--ZACK
SNYDER'S JUSTICE LEAGUE is serious competition for the dumbest movie in
this run. Darkseid, it's ultimate Big Bad, was once defeated in trying
to conquer the Earth and is only now, many centuries later, getting back
to it because, well, he forgot where it was. Youtuber Mauler (among
others) has already created a feature-length dissection of many of its offensive idiocies, and I'll defer to him on it.
Over
the years, Snyder has developed a particularly rabid (and particularly
toxic) cult following, but his DCEU movies are just terrible--some of
the worst, most misguided comic-book movies to come out of this
comic-book-movie era--and to the extent that history remembers them at
all, it will be as some of the most embarrassing, "WTF were they
thinking?!" creative misfires in the long histories of these characters.
The efforts by multiple executive regimes at Warner Brothers to salvage
them and build a cinematic universe with those swamps as the foundation
are, collectively, one of the most remarkable examples of studio
mismanagement in Hollywood history. Basically just a big dumpster fire
that burned for a decade because, instead of just bowing to the obvious,
extinguishing it and starting over, every new suit insisted on
continuing to dump more and more money on it. It's good that the DCEU
has now ended. It's astonishing that it took so long for WB to end it.
Snyder's DCEU movies continued the Bigger, Bigger, Bigger-ization of the Batman. Back in 2017, I wrote:
"[I]n three of the last four Batman movies (existing in two different
continuities), the Batman has tackled, in this order, a plot to destroy
the denizens of the entire city of Gotham, a plot to blow up
that city and a world-threatening menace. When next we see him on
screen [JUSTICE LEAGUE], he'll be working to thwart a full-blown alien invasion and he's
already been set up for a storyline in which he will resist a Superman
who has become a godlike dictator and has conquered the world.
"Though stories like this
are told in the comics," I noted, "they're a
very
small part of the larger Batman picture." The Batman is primarily a
street-level crimefighter, a detective, his iconic rogues mostly
criminals, gangsters, killers. The Batman was created by crime but
becomes the scourge of crime. He has the countenance of a villain and
uses terror as a weapon, yet he's a hero. His headliner foes are sort of
like distorted reflections of himself, often born in tragedy, often not
exactly right in the head, they adopt some outlandish gimmick, just
like the Batman, and try to make over the world--or their part of it--in
a way they find more suitable, just like the Batman. Maybe even
inspired by the Batman? There's all kinds of meat there for good
writers, but it's meat that was being left to spoil while his screen
adaptations were limited to these huger-than-huge spectacles.
Relief
on that front fortunately arrived in 2022 with Matt Reeves' THE BATMAN,
which radically deescalated things and gave us a Batman more like,
well, Batman. In that older piece, I suggested bat-projects like "the
Batman investigating a SE7EN-style serial killer" or "trying to crack
one of the
Penguin's criminal schemes," and Reeves' picture--set in yet another
continuity--showed its creators were thinking along similar lines
(Reeves even directly cited SE7EN as an inspiration). And it was really
good.
Not perfect. There was some ill-advised first-person
voiceover by the Bat. Not badly-conceived, just badly written and
executed. Reeves could have used a little more SE7EN in his ending. The
villain--a radically reimagined Riddler--is apprehended and the movie
seems to be coming to a conclusion then takes a left turn, as we learn
the villain has been plotting something else along the way. This sort of
thing works when it's Gweneth Paltrow's head in a box delivered to a
remote desert location to complete some twisted master scheme. In THE
BATMAN, it's a pretty lame plan in which the movie's creators, in trying
to tip the hat to the Bigger, Bigger, Bigger trend, end up tacking on
an extremely underwhelming and, honestly, rather stupid second final act
that really doesn't add anything of merit to the proceedings and just
served to balloon the budget and make what had been a good movie drag on
beyond its welcome.[4]
Rubbish final acts are a recurring
problem in comic-book movies, and that push to make things Bigger,
Bigger, Bigger is usually the culprit. A quarter-century ago when BLADE
was in production, the film's original final confrontation had the
villain Deacon Frost mutate into a giant, gelatinous CGI creature that
Blade had to defeat, but the filmmakers found that, in test screenings,
the audience, which had become very invested in the Blade/Frost
conflict, simply checked out once Frost became a giant, unidentifiable
mass of blood-jello, so the much-better Blade-vs.-Frost ending used in
the theatrical release was created. That lesson didn't carry over to
other comic productions, in which, for years now, there just seems to be
this baked-to-diamond-hard Conventional Wisdom that the final act has
to be some huge, epic CGI-filled donnybrook.[5]
That sort of finale can be earned and, in fact,
is
often earned by these films. THE AVENGERS certainly earned it, not only
within its own running time but with pieces of the build-up to it
scattered across five movies preceding it. The other side of the coin is
BvS, where, as noted earlier, the creators had Luthor make the
staggeringly irrational--suicidal--decision to create a world-destroying
monster and sic it on Superman solely because they felt they
needed a big CGI-suffocated Final Boss fight (and as with THE BATMAN,
that too was a 2nd final act, needlessly appended at a point when the
movie was basically over).The finale of WONDER WOMAN drew
widespread complaints, even from those who liked the movie. Diana
leaves her home on Themyscira for Europe, convinced that Ares, the god
of war, is responsible for the then-ongoing World War I. A theme of the
movie--and something Diana was originally supposed to learn by the
end--is that sometimes, people just do bad things, no intervention by
evil gods necessary. But the studio wanted a Final Boss, so this was
scrapped near the end of production and, instead, Diana finds Ares
(presented as a hammy, mustache-twirler), engages with him in a long,
awful CGI cartoon, kills him and, upon his death, his spell over the
soldiers fighting the war is broken and it turns out he was responsible
for World War I after all! Who knew, right?
