CAUTION: This review contains major spoilers for Batman v. Superman.
There are some good ideas and good intentions behind Batman v. Superman. If you want to make a superhero film, there are worse comic books to crib from than Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and the Doomsday arc. If you’re trying to create a film that owns its four-color roots while also aiming to make some kind of grand statement, there are worse ideas than trying to examine the social and political repercussions of god-like aliens coming to Earth. If you want to add your own bit of shading to a set of time-honored icons, there are worse ways to do it than showing each of them struggling with the legacies of their parents.
But trying to do this all at once requires a deft hand. Trying to do it all with the added requirements of the expected big-budget action sequences, the need to launch a new cinematic universe, and an effort to correct for the perceived missteps of a prior film, would take a miracle-worker. If the balance of all of these disparate elements isn’t just right, instead of the intended depth and complexity, you get a well-meaning, but ultimately incoherent muddle. That’s what the cumbersomely titled Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice amounts to — a boldly ambitious, hopelessly flawed, overextended mess of a film.
Posted in Movies, Superhero Movies
Tagged Batman, DCEU, Lex Luthor, Movie Reviews, Superman, Watchmen, Zack Snyder
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Deadpool: The Anti-Superhero Movie
Caution: This review contains major spoilers for Deadpool.
Deadpool is at its best when it’s making fun of superhero movies. The film feels like a deliberate counter-reaction to the seriousness and prominence of comic book films in pop culture, and in that regard, it’s a wild success. When it fills the opening credits with descriptions of its actors rather than their actual names (e.g. “Moody Teen”, “British Villain”, etc.), features knowing winks to its star’s prior, emerald-tinged efforts as a cape, and plays “Angel of the Morning” behind its freeze-framed mayhem, it’s a statement of purpose, an indication from the very beginning that this is not going to be your average superhero flick and the movie is very much in on the joke.
At the same time, Deadpool is at its weakest when it capitulates to the sober, formulaic demands of its genre, when it hits the expected beats of your typical good guy origin story—a tragic past, a dull antagonist, and a lost love–even as it vociferously proclaims that its “hero” is anything but a good guy. The film does its best to throw in a comedic riff on these moments. Deadpool himself, a.k.a. Wade Wilson, has plenty of playful quips for the movie’s villain, Ajax (Ed Skrein), even as his rival slogs through the usual, perfunctory threat and intimidation routine. And Wilson’s ribald remarks permeate the sad-sack backstory and star-crossed romance that might otherwise hurt the film’s humorous tone.
To this end, the film makes a firm attempt to take some of the edge off of some of its more standard-issue elements—generic baddie Ajax and his wooden henchwoman Angel Dust (Gina Carano) chief among them. But at its core, Deadpool can’t completely run away from the typical superhero movie tropes it ends up employing, even as it’s trying to make fun of them. That drags down the proceedings in the moments where the otherwise off-the-wall film tries to be a little more solemn or conventional.
Posted in Movies, Superhero Movies
Tagged Comic Book Movies, Deadpool, Marvel, Movie Reviews, Ryan Reynolds, X-Men
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Marvel’s Unshared Universe: Age of Ultron and Continuity in Broad Strokes
I had the faintest glimmer of hope at the climax of Avengers: Age of Ultron. In the midst of our intrepid heroes’ battle with the titular AI run amok, when the chances for a civilian evacuation seemed bleak, Nick Fury came blazing to the rescue with a helicarrier, and reassured Earth’s Mightiest Heroes that he had “pulled her out of mothballs with a couple of old friends”.
Here it was, the moment when Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. would have the slightest impact on the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. Sure, the TV show’s characters would be relegated to a quick cameo or even the background, but the devoted fans who had slogged through the show’s rougher patches would be rewarded with a brief glimpse of Fitz or Simmons or Mack or somebody from the ragtag remnants of S.H.I.E.L.D., there to help save the day. It only made sense. After all, if recent episodes of the show were any indication, Fury and Maria Hill had been working with Coulson’s team off-screen for some time, and there were more than a few capable agents suited to the task.
But no. Instead, the brief-if-pleasant bit of continuity came in the form of an appearance by the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent from Captain America: The Winter Soldier who had refused to launch Hydra’s helicarriers despite being held at gunpoint. It was a nice callback, but one that still left me feeling cold to a film that seemed to only make the broadest of gestures toward the rest of the MCU.
Posted in Movies, Superhero Movies
Tagged Angel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Comic Book Movies, Continuity, Joss Whedon, Marvel, Shared Universe, The Avengers
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Man of Steel | The Andrew Review
Superman is an alien from beyond our solar system, but also a part of humanity. He’s a boy from Kansas, but also a demigod. He is, at once, both the other and the familiar. It’s a duality that director Zack Snyder and screenwriter David S. Goyer explore in Man of Steel, and they demonstrated the similar duality that’s inherent in attempting to adapt Superman for the screen.
In the film, Superman struggles with the tension between his knowledge that he is a living monument to a world and a people who have long since been destroyed and the feeling that he is a part of our world with friends and loved ones who are just as meaningful. By the same token, the film’s creative brain trust (which includes the director of The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan) struggles to both honor Superman the icon, the character who has come to represent so much over the course of decades of stories in every medium imaginable, and make him a relatable character who movie audiences can connect with.
It was a noble effort, and a difficult one at that, but ultimately, an unsuccessful one as well. At the end of the film, Superman is still more icon than man and more symbol than individual.
Am I the Only One Worried that “The Dark Knight Rises” Might Be Terrible?
Well, maybe not terrible, but not very good?
Don’t get me wrong. I’ll be at the midnight showing, wearing my Batman t-shirt, and cheering with anticipation like the fanboy I am. But I’ll also be bracing myself for disappointment.
The problem is that I’ve been burned before. The first X-Men movie told a solid, entertaining story that reestablished our favorite mutant superteam for the big screen. The second built on the successes of the first, and set those characters loose in the world the prior film had built. The end result was an engaging, well-regarded film that provided fans with the best entry in the series. Then, the third movie collapsed under the weight of too many unwieldy storylines, too many characters to reasonably develop, and too many extras jammed into an already bloated film. It was an unwieldy, schizophrenic failure of a movie.
The most recent Spider-Man trilogy followed a similar trajectory. The first movie retold Spider-Man’s origin story and set up the rationale behind his heroic struggle. The second explored that raison d’être, harvested many of the seeds that had been planted in the prior film, resulting in one of the most acclaimed superhero films of the decade. The third, however, was an unmitigated disaster. Again, it suffered from too many storylines, too little development, and an attempt to do too much in a movie that already felt overstuffed by the end of the first act.
So you’ll forgive my concern when I look at the current Batman franchise and see an initial entry that reenvisioned the caped crusader on the silver screen and managed to wash the taste of the Schumacher films out of the movie-going public’s collective mouths. I see a sequel that took both the character of Batman and the setting of Gotham City that had been established by the prior film, and mined them for all they were worth. The Dark Knight is not just one of the greatest, if not the greatest, superhero films ever made; it’s a movie that helped prompt the Academy to expand the Best Picture category to account for films that transcend their genres and set a new standard for what a superhero movie could be. Now, I see a third movie on the horizon, trying to live up to that standard, and I worry it’s headed down the same path as those other franchises.
Posted in Movies, Superhero Movies
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