“Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps!” That’s what Jeff Bridges bellows about Robert Downey Jr. in the first Iron Man movie. And, for a while, it was that scrappy, improvisational Stark-like energy that made Marvel Studios special. Across three “phases” of filmmaking, Marvel combined the backbone of good superhero storytelling (likable characters, exciting action, cool special effects, compelling plots, a fun sense of humor) with the true secret sauce of the genre: meaningful storytelling themes.
Lately, however, it’s as if Marvel has forgotten that superhero stories are actually supposed to have ideas. Marvel has moved from the Age Of Heroes to the Age Of Aimless Intersecting Content. That philosophy reaches its nadir in the latest big-screen addition to the MCU, Captain America: Brave New World—a film that continues the “what are we doing here?” trend of recent Marvel projects like Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania and Secret Invasion.
It wasn’t always like this. Marvel once understood what filmmakers like Richard Donner and Sam Raimi long ago proved: More than any other genre, superhero stories are built around archetypal characters engaging in ideological battles meant to reflect something larger about the human condition. That means they need driving central themes to elevate their sometimes-thin individual components into something greater than the sum of their parts.
Yes, I totally agree and I think you’ve hit on something subtle but really important…
The difference between starting to make a work (of art, if we are lucky) with an intent for it to be about something and telling people a work is about something.
I think the intent is important. Marvel’s latest round of press includes them telling us how the new Captain America is about modern politics but the plot really doesn’t hold that up beyond some fairly blunt motifs. Ultimately, it feels as if it about a struggling studio, if that is a theme.
I guess the context is really important… And it highlights the slippery thing between thematics and meaning. Take a film like Stalker where the plot is arguably slight, but the characterisation and the context give rise to meaning through the themes… It would be a different film if Tarkovsky had tried to market it as being about politics and Chernobyl.