It's really bad.[6]
This studio imposition completely obliterated the character arc the
movie was building. That it eliminated the intended reason Diana
essentially went into hiding for a century and didn't replace it with
anything--raising, along the way, a a literal infinity of problematic
questions about that century--didn't help. Because the movie, while in
production, had always ultimately been aiming to deflate Diana's belief
that Ares was responsible for the war, the Ares confrontation was never
properly established; narratively, it just sort of comes out of
nowhere.[7]
A similar thing happens in the final act of Destin
Daniel Cretton's SHANG-CHI & THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS. The
movie's central conflict is between the title hero and his supervillain
father. They have it out at the end, but then things proceed into yet
another of those 2nd finales, this one in which the Dweller-In-Darkness,
a Lovecraftian monster barred from this world via a
portal guarded by the inhabitants of the mystical village of Ta Lo, is
released and must be beaten down. What follows is another CGI cartoon
full of dueling dragons and ridiculous aerial acrobatics that is just
allowed to go on and on but that--crucially--has almost nothing to do
with anything that preceded it. An entire sequel--or, for that matter,
this
movie--could have been spent building up this menace. Instead, it's
treated as virtually an afterthought, then used as a Final Boss in a
movie that wasn't about it--a bad idea that is then done badly.
Shang-Chi
is also an example of General Big-itis and the often-excruciatingly
narrow notion of what these comic-based projects should be conspiring to
befoul what could have been a lucrative run of pictures. Comic
Shang-Chi was a Master of Kung Fu, the son of a supervillain who turned
against his father. His formative stories were moody adventure tales,
pulling from pulp fiction, martial arts movies, Gothic horror, espionage
pictures. Those are the stories that made the character popular enough
to bring to the big screen in the first place but the movie almost
entirely disposed of the best years of the source material, which would
have been far cheaper to turn into movies, in favor of a flashy
superhero movie that reportedly cost between $150 million and $200
million--enough to fund multiple films closer to the comic.
The same thing happened with SUICIDE SQUAD.
In
the original comics, the group was
intended as a black ops team. They carry out covert missions--taking out
a terrorist cell, extracting an important dissident from political
imprisonment in an adversary nation, assassinating a drug lord in a
Latin American nation where he has political connections that give him
protection from official action, etc.--and because
it's a matter of public record that they're criminals, the U.S.
government has plausible deniability regarding their activities. It's a
perfect premise, one that would yield an endless array of relatively
low-cost spy/adventure/action pictures, but the film's creators wanted
Big, Big, Big, so
in the movie, the Squad--mostly street-level villains, including
a marksman, a guy who is
good at climbing things, a thief who uses boomerangs, a
mentally-ill woman with a baseball bat, etc., most without any
superpowers and who have already been apprehended by law enforcement or
by superheroes--are assembled into a team to defend the world from Superman-level threats. Somehow. What could have been a string of great $30 million to $80 million flicks turned into one really awful
$175 million mess. James Gunn's reboot, THE SUICIDE SQUAD, restored the
premise and was a vastly superior movie in every way, but it included,
among other things, an expensive CG character and a final-act showdown
with a world-threatening, King Kong-sized Starro the Conqueror--much
bigger stuff than an SS movie closer to the comics would usually
need--that pushed the budget up to a really hefty $185 million.
The
sort of changes wrought on many of these properties were meant to
conform them to a Big Superhero Movie template--what the creators of
these adaptations think they should be--in pursuit of a billion-dollar
box-office hit.
Our present comic-movie boom furnishes a great
example of both how this can help lead to a very bad screen project and
how, to the contrary, doing the same character properly can make for a
very good one:
20th Century Fox spent $78 million on Mark Steven
Johnson's godawful 2003 DAREDEVIL. Sam Raimi's SPIDER-MAN had just been
a mega-hit and Fox executives looked at it and, with no consideration
for the differences in the characters and their worlds,
said "I want one of those!"
"...[T]he studio suits... [turned] it
into a huge-scale, effects-laden blockbuster picture--totally out of
character for the material. Daredevil is film noir. Daredevil is
crime-stories full of bad luck and savage ironies told in smoke-filled
rooms with light filtering in from outside through Venetian blinds. It's
THE
USUAL SUSPECTS and CHINATOWN and ROMEO IS BLEEDING and
DRIVE. You don't need $78 million in bad wirework and CGI to do
Daredevil. You find a Jet Li and put him in a red suit."
No Jet Li in
that
picture. Daredevil, who is, physically speaking, just a normal, albeit
very athletic, ninja guy, drops down what looks like 40 stories off a
building, lands on a fire-escape and just keeps going. Characters who
definitely
don't have spider-powers nevertheless bounce 35 feet
into the air like cartoon grasshoppers. The movie was a stupid, horribly
written, horribly directed, often horribly-cast
mess, pillaging--Snyder-style--moments from years of comic stories,
removing them from the context of all of the years of development that
gave them their power on the page and jamming them into a little over 2
hours of time.
Years later, after reacquiring the rights to the
character, Marvel turned it into a series on Netflix, giving it a proper
scale, tone and focus--a Daredevil that was like Daredevil. Thirteen
episodes were shot, the equivalent of 6 1/2 feature films, for only a
little over 2/3 of the cost of that shitty movie, even with 11 years of
intervening inflation. It led to 2 more seasons and a crossover with
other Marvel Netflix shows, and it was the best thing Marvel has ever
brought to the screen.
