Despite the flaws, I really enjoyed Endgame back when I saw it in April. Ever since I saw it, I felt like 1) I wanted to watch it after a refresher viewing of the previous movies, and 2) I wanted to see it with my boys.
The second impulse came (in part) because of what happened when I was at Infinity War, which, if you still haven't seen it, I'm going to be rather spoiling the film for a quick sec. At the end of Avengers: Infinity War, the Snappening transpires, which totally shocked me because I had been so well conditioned by Marvel movies to see the heroes pull off the big win at the end of it all (additionally, I purposefully don't pay attention to announced movies as much as possible, preferring to be surprised by when they show up, rather than anticipating them). The ending to that movie is powerful, raw, and surprising. Gayle and I sat in the theater, waiting for the end of the credits (again, conditioned), only to hear the heart-rending wailing of a kid a few rows in front of us. He had just seen some of his most beloved heroes get dissolved in front of his eyes. Methinks the price of that family's tickets will increase with therapy bills later on. I didn't want that to happen; I didn't want my youngest (he's six at the moment), who has seen some Marvel movies, jump ahead to Infinity War and see so many characters get Snapped. That was not a parental-trial I wanted to face. So I decided that we would get around to rewatching all of the Marvel movies together as a family--yes, there's some uncomfortable content, and I'm not going to sweat that too much (I saw Batman Returns in the theater--you know, the one with the Penguine trying to bite a guy's nose off? Yeah, that one--and I'm only slightly permanently scarred)--before I hit Endgame again. Then my kids would have a fuller experience with the emotions that the film is playing with. It's not quite the same with being in the moment, I know--there's a full third of my life in which Marvel movies have been made. Considering how I was very much the stereotypical nerd who yearned to see his favorite characters on the silver screen someday, the Marvel films really have been emotionally significant to me. I can't recapture that: My kids grow up in a Marvel-dominated world (and hurrah for that, says I). But I think this process will be worthwhile anyway. We've already knocked back Iron Man, Thor, Iron Man 2, and since I rewatched The Incredible Hulk only a few months ago, we're considering that one complete. That meant that, before Amazon Prime loses all of the Marvel movies to Disney+, I decided to watch Captain America: The First Avenger last night. And by saying that, I have now taken about 500 words to get to this particular point: I am still conflicted about that movie. There are a lot of things about the Marvel movies that are rightly criticized: The music is forgettable (good while you're in it, I suppose, but essentially without the ear-worm stylings of earlier superhero movies (think the John Williams Superman theme, or Danny Elfman's Batman theme, for example)), the colors are sometimes a touch bland, the character arcs are familiar, they always end with a swarm battle, the girlfriends are immaterial to most of the heroes…all of these are valid points, and there are some more, too. One of the more subtle critiques--and one that really just gnaws at me--is that it's a much more progressive world. I mean, don't get me wrong: I love the fact that Agent Carter and a couple of nameless (essentially; I didn't catch them, at least) Black guys are brought into Captain America's squad after he busts his best friend out of Hydra prison. I wish that Bucky had been Black just to drive that home a bit more: In this version of history, they weren't Buffalo Soldiers or a segregated unit like the 442nd Infantry Regiment. They have a San Diego-born Asian-American, a Brit, a guy I'm assuming is Irish, as well as a couple of White guys and the Black guys. We don't spend a lot of time in their presence, so we never get attached to them, but seeing that kind of rich diversity that America can have (if we let it) is awesome to see on the screen. So what's the problem? It's not historically accurate--and what I mean by that isn't "I want my superhero movie to only feature White people 'cuz that's what history says and the source material" kind of argument. It's the same problem as having Captain America focus on defeating Hydra instead of Hitler: The real-world, real-history problems were deep, damaging, and destructive, but the film vaults over them without so much as a hesitation. The Holocaust is pretty much one of the most wicked things that happened in Europe--World War II was pretty much one of the most wicked of things to have happened to the planet. No one walked away without