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August 11, 2014

Filed under: movies»commentary»superhero

12 Percent of a Plan

I would love to have been in the meeting where someone pitched Guardians of the Galaxy. "We're going to take all the good will you've built up through the Marvel comic movie franchise, and then spend it on a space movie with characters that nobody really knows, one of whom is a heavily-armed raccoon." And then even weirder, it worked: Guardians is pretty good. Maybe it tells when it should show a little too often, but it never stopped me from enjoying myself. It's got a great soundtrack, good writing, well-done special effects, and most importantly, a really watchable cast.

Of course, this has been the case with most of the Marvel movies. I mean, let's be honest about, say, the Thor franchise, which have been a fun pair of movies considering that they're composed almost entirely of gibberish: Norse gods with British accents (who are actually aliens) fighting against elves and ice trolls (who are also aliens)! The whole thing is completely incoherent, but nobody cares because of the casting: everybody onscreen is good-looking, compulsively charming, and clearly having fun with a very silly premise.

But there's one thing that's been bugging me about the Marvel flicks, including Guardians, which is their endings. Namely, that they've all got the same one: the bad guys summon/control/take over a huge flying object, which immediately crashes headlong into a city.

  • The Avengers: Aliens crash giant worms into New York City.
  • Thor: The Dark World: Elves crash giant spaceship into England.
  • Captain America: The Winter Soldier: Nazis crash giant aircraft into the Potomac.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy: Lee Pace crashes giant accordian into alien planet.

Explosions follow, while the heroes rush to tackle the portal/controller/big bad at the wheel. Lots of buildings fall over in the process, and people run through the streets while looking up and behind them (oddly enough, hardly anyone ever trips). Lance Mannion refers to it as the "obligatory ad for the video game," and while that's harsh it's not inaccurate, because it does feel a little bit (between the overused CGI and the framing) like watching someone else play God of War. A lot of money went into it, and someone's clearly having a good time, but it's not necessarily you.

And to be clear, Marvel's not the only company writing screenplays this way. Star Trek: Into Darkness, for example, was a movie that committed every sin in the screenwriting book (and then added a few) but arguably the worst part was the meaningless and cruel spaceship crash at its climax. Over at Fox, X-Men: Days of Future Past has Magneto tossing an airborne baseball stadium at the White House. Huge flying objects are the new glass jail cell.

The problem with these pyrotechnics isn't just that they're repetitive and tasteless (although they are both), it's that they're ineffective: by destroying a huge chunk of a city, the writers are aiming for huge cinematic stakes, but by portraying it from a wide-angle lens (and, in PG-rated films, refusing to show any of the resulting bodies and carnage) there's no sense of drama. It's just computer-generated buildings falling over in the distance: who cares?

For a movie like Guardians, which has no real point other than to be a fun space adventure, it's bad enough that there's a good fifteen minutes of watching architecture instead of the characters that are the real draw. But it's more acutely frustrating for something like The Winter Soldier, which spends its first 90 minutes referencing the modern surveillance state, which is a tricky, subtle political problem. And nothing says "tricky" and "subtle" like sending three flying aircraft carriers through a building in Washington, DC.

Maybe that's expecting a bit much from a huge media property with a multi-year cinema domination plan. Marvel wants to put people into seats twice a year, and if that means making the same movie over and over again, that's fine. It's certainly never stopped anyone else (see also: Transformers and Harry Potter). If they're not even sure they can make a movie starring a woman, the chances they'll mess with the formular are pretty slim.

But look at it this way: now you know when you can take a bathroom break without missing anything. I figure you can stay away until the end of the credits, at which point you'll learn which comic-book movie will drop a giant metal object on Paris next year. If we're all very lucky, it'll be Squirrel Girl's turn eventually.

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