When those Netflix projects were
announced, there were to be 4 series, DD, JESSICA JONES, LUKE CAGE and
IRON FIST, and a crossover miniseries featuring all of
them--appropriate, since these were street-level characters that, in the
comics, often interacted. The Punisher was introduced in DD season 2
and then got his own series. The 1st season of JESSICA JONES was a
rousing success, another contender for the title of all-time-best Marvel
adaptation, and it was another argument for staying true to the spirit
of the source material.
Some of these other adaptations didn't fare as well.
--IRON FIST was plagued with behind-the-scenes difficulties. Comic Fist slays a huge
dragon
with his bare hands. A moment central to the character, this was
apparently well beyond the show's budget and happens off-screen. The
show introduced a fairly significant supporting cast, then, despite
spending far too much time with them, didn't really seem to know what to
do with them. Underplotting, a lack of focus and pacing issues
abounded, problems that only grew in the 2nd season.
--Jon
Bernthal was incredible as Frank Castle, THE PUNISHER, but Marvel,
having established the characters' simple, straightforward origin story
in DAREDEVIL, has him repeatedly--and inexplicably--retire his
crime-killing persona, requiring that every new season give him a new
reason to bring it back. The character appears in DD, then 2 seasons of
his own show and is given, in effect, 3 different origin stories, which
could make the often-still-good shows a bit of a slog (the 2nd and 3rd
"origins" weren't very good either). When he finally decides to continue
being the Punisher, Marvel pulled the plug on all of the Netflix shows.
--Maybe
the biggest creative misfire of the Netflix Marvels happened with LUKE
CAGE. Comic Cage began as a fugitive; incarcerated for a crime he didn't
commit. He escaped from prison after an experiment-gone-wrong gifted
him with steel-hard skin and superhuman strength. For many years before
his name was cleared, he had to lie low. Cage is a working-class hero;
he goes into business as the Hero For Hire. Got a shipment of jewelry
that needs protection in a Marvel Universe full of all kinds of
metahuman nutbags? Hire Cage and sleep soundly. Luke later befriends
Danny Rand--Iron Fist--and Rand becomes Luke's partner, the venture
expanded to Heroes For Hire. The Heroes For Hire comic--Power Man &
Iron Fist--is much beloved, letter-perfect for the screen (buddy
action/adventure/comedy that was, in its time, years
ahead of its
time) and when the Netflix projects were announced, there was much
excitement that the shows would eventually join together, along with
JESSICA JONES, who, in the comics, eventually marries Luke. In Mike
Colter, Marvel found a good Luke Cage. The show's creators kept the
fugitive angle and their 1st season, particularly the first half of it,
was quite good, but they were apparently completely uninterested in the
Hero For Hire business so central to the comics. And then they didn't
replace it with anything. Cage just sort of becomes a local celebrity to
whom things happen. Season 2 goes off the rails pretty badly; it's
slow, often dull and ends with Luke deposing a crime boss and declaring
himself the new boss--a plot taken from the Daredevil comics (where the
character doing all of this was Daredevil). The only ep that feels
remotely like Luke Cage is one in which Finn Jones, who plays Iron Fist,
makes an utterly random fan-service guest-appearance, which just
underscores the "WTF were they thinking?!!!" impression of the show's
taking this other course--if that word can even be applied to the
aimless direction in which CAGE went--instead of pairing them up.
Disney ended all of the Netflix shows and though all were set in the regular Marvel continuity, Disney, for a time,
signaled
they were no longer canon. While this would allow Marvel to fix some of
the issues with the other shows, this was an incredibly short-sighted
decision when it came to Daredevil. Why exile from the MCU the best
thing Marvel has ever brought to the screen? Meanwhile, Vincent
D'Onofrio, who played crime Kingpin Wilson Fisk in DAREDEVIL, returned
to the MCU in the HAWKEYE show, then in ECHO, while Charlie Cox reprised
Matt Murdock/Daredevil himself in SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME, ECHO and
SHE-HULK: ATTORNEY AT LAW, and Disney announced Daredevil, essayed again
by Cox, would return in a new series, BORN AGAIN.
And then,
those connected to that new series began trying to dampen expectations
for it, saying it wasn't a continuation of the Netflix show and would
have a "lighter tone" than its predecessor, which was noted for its
dark, mature tales, psychological complexity and violence. As if to
accentuate the last, Daredevil appeared in SHE-HULK wearing a version of
the yellow uniform he wore in the earliest comics,[8] rather than the
more familiar deep-red gear. Cox
said the new show was intended to "appeal to a slightly younger audience." There was even
the suggestion
by a Marvel producer not working on the reboot that the new series
could be based on the execrable Mark Waid run of the comic, a goofy
creative sewage-line rupture that Marvel had cruelly allowed to spew all
over fans and lay waste to their favorite book for 4 long years.
There
was every indication that this--again, a sequel to one of Marvel's most
beloved productions--was a fandom-alienating disaster in the works.
Fortunately, whatever all of this was intended to sell isn't, it seems,
the BORN AGAIN we'll eventually be getting. It's perhaps odd to
characterize as "fortunately" executives finally realizing that a string
of pretty obviously bad decisions had resulted only in a turd--an
expensive waste of time and money--but Marvel seems to have come to its
senses in time on this. When higher-ups reviewed the new show--several
episodes had already been shot--they came away with what the Hollywood
Reporter
described
as "a clear-eyed assessment: The show wasn't working." Marvel fired
basically the entire creative team and started over. Then January
officially brought the Netflix show back into continuity.