sin. Our institutionalized racism was horrendous--so bad, in fact, that the Nazis used our racism as propaganda to try to influence Black soldiers to defect--and America is the only country in the world to drop two nuclear bombs on civilian populations. It isn't like we walked away from that conflict without some heavy stains on our souls. But the version of America that Steve Rogers represents isn't the one that we have. Maybe that's the biggest part that bothers me: He has a vision and understanding of America that we never got, though many of us believe it is the same one. There's nothing wrong with having a story with an alternate-timeline of how American history went. That's not the issue: It's the way that it feels like it's supposed to be interchangeable with our own timeline. I plan on talking to my kids about this very thing, especially since my oldest is studying The Hiding Place right now, so he's becoming exposed to the real terrors of that time period. This matters to me because so much of how we view the world is filtered by the media we consume. While I do think America was a force for good during World War II, I don't want my kids to think that Rogers' America is our America. Additionally, it still bothers me to think about how Captain America--the paragon and quintessence of Americanism--is used to charge a dumpy little fortress in the Alps when he could have been helping push through the German lines at Bastogne or liberating parts of France. The timeline of the movie, to me at least, was a bit murky. Obviously, it was post D-Day when Rogers arrives in Europe, but where he is and when is incomplete. I mean, when he attacks the Hydra headquarters, he literally rides his motorcycle in, as if it's just a matter of using the 1940s version of MapQuest to figure out the best route in. I know that there are a lot of cuts that a movie like this has to take in order to 1) hit the two-hour run-time, and 2) keep it simple enough to tell the portion of the bigger story (how Captain America came to be and ended up in the 21st century), so there had to be concessions. Nevertheless, I feel like their version of the war doesn't really show the sacrifice, danger, death, and suffering that transpired in the war. Nothing really shows that to me quite as strongly as the shift from Hitler to Hydra. Honestly, the easiest way for me to swallow what happens in Captain America: The First Avenger is to assume that the Holocaust doesn't happen in this timeline. I know that America didn't get involved in Europe because we wanted to stop a genocide. But by the time (again, it's not perfectly clear) Rogers was blocking blue disintegration blasts with his vibranium shield, the crimes of the Nazis was no longer whispers and rumors: We had been liberating camps as we marched eastward, and the Russians (non-entities in this film, which is not unusual for World War II narratives; why should we credit our future enemies with their due? They were communists, after all) had been doing the same as they raced toward Berlin. Steve's fixation on Hydra--which is flimsily cast as being even worse than the Nazis, though it's only through some hasty dialogue--honestly feels out of sync if there are death camps dotted throughout Europe. Look, he even thinks about diving into the water to save that young scamp during the foot-chase scene ("I can swim! Go get him!" the kid tells him). Are we seriously going to say that he understands the Hydra threat to be so large--this mystical, quasi-magical weaponization of Norse deities' power--that people being burned alive in ovens is immaterial to him? I'm not saying that I want Hydra to be more wicked than Nazis. That would require a lot of uncomfortable decisions that wouldn't make sense in the alternate-world that the Marvel movies work in. Instead, I wish that the Nazis were also considered a threat…maybe the threat of the story, only learning about Red Skull and the tesseract in the final moments. The thing is, masked soldiers who do a double-arm salute instead of the blonde-haired, blue eyed brownshirts doing a single-arm Nazi salute really doesn't feel like a legitimate threat to me. I feel like Hydra's dangerous because the movie says they are, while the historian in me is reminding me of all of the horrible things that happened to those who fought against the real-life villains. For me, it's a bridge-too-far to pretend like there was anything worse than Nazism's ideologies that were motivating the violence of the Second World War. I can't turn off my visceral reaction to that time period long enough to let a garishly-dressed supersoldier kill (and, boy, does Rogers do a lot of killing) his way through these faceless spearcarriers without feeling like something is really missing. "But, wait. Don't