By fnord12 | May 8, 2012, 2:05 PM | Comics & Movies | Comments (3)| Link

Time to make superhero movies more like comics

Alyssa Rosenberg again:

"Why The Avengers was so exciting to watch," Ben Kuchera wrote in his review of the movie at Penny Arcade, "was that once you have every character set up and properly introduced by their previous films you can do anything. The script doesn't have to spend time and dialog explaining who everyone is and where they came from...They each arrive on the screen fully formed, without the dullness of a well-worn origin story weighing them down."

I think he's right, and he's nailed something important about where we are in the development of comic book movies. Some, if not all, movie franchise are finally fully behaving like comic books, giving us extended explorations of individual characters that intersect with and then diverge from other characters we're spending time with in parallel, and examining new iterations of characters before the memory of the last version of the same figure has faded. To some critics, that means we've succumbed to an efficient, corporatized entertainment system that hits the same beats over and over again. Certainly, one of the reasons Spider-Man is rebooting is so Sony keeps its rights to the character and doesn't let them revert back to Marvel. And if the lesson Marvel takes from the massive success of The Avengers is that pure repetition is a gold mine, that would be too bad. But I also think that the willingness by Marvel to give us more than six-odd hours over three movies with a set of characters presents an opportunity to demand richer, more unusual, deeper explorations of characters, to turn action movies into the kind of meditations