THR
said the abandoned BORN AGAIN had been intended, at least in part, as a
"legal procedural," and Marvel's last stab at that particular format
had gone as badly as anything Marvel has ever brought to the screen.
SHE-HULK: ATTORNEY AT LAW was, in theory, a thing for which this writer had been agitating for years, including back in my
first "What Ails 'Em" article:
"Jennifer Walters is the shy and reserved cousin of Bruce Banner--the
Hulk--who is gunned down by vengeful mobsters and to save her, Banner
must transfuse her with his own gamma-irradiated blood, a process that
eventually transforms her into a big, green Amazon with super-strength.
Unlike her cousin though, she doesn't become a raging brute. She retains
her full faculties in her Hulk form and her real transformation, it
turns out, is more personal than physical. Becoming the She-Hulk makes
her shed her shyness and gain confidence in herself. A lawyer, she comes
to love being a superhero on the side, and to prefer the She-Hulk to
her own form. Being a Marvel character, of course, she's far from
perfect. Those old insecurities can creep back in, her life can become
quite complicated and she doesn't always make the best decisions when
trying to sort it all out. Her writers have given her a great deal of
depth over the years--she's probably the best-realized, most human
superheroine in the Marvel stable, a great, great character who is long
overdue for feature treatment."
But I assumed a Disney-fied
Marvel, which is sexless anyway, would likely judge navigating the
perceived minefield of sexual politics lain by the character to be more
trouble than it was worth and was cautiously pleased when I learned they
were going to make the effort.
The pitch for SHE-HULK: ATTORNEY
AT LAW was a legal procedural comedy--a far-from-ordinary
lawyer/superheroine dealing with some of the nutty legal issues that
arise in a world of superbeings, a great approach to the material. The
show had the potential to be one of the MCU's all-time triumphs.
That, alas, wasn't what was delivered.
Though
this was only made public later, the problems behind the scenes began
almost immediately. The show's head writer Jessica Gao
revealed
that the writers, once assembled, discovered that none of them could
write good courtroom scenes! Which immediately raises the question of
why these writers were hired in the first place and why, when this came
to light, they weren't replaced or didn't at least try to do a little
homework on this. SHE-HULK was a half-hour show and there were only 9
episodes but it was going to be a very pricey one, thanks to another
very bad decision--to make She-Hulk a fully-CG character, instead of
just hiring an actress to play her. Photo-realistic CG characters are
insanely expensive and if the series was even going to resemble the
comics, it was going to be She-Hulk Jen, not human Jen, on the screen
most of the time. A bigger price-tag makes it even more important to get
writers who could actually do this kind of material. It's bizarre that
these particular writers were kept on.
Everything that happens in
every courtroom scene in the series painfully reinforces how bereft of
any understanding of law the writers were and how little effort they
made to acquaint themselves with the subject--a laymen who had never
gotten any closer to an actual court than some reruns of PERRY MASON
could have done better. And it turned out courtroom scenes weren't the
only thing they couldn't write.
Most
of the show's "comedy"--the other leg on which SHE-HULK was to stand--is painfully unfunny, which is particularly
unforgivable given the limitless comic potential of the material. These "writers" couldn't really write
anything.
In
the first ep, Jen and her cousin Bruce are in an auto accident when a
random flying saucer suddenly appears in their path and she goes off the
road. She's exposed to Bruce's blood, transforms and Bruce takes her
away to an island where his efforts to teach her to Hulk, so she doesn't
have to go through the nightmare he did after his change, are treated
as unreasonable, annoying, paternalistic mansplaining. The key
scene--and the one that particularly upset a lot of viewers--happened
when Jen decided to "girlsplain" her life to Bruce:
"Here's the thing, Bruce. I'm great
at controlling my anger. I do it all the time. When I'm catcalled in the
street. When incompetent men explain my own area of expertise to me. I
do it pretty much every day because if I don't I will be called
emotional or difficult or... might just literally get murdered. So I'm
an expert at controlling my anger, because I DO IT INFINITELY MORE THAN YOU!"
That
last delivered with full neck-veins a-poppin'--a character who has a
successful career, a supportive family and lives, from all appearances, a
very comfortable life angrily trying to outperform
Bruce Banner
in the Oppression Olympics with mostly minor annoyances in her
otherwise-sheltered existence (the writers throwing in the melodramatic
"might just literally get murdered" part perhaps in recognition of how
badly their scene plays). Bruce probably doesn't get "catcalled in the
street," but he did suffer horrendous abuse as a child, watched his
father murder his mother at a young age, spent his life accumulating
horrors and becoming more and more bottled up until an experiment made
all of that repressed stuff dramatically rise to the surface as a big,
green, unstoppable, nearly indestructible rage-monster.[9] He wasn't
"called emotional or difficult"; his life was completely destroyed, he
was feared and hunted, he lost, in succession, both the women he loved.
He wanted to die; he tried to kill himself and the Hulk prevented it. He
became such a danger to the world that he felt compelled to leave
everyone and everything he'd ever known behind and exile himself in
space. His life has been a descent into blackest darkness, and he wears
his past traumas as flesh, his body a living, anger-fueled weapon of
mass destruction.