you love Wonder Woman? Isn't that doing the same thing, but during World War I?" Yes. Good question. And that has been grist for a lot of thinking on that front, too. In fact, I felt so strongly about how Wonder Woman treated the Great War that I took my son to see Wonder Woman as a way of getting him exposed to World War I. So, what's the difference? On the surface, it's basically the same story, isn't it? Superpowered person ends up in the theater of war and, through heroic efforts and immense self-sacrifice, manages to keep a plane loaded with deadly, world-ending weapons from being released, all while defeating an antagonist who isn't actually concerned with the historical motivations for why the war is being fought. But Wonder Woman does a lot of things differently. First of all, they picked a less-popular war (what a world we live in where wars have anything representing popularity), one that wasn't as pre-loaded in the minds of Americans. The 101st Armistice Day was observed just a couple of weeks ago, but what was the experience like for Americans--here and over there--during that time a century back? Do we remember any of the soldiers who survived the Great War--or are they only significant in the way that they came into play during the Second World War? How many battles can the average American name that happened during World War I? How many battles did the Americans fight in during World War I? These are massive gaps in our collective memories, and as a result, it allows a fictional version of the war to fit inside the superhero paradigm better. Having Diana Prince in this less familiar conflict allows the film's incongruities (like, how the H did they get close enough to the bad guys' headquarters that Diana could go incognito in a stunning blue dress without being noticed?) to be easier to swallow. More than that, however, is the trench scene. Not only is there the symbolism (which I absolutely love) of Wonder Woman being the only person who can get across No Man's Land, but there's an intimacy with the violence that makes it feel more significant. That is, Wonder Woman has to navigate the trenches, where we see the suffering of soldiers wounded, horses drowning in the mud (about 8 million pack animals served during World War I; the screams of dying men were echoed by equine death-throes), and families displaced by the violence of the war. All in about ten or fifteen minutes of screen time, we get a strong sense of the cost of the war, the effect it has on those surviving it, and the traumas it inflicts. Remember the sniper guy's PTSD being so bad that he becomes a liability? Shell-shock was a real problem, one that many--if not most, to one degree or another--soldiers experienced. In other words, Wonder Woman treats the war as a war--albeit a PG-13 version (which is fine; not everything needs to be Saving Private Ryan level of graphicness)--and allows there to be cost, danger, violence, and stakes. Wonder Woman has its own flaws--the third act is, in retrospect, a fairly large stumble--but in the area where it feels most important (to me), it really succeeds: It makes me feel like this is a real war in which Diana Prince is committed to doing her best to help end it. Captain America feels like Rogers is taking out some bad guys in a foreign country, a la the beginning of Black Panther. Couple final thoughts: All of that being said, I still really, really like the film version of Steve Rogers. The comic book version never really clicked with me--as a kid, the Man Out of Time trope wasn't very interesting (I don't know if I'm that way still; I haven't thought about it) and his costume always struck me as ridiculous. However, Chris Evans' work with the character is really enjoyable. Yeah, his pre-serum body is a bit distracting, but I positively love what they did with the character. He's committed, self-sacrificing, brave, and unwilling to compromise in the areas where conviction matters most. He's simply fantastic. In a lot of ways, Captain America: The First Avenger is less useful as an origin story, and more valuable as a character study of what makes Rogers so intriguing. Lastly: Watching Captain America and thinking about Wonder Woman and the portrayal of those films makes me--once again--deeply consider what I'm doing with my War Golem book. I've mentioned it on occasion before (like right here), but in case you've forgotten, I wrote a novel where a World War I-inspired war is fought, but with gigantic golems as an additional part of the war. If you take the dragons from Anne McCaffery's Dragonriders of Pern and their relationship with their riders, the scale of Michael Bay's Transformers, and dropped them into trench warfare, you have a sense of what I'm going for in the story. It has always gnawed at