--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.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlEKQ6SP42BVk7CU0afbaOXyfPWWCvq-_x8lLjlzMBYdtyuKg8p_q-5Mum6gUTc60xf7tcHg_UprNGSm3KBtgUNmsPouTkP4KnH6sRXhqm8IOaOWWGPiVUKUPQKBtO-Cg-z1Kq3D6h_zMb_gZr6TT7lbVoFX0ytEvTd5V8dqDD0RrUG0rWhKWOAvl-/w640-h266/SheHulk_infinitely_more.JPG) |
"...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.
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--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?
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG_TWuGpdfu-Do9vPJ7YHFZpP_tjHXfzerSDdaoPn3you0WdEghH_RU4LiUCylbBHqTdWYWYmvB3LeKZINeF-EdhHatHZgslw5uP_vkXdGUYIWdqV-HxauGgm1XCpqgAj7BJD0WpWVplsr0l1BuTFtX_BxpM86l_OJ2uZD7uHLjtZvS5FM1xQ-u0yQ/w400-h343/Wrecking_Crew_Iron_Fist_11.JPG) |
The Wrecking Crew...
|
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqDoyu28ihLxmdCHujLJ0oqPvfjeJuiWzaGBE4916jn0r3FZBjssVfp_2fHHcDaHhsNqO6rFbq-L2HY8TxZwhbZSvyknT4ll3UOWo_OqrxsrOLudLZPBUaAvLni2SrSPTW81h05V0z_T5JLZz-0FRZ_AeDOZrOUsfQmKPu2FrDd0dtd-072E98ojei/w400-h235/Wrecking_Crew_SheHulk.JPG) |
The "Wrecking Crew" from SHE-HULK: AAL.
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Don't even get me started on what they did to Man-Bull.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidefd9mzfQiNCL3bPR74cmJ-tuewUlpUeDwBuDpilg-qHfAOx7sjco11Zc2_1wcHZtGZa7RmZs0AyYqciSctoaEZLMaWKiPbrCz8H__1GdsB9vuWt51TQQRLoGZREfRlHx26oUtZ0N8_6o_lkoC-DuG3susQpialPMfDMf3LvU4ylQ5k6kIrJebcN9/w354-h400/ManBull_DD144.JPG) |
Man-Bull... |
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgssjCs-_2lksGurxRT19zi25grI8lEw9Fgug7vlIuMec-RH1J6DaY4YxfZKC1XwIuY0HMK2CYvmK6PMWL0_1q_jy2XjK4iTANFTtuCPFgbF-Rqq9F51xaFsyAB5-wOIf0IAfFxDf2kYz6xN3nQmvpVOPMxLMKxY_PFcqh-lib7jz1AwpTTiVoCkh6Q/w400-h236/ManBull_SheHulk.JPG) |
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.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGGpsQkeez1xrQ8Qc0YJEGfqhaovDkqbhJA3YRXlkHHMF4JQF7nRuMzLjajipfeTx5b8IL12wolkGC29MKGeY15D10lAjdgAXwsGBCV64Wjuu7ZcidPRIMfBrAgg8cxHCBs-fQaGhlkgzfO87OIo4QPlujPE7o9YIbwzc2YEs-nqskmPa5iKmie1RD/w400-h310/Modok_Tales_of_Suspense_94.JPG) |
Jack Kirby's original MODOK design...
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![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis-IUplniRqaaWHQJER1gVz0YWDyc_jvDUmhTQOWCRVhdTHrcyDN4PLSkYzczcxseDLRAI-R2_d1LZ6mgVQFOWLO3e7q676J14uE8R0p2PpbCL4h4Lsa2D3YiG6AtUZlUcRukxqHya5uEHQiRNfEA8RPh_JFwV8TWE3kUllGdgf3SP4o_j0gNFcwrU/w400-h283/Modok_Quantumania.JPG) |
...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.
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.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1gn2Bm_ucxV9-KNesG67tcCAANXmNR9n9KIKeNVOWhZDqxv-AA1ZNoMH_HLLm7CxcqMDDIp1_VqsSteIgGqWTGZ6HdoWdj9VkVoEHGXq8p7ZV8O_vykrwdlGcYz3j6a38D04i1VBvMSQ7fhHCgaKjnHhdpZoBWw98LWmYmtf_jUDDwNofcdpTomrj/w268-h400/Defenders.jpg)
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.[15] But if the MCU is
all (or nearly all) Avengers, that becomes, for an audience, what the MCU is,
the Avengers and satellites. That's the thing in which audiences become
invested. Then Marvel basically 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,[16] 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.[17] A slip in quality can't help but make this more acutely felt.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. [18]
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.