Jen's rant at him, after he's learned to master that degree of rage and is able to sit calmly before her, is not only visually absurd, it makes her look terrible. She even morphs into She-Hulk and back at a will, just to underscore her "point" and taunt Bruce.
|
"...INFINITELY MORE THAN YOU!!!" |
Minutes before delivering that rant, we'd just seen Jen become so
unhinged by some boorish misbehavior by a group of guys at a saloon that
she hulked out and attacked them--probably would have murdered them on
the spot if Bruce hadn't been there to wrangle her down. Later, she
further belittles Bruce as someone who wound up "alone, hiding away on
some remote beach with no friends, no relationships, never seeing your
family and definitely not dealing with a decade's worth of trauma...
You're a cautionary tale."
That was viewers' first impression of the character.
|
On Bruce, comic Jen knows the score
|
Comic
Jen is a genuinely good, likable person. She's kind, nurturing,
fiercely loyal to her friends, has a strong relationship with her
cousin. She's a good lawyer, loves doing the superhero thing and her
persona in that role is, as one writer described, that of a
swashbuckling heartbreaker. She makes bad life decisions at times and
finds herself in goofy, undignified situations but readers root for her.
The
Jen the show introduces is an obnoxious, judgmental, self-centered,
dangerously reckless, vapid hypocrite, throwing out snide remarks about
others while, herself, behaving terribly. Getting viewers to overcome
that initial negative impression would be heavy lift for even the best
creators but the writers here--none of whom would ever be regarded as
falling into that category--never even try, as they seem
genuinely unaware that they're making their protagonist behave terribly
in the first place and think audiences will sympathize with her.
They, in fact, have the characters in Jen's orbit repeatedly talk about
how great she is, instead of showing us a great Jen. While
Jen complains about those "incompetent men" who explain her own area of
expertise to her, she's revealed at every turn to be a terrible lawyer, then, as the show nears its end, the writers have a legal group give her a Female Lawyer of the Year award. This Jen doesn't
even want to be the She-Hulk or even called that, except when--utterly
randomly--the writers decide to give her the exact opposite view for a moment.
That's how pretty much everything works on the show: randomly. Often
contradictory within the same ep.
It's
necessary to say a few words here about a much-discussed--often
misdiscussed--aspect of SHE-HULK: ATTORNEY AT LAW, the writers' decision
to make an ugly, in-your-face misandry a central focus of the series.
Ep after ep is just an endless parade of cartoonishly sexist male
characters behaving in cartoonishly sexist ways, dimwitted men behaving
in dimwitted ways. The "men are shit, men are shit, MEN ARE SHIT!"
messaging is absolutely relentless and quite off-putting, not just to
rightist trolls scouring every nook and cranny for "wokeism" to inveigh
against but to any conscientious viewer. Strictly
an innovation of the show's
creators, this doesn't reflect any incarnation of the comics but it's
one of the show's central foci, a thing to which nearly everything else
is made to take a back seat. Entire
"characters" exist for no other purpose than to act as ambulatory
billboards for it. Dennis, a lawyer colleague of Jen's, may as well have
been named Joe Stupid Sexist Male Caricature Esq. That's how he's
written, not as someone who is supposed to be a real person but as a one-note joke that is never even once funny.
Jen's misadventures in dating, in which she ends up with one sleazy
loser and asshat after another, could have been, in more skillful hands,
the amusing comment on the difficulties of dating in one's 30s the
writers wanted it to be, except in the context of the rest of the show,
it just comes across as more ugly misandry. "MEN ARE SHIT!" for the
150th time. Jen had drawn in these fellows by creating a dating profile as the She
Hulk, and only after the fact do we learn that on it, she had answered the question,
"What are you looking for in a partner?"
by writing "A sturdy back and reinforced king-sized bed." Hard to believe this didn't draw the cream of the crop, right?[10] The
writers anticipate the negative response their shoddy work--and
particularly their relentless misandry--will generate among the regular
fans of screen Marvel and preemptively indict their critics as a bunch
of misogynistic
dudebros, who are revealed, near the end, to be the series' villains.
In
the end, the She-Hulk is so appalled by the stupid story that has
played out that she breaks the fourth wall and goes to confront the
show's creators over it. Jen demands that the ending be reorganized in a
way meant to make it less dumb but her version is just as nonsensical. For
the writers, it's a self-indictment, but a very poorly conceived one
because it leaves viewers with nothing. There's no story, just a bunch
of stupid shit that happened then didn't go anywhere. The whole series was an exercise in trolling its own target audience.
Wouldn't it have been better to just get good people to work on it and at least try to make a good show?
It certainly would have been cheaper. The punchline to this--arguably the low-point of the MCU to date--is that Marvel spent $225 million to make SHE-HULK: ATTORNEY AT LAW--more than was spent on most of Marvel's feature films. The good news is that this likely means
this is the last we'll see of this show. The bad news--and it's very
bad news indeed--is that with it, Marvel thoroughly wasted its best
superheroine, who deserved a hell of a lot better than this.
The
show wasted other characters as well. Titania is a good character, not
always treated well in the comics, but who went from a bullied girl to a
villainess to sometime anti-heroine. Her backstory seems rich for
screen adaptation.[11] Here, she's reduced to a venal "internet
influencer," swiping the She-Hulk's name to sell beauty products in a
show that used nothing of the comic character except her name. The
Wrecking Crew, a superpowered gang of beefy bruisers who have taken on
some of the most powerful heroes in the Marvel universe, are here just a
bunch of scrawny losers the She-Hulk takes apart with minimal effort.
All the characters in the show had to be was a random gang of thugs (one
of them later a repentant one). Why make them the Wrecking Crew?