me that I chose to write a book (two, technically, though I haven't looked at the sequel since I wrote it) that uses the real-life suffering of men and women in order to tell an adventure tale. I don't normally watch war movies, as I take issue with the idea of profiting off of the death and misery of some of the worst moments in modern human history. I know that some people view them as homages and demonstrations of appreciation, and I don't disagree with that. However, as I mentioned earlier, the media we consume gives us our lenses, and viewing the wars the way that Saving Private Ryan or Dunkirk do tends to push the narrative into a "my side is the heroic side; the other side is the evil side" kind of thinking. After all, there are only a couple of hours to tell the story, so shortcuts are required. But if a person watches Hacksaw Ridge (which I haven't seen, so I'm guessing here) and thinks, "Man, the Pacific War was crazy. Look how many people died! It was so bloody!", then the film has failed. Any story of Desmond Doss, I would argue, that doesn't inspire the audience to rethink what it means to serve a country and fight in a war is a failed telling of that man's story. (Again, I haven't seen it; I can almost guarantee, however, that some people left with those sentiments I just mentioned.) I haven't been able to come up with a way of squaring this circle. As I mentioned in my linked essay, I really do like War Golem. I think it's a pretty good book. Because it's a fantasy, I don't have to worry about things like the Armenian genocide or the British blockade that starved millions of Germans--I can have a Captain America style world where the terror is in the trenches alone. But I'm trying to make it feel like Wonder Woman in terms of giving the reader a sense of the trauma and fear, the worry and pain that war of that type creates. Is that enough? Is that what it takes to make a story with real-life suffering as its cornerstone? Care, consideration, and respect? I don't know. I really don't. But I wish I did. I watched a video essay about the value of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I've written more about the DCEU (DC Extended Universe) movies, in part because they're not as well told as the Marvel movies, but also because there are fewer films, and the ones that come out are more notable and noticeable as a result.
And that's an interesting aspect of the two: Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman, Suicide Squad, Wonder Woman, and Justice League comprise the entire DCEU canon. Marvel releases that many movies in a year--or so it feels. And, according to the abovementioned essay, by the time we see "the end" of the MCU, it'll be twenty-two movies long. That's…pretty crazy, honestly. I've been a comic book fan since I was in elementary school. I grew up watching Batman: The Animated Series, X-Men, and, of course, Spider-Man: The Animated Series. My favorite episodes of Tiny Toon Adventures or Animaniacs were the ones that spoofed and riffed off superhero tropes. And if someone had told me that the rest of American pop culture would fall in love with superheroes and allow them so much time on the movie screen, I would have been dubious. So I'm not complaining about superhero movies being ubiquitous. Quite the opposite: The more, the merrier. I'm certain that there will be a saturation point somewhere down the line, but I don't foresee it in the near-term*. If the films continue to have enjoyable stories, with interesting characters, intriguing visual effects, and great acting, why should they stop? Because the characters wear goofy costumes? That's a criticism of the superficial, and seems a superficial criticism while we're at it. I understand the idea of Marvel Movie Fatigue™, though. I didn't much care for Dr. Strange, since it was basically Iron Man but with magic instead. (Heck, they even have the same facial hair.) My wife and I missed Ant Man. And, though the films' qualities weren't the same, I think I enjoyed Justice League more than Thor: Ragnarok,** which shows that there is, perhaps, a limit to how far I, personally, want to go with the MCU. (With Spider-Man on their side, though, I'm not likely to ever stop throwing my money at the monolith that is Marvel.) Despite these qualifications, I think it's likely that the MCU movies will continue to do well. As the video essay pointed out, the films are serialized, organized like chapters in a novel. One big, familiar novel. The surprising thing about this is that, unlike most novels, there are skippable chapters. I mentioned having missed Ant Man, and it hardly mattered for my overall understanding of the story. We watched Avengers: Age of Ultron before we watched Captain America: Winter Soldier, and though we were slightly