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The Wrecking Crew...
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The "Wrecking Crew" from SHE-HULK: AAL.
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Don't even get me started on what they did to Man-Bull.
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Man-Bull... |
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Man-Bull in SHE-HULK: AAL.
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Wasting characters in this way is a regular problem with comic-to-screen
adaptations. Wasting villains is a particularly acute problem for
screen Marvel.
CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER was a terrible
movie but one that introduced a great Red Skull, essayed by actor Hugo
Weaving. For decades in the comics, the Red Skull was Captain America's
major nemesis, a brilliant, resourceful, megalomaniacal fanatic chosen
by Hitler, during World War II, to be the Fuhrer's right hand and
successor and devoted, after the war, to bringing back the Third Reich
and achieving mastery over mankind. He'd certainly be an excellent
pretext for topical tales about the recent rise in fascism in the U.S.
and around the world, but THE FIRST AVENGER chucks all of that and has
the Skull declare war on the Nazi regime--only one of that film's
infinity of WTF? missteps--then takes him off the board in a way that
would allow for his later return. And then, of course, he never returns,
except for a minor appearance as the guardian of an infinity gem.
MODOK
was another major comic villain, one of Jack Kirby's strangest
creations, who, as head of the group of evil scientists who created him
(Advanced Idea Mechanics), has menaced nearly every major Marvel hero
for decades--an incredibly formidable foe. ANT-MAN & THE WASP:
QUANTUMANIA disposes of the characters entire backstory, keeping only
his name and very general appearance from the comics and reducing him to a pathetic joke.
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Jack Kirby's original MODOK design...
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...and the QUANTUMANIA version.
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In the comics, the Mandarin is arguably Iron Man's arch-nemesis,
certainly one of his most persistent foes, and the two have engaged in
many epic beat-downs over the years. IRON MAN 3--dreadful, like its
predecessor--introduced the villain, only to reveal that he was a
cowardly English actor being used as a front by the real villain of that
movie. While SHANG-CHI isn't a very good movie, I did appreciate that
it fixed this particular mess, introducing as its central villain Xu
Wenwu, a composite of the comic Mandarin and Fu Manchu and explaining
that the actor in IM3 had been, in effect, impersonating the
Mandarin--something Wenwu didn't appreciate. It at least restored some
dignity to the Mandarin. Unfortunately, the movie then killed him.
Villains,
of course, aren't the only characters wasted by screen
adaptations. Marvel introduced T'Challa, the Black Panther, but after a
single solo film setting up the character and some appearances in other
Marvel movies, Panther actor Chadwick Boseman became ill with cancer and
died. Instead of just recasting the role, Marvel foolishly opted to
kill off and replace T'Challa, throwing away over 50 years of great
stories featuring the character. While the Netflix DAREDEVIL was a great
show, it wasted the
character of Ben Urich. Comic Urich was a perpetually down-on-his-luck
reporter who manages to deduce Daredevil's real identity--a dynamite
story but one he can
never publish. He and DD become allies, and he's an integral part of
DD's stories for decades. The Netflix show killed him off in the first
season. As with the Panther and so many of these other examples, that
move didn't just waste Urich; it also wasted all of those decades of
great stories featuring Urich that could have been brought to the
screen.
Even a good movie like the first IRON MAN not only wasted
villain Obadiah Stane, it wasted one of the major epic tales from the
comic. Comic Stane took over Tony Stark's company and and ruined the
hero, leaving him a broken, drunken shell of his former self. In a
storyline that ran for 2 years and saw Stark replaced, for an extended
stretch, in the Iron Man armor by his pal James Rhodes, Stark had to
pull himself back together, rebuild his life and, in one of the all-time
high-points of the comic, take down the villain. The movie just makes
Stane a scheming businessman out for a buck and disposes of him in 2
hours. In 2019, AVENGERS: ENDGAME disposed of Iron Man himself, along
with most
of his then-nearly-60-years of adventures. His end was well-played but
it threw away a lot.
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Marvel house ad for Obadiah Stane storyline
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Unfortunately, comic-to-screen adaptations
waste storylines at an alarming rate. To note a few more, BATMAN BEGINS
pillaged elements of the great "Batman: Year One" comic, pissing them
away on a bad movie. Snyder's BvS stole moments from both "The Dark
Knight Returns" and "The Death of Superman." My second "What Ails 'Em" article
dealt with the travesty that was THE WOLVERINE, which had, in a
Wolverine mini-series it alleged to adapt, a perfect film storyboarded
on the page, threw it in the trash and gave the world a rancid
shit-stain of a movie. THOR: RAGNAROK, on the other hand, was quite
entertaining but it needlessly lifted from the "Planet Hulk" storyline
from the comics for a movie that had nothing to do with it. "Planet
Hulk" saw the Hulk exiled from Earth because he'd become too dangerous
to keep around. He was marooned on an alien world, captured and
imprisoned there, made to fight in gladiatorial games and eventually led
a Spartacus-style revolt, overthrowing a corrupt government, falling in
love, taking a wife and settling down as a leader of this world and its
people (and then--because it is the Hulk--losing it all). It would make--forgive me--an incredible
movie. Instead, pieces of it were just needlessly pillaged for a
project unrelated to it.[12] This kind of thing doesn't just travesty
the comics; for any future filmmaker who may want to do justice to those
neglected comic stories on screen, it spoils the story elements and
moments these "adaptations" do use.