confused why S.H.I.E.L.D. wasn't around anymore, we didn't puzzle over it for so long that we missed out on the rest of the story. Now, while you likely shouldn't skip the large, flagship films (Avengers, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War), missing out on The Guardians of the Galaxy movies won't necessarily leave you in the dark when they show up in Avengers: Infinity War since, like Thor, you won't know who those characters are. In other words, the stories are formulaic so that, if someone misses a movie or two, most of the pieces are already operating tropically (that is, on their tropes). That's clever staging and writing, and it shows how well MCU has refined their storytelling game. Now, the films have plenty of problems: Forgettable scores, a lack of diversity and female characters (though steps are moving forward in this regard, and I'm very hopeful for Black Panther), an over-reliance on the "quip-quip-punch" set up, a misunderstanding of bathos, the "Marvel swarm" comprising the majority of the third acts of nearly all the films, and a samey feel for many of the villains. And while it'd be nice to see more of these issues addressed, there are probably plenty of people who like the things I'm calling flaws. So these problems are, in part, subjective (though the villain thing really isn't: I'm waiting for Marvel to give us a villain as captivating as the Joker--and, no, Loki doesn't count because he's more of a rogue than a consistent villain). These problems, however, are a natural outgrowth of the sheer size of the job. With so many moving parts, it's a wonder that there aren't more problems. And I think that's another interesting aspect of the MCU: Creative control. When Disney bought Marvel a few years ago, I was happy to hear it. The Mouse would infuse the comic book juggernaut with much-needed cash so that the comics (which aren't a lucrative medium at all) would continue to be made. In exchange, I would get to buy overpriced Spider-Man merchandise in Disneyland. Sounded like a win-win. Then the movies started to come out. And there are a lot of fingers in the pies of Marvel characters. Sony movie rights for Spider-Man and Twentieth Century Fox owning X-Men made crossovers unlikely. I can't remember who had Daredevil and Electra, but the early Marvel films had all sorts of different masters. (That's part of why Spider-Man: Homecoming was a big deal, because Sony finally acknowledged that they don't know how to make a Spider-Man movie.) With so many conflicting interests, I'm surprised that as many movies were made in the pre-MCU as there were. Perhaps that's the real shock and surprise (and disappointment) about the DCEU: Warner Bros. owns DC and that's about all you need to know. The rights are straightforward, and the mother company has a vested interest in making sure that the stories are successful. Were I a betting man, I would have put money on DC being able to be the leaders here: They had it so easy, with so little to interfere. But they tripped on their own shoes, while Marvel--who never should have had so much success, all things considered--managed to pull ahead. No, not pull ahead: Blaze the trail. DCEU has been playing catchup for the better part of a decade, and it doesn't look like they'll be able to recover that lost ground. (Yes, Wonder Woman, but that's a flash in the pan, at this point, rather than an indication of what WB can do with these characters.) Now, my "home team" is Marvel, but that doesn't mean that I want to see the DCEU fail. In many ways, I think DC has superior characters--but their stories don't grab me the same way. In the final analysis--at least, when it comes to movies--I will have to keep saying: Make Mine Marvel***! --- * Part of that is the peculiar sensibilities of comic book fans. For the hardest of the hardcore, there's a sense of ownership for their passion. This footnote can't really fit the reasons why, but the result is that the emotional investment from fans is more akin to sports fanatics than trend-chasers. Much like the PGA isn't going anywhere soon, I think the same for the MCU specifically, and superhero movies generally. ** The reason is pretty straightforward: I've seen Thor and Hulk fight together onscreen before. I've seen them fight each other onscreen before. I haven't seen Wonder Woman tag-teaming with Aquaman and Superman come back from the dead. In other words, though Justice League isn't an especially well-made movie (and, considering what it had to fix from Batman v. Superman, it's little wonder), but it was a different movie than what I'd seen before. That freshness helped to make up for the familiarity of the Marvel-formula in Ragnarok. *** 'Nuff said. Excelsior. |
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