"Planet Hulk" was, it
should be said, just the tip of the iceberg of great Hulk material--in
that case, misused but in most cases, completely untapped. For years,
the Hulk was
sort of like a
comic-book version of THE FUGITIVE, with the angry green goliath
bopping around every corner of the Marvel Universe, meeting all kinds of
weird characters and getting into odd, existential fantasy adventures
("Planet Hulk" itself emerged and drew from this very tradition). I
covered a few examples of this in my first article
on comic book movies. It would be great to see this brought to the
screen. The comics also established there are multiple "Hulks" in Bruce
Banner, products of his Dissociative Identity Disorder, and each emerge
at various points and have various adventures (one, who uses the name
"Joe Fixit," even becomes an enforcer for the Las Vegas mob). Again, a
nearly endless reservoir from which screen tales could be drawn. There
is, unfortunately, an issue of divided rights to the character between Marvel and
Universal Studios. Marvel can't do solo Hulk movies without a
profit-sharing deal such as was worked out for THE INCREDIBLE HULK and
because the Hulk is expensive to bring to life, that's apparently been
judged economically unfeasible. It's rather frustrating that Disney,
which has made a bloody fortune off Marvel projects, hasn't worked out a
deal to just get these rights back.
The Hulk can, however, be used in non-solo movies, and I'm really
surprised that Marvel has shown no interest in creating a Defenders
franchise, opting, instead, to waste that title--THE DEFENDERS--on the
crossover mini featuring the Netflix characters. While the tagline of
the Avengers comic has long been "Earth's Mightiest Heroes," it's the
Defenders to whom that title rightly belongs. Led by Dr. Strange, the
Sorcerer Supreme of Earth, they included, at first, Namor the
Sub-Mariner, who was the baddest thing in the sea, and the Hulk, the
baddest thing on land. When the Silver Surfer became involved, they had
the baddest thing in the air too. The Defenders are the "un-team," an ad
hoc alliance of, primarily, solo heroes who have little in common and
who come together, initially by circumstance then, later,
at Dr. Strange's initiative, to face various --and often quite
weird--menaces. The Defenders were social misfits, shaped by trauma,
beset by various neuroses and having, for various reasons, no real place
in the normal world. Their stories were quirky, imaginative, funny,
full of strange twists and creative, often bizarre
uses of the characters. There's much in the Defenders to appeal to
screen Marvel's affection for Bigness;[13] the team squared off against
everything from a serpent-themed group of white nationalists to
world-conquering aliens from a thousand years in the future to Hell on
Earth--a literal invasion of Earth by the forces of Hell--to (one of the
more notorious examples) an Elf with a gun! (Needs that
exclamation-point for the full effect). The Avengers/Defenders War was a
major storyline in which the two teams came into conflict. The property
represents an endless playground for ambitious filmmakers.
The
Hulk was part of the Defenders for over a decade, the only substantial
association of that kind in the primarily solo--and
solitary--character's long history. In the MCU, the Hulk is an Avenger
but in comics, he was really only ever a member of that team for 2
issues, 60 years ago.
For most of the MCU's existence, Marvel has
insisted on tying nearly everything it puts on the big screen to the
Avengers. The MCU divides its features into "
phases."
It was halfway through Phase 2--six years and 10 movies old--before the
first non-Avengers-related movie was produced (GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY
in 2014). There were 23 movies in the first 3 phases, and only DOCTOR
STRANGE and the Guardians weren't Avengers-related.[14] The
Avengers-centric focus was, as noted earlier, a marketing
decision, but it's one that created its own set of problems for the MCU
going forward.
Those first 3 phases were essentially one big Avengers
story, into which even the few non-Avengers-related characters were
roped. But if the MCU is
all (or nearly all) Avengers, that becomes, for an audience, what the MCU is,
the Avengers and satellites. Then Marvel rapidly took out most of the original Avengers,
the characters in whom the audience had become invested. Iron Man, who
had been the anchor of this version of the MCU, was killed off, the
Black Widow was killed off (and never got the solo movie set up by THE
WINTER SOLDIER until she was already dead), Captain America was aged out
of action and the Hulk was domesticated--currently going through one of
his "smart Hulk" phases that tend to be the least interesting for that
character. The
Black Panther, one of the later-generation characters who could have
taken up some of the weight of the MCU after all these losses, was
killed off as well. Along the way, Marvel did begin using
tv shows--the Netflix series, AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D., CLOAK &
DAGGER, THE INHUMANS--to introduce non-Avengers-related characters but
all of these were later declared non-canonical (until Marvel's recent
restoration to continuity of parts of the Netflix shows).
Because big-screen Marvel wasn't introducing and nurturing new
characters all along, letting them go off on their own and build their
own audiences and their own little portion of the MCU, it has created a
viewership that doesn't expect that, and Marvel has really struggled to
introduce new characters in the last 2 phases, which have continued to
be Avengers-centered. A lot of that built-up audience can't help but
view things like SHANG-CHI and THE ETERNALS as aberrations, anomalous
side-projects that come out of nowhere.
The overall quality of
the MCU has, of late, undeniably dropped,[15] and this has fed the
now-oft-expressed sentiment that comic-based productions have so prodigiously proliferated
that they're becoming a glut on the market. Marc Guggenheim is right
though. A central theme of this piece and its predecessors has been an
objection to, as I said before, the very limited conception, by those
behind these productions, of exactly what these productions could/should
be. It's no overstatement to say that the comics on which these
projects are based have been used to tell every kind of story there is.
They have a vast and fascinating history, a rich mythology, they take
place in every conceivable setting, explore every kind of psychological
and emotional terrain, cross every genre. Why, then are their screen
adaptations so often cut from the same narrow cloth? The problem isn't
too many productions; it's too little diversity in the kinds of stories
being told. Too much of the same thing. A slip in quality can't help but
make this more acutely felt.The Avengers-centrism limits the MCU to those relatively few characters and the way Marvel has gone about it--cavalierly throwing away so much of the individual characters' vast canon and mini-universes of their own[16]--isn't the only way that such an undue focus on the team has stifled diversity. The nature of the Avengers themselves, I would argue, does as well. In comics, the Marvel Universe proper began with the Fantastic
Four, who were a team of explorers. This offered an automatic premise
for seeking out new corners of the world, new dimensions, new universes,
a vehicle for constantly expanding the terrain of the Marvel Universe,
which was done. The FF landed on the moon before real-life humans.
Subterranea, the Negative Zone, the microverse, alien worlds, Atlantis,
Wakanda,
the Great Refuge of the Inhumans--all mapped by the FF. The Avengers are
just a team of powerful heroes who come together to repel powerful
menaces. It's a much more limited premise. The MCU badly needs the FF.
It's good that it will soon get it; it has needed it for a while now.In
Hollywood, the thinking is that nothing succeeds like success, so just
do the same thing as often as possible, instead of anything different,
which could be risky. If Avengers-related movies make money, make more
Avengers-related movies. A tentpole picture with one of these IPs can
make a billion dollars, so turn them all into tentpole pictures, whether
it suits the material or not. The last movie was big and made money;
make the next one even bigger to make even more and never deescalate.
ComicBookMovie.com recently reported
a rumor that Sony and Marvel have again come into dispute over the next
Spider-Man movie. Sony wants to another huger-than-huge multiverse
adventure and to bring back
the Spider-Men from other dimensions, whereas Marvel is arguing for a
more modest,
more grounded film. One would like to be encouraged by Marvel's
part in this, except Marvel is reportedly using, as examples of what
they'd prefer, the more "grounded" first 2 Spider-Man pictures.
This writer would like to see more creative intelligence brought to bear
on how these characters and their worlds are brought to the screen.
That can be a tough case to make to a Hollywood of bean-counters who
only want to sell spectacle and only see things through the lens of the tried-and-true.
Among
other things, I'd like to see more respect for the original material.
That shouldn't be read as encouraging Comic Book Guy masturbatory raving
against the movie changing the color of his favorite character's
belt-buckle, but the original material is, after all, the stuff that
made the properties popular enough to be turned into movies and tv shows
in the first place. There needs to be a lot more consideration of
whether a proposed change is for the better or the worse, or if it
serves a higher purpose. The ending of WATCHMEN, for example--which was,
overall, a
very faithful adaptation of the comic--arguably fixed
a problem with the ending of the original story (one of its only
significant deviations from that story). There would have probably been
no way to do X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST as a
note-perfect rendition of the comic story on which it was based because
so much of that story and its imagery had already been lifted by James
Cameron for THE TERMINATOR. The movie that was made, which is quite
good, changes most of the details of the story but very much keeps the
spirit and the flavor (and even a lot of the structure) of the original.
Another side of this is SIN CITY, where the comic creator Frank Miller
teamed up with Robert Rodriguez to create a movie that basically just
replicated the comics on the screen, scene for scene, line for line.
Still another side is James Gunn's GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY movies,
nearly every aspect of which wildly departed from the source material of
the characters used but created a run of movies that rank among the
very best of this long comic-movie boom. That's really down to Gunn
himself, who is both a top-shelf creator and a comic book guy. [17]
Before ECHO was released on Disney+, the series' producer Sydney
Freeland offered a great example of how
not to go about handling an adaptation (or public relations):
"'Echo's]
power in the comic books is that she can copy anything, any movement,
any whatever. It’s kind of lame,' Freeland told press at an event for
today's trailer release (via Variety). 'I will say, that is not her
power. I'll just kind of leave it at that.'"
I'm sure it was
as shocking to everyone else as it was to this writer that the show
built on that kind of "respect" for the character (whose abilities are
actually pretty cool) turned out to be
really terrible.
Why
not a Batman that isn't some string of huge-scale spectacle but just
lets him be a crimebusting detective? A Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man
who faces off against his comic adversaries? A Suicide Squad or
Shang-Chi franchise like the original comics, which would be cheaper to
make and offer the potential for much healthier profit margins? Smaller,
thoughtful, more intelligent character-driven stories where the stakes
aren't the end of the world? The answer to all of that is "dollars." The
tentpole mentality is always looking for the billion-dollar pay-off,
which may make all this baying I'm doing here in vain, but I'd argue
this long comic-movie boom has already furnished evidence for my part in
this. Fox, for example, produced three Wolverine solo movies. The first
two were unwatchable; the first was the most expensive and the least
profitable. The third, LOGAN, was the kind of smaller picture I'm
suggesting, was by far the least expensive of the trio and made far more
money than any of the others. Spectacle isn't what made these comic
properties sell on the page for so many decades; it's just one of the
things they can do.
The tentpole model
can eventually kill these movies if it isn't
reigned in. If a string of very expensive flicks fail at the box-office,
the studios will become less and less willing to gamble the big sums
needed to produce the Bigger, Bigger, Bigger pictures--the only kind of
comic movies they seem to want to make. There has to be more diversity
in the kinds of stories being told. There have to be smaller pictures to
let these characters live and breath and do what they've always done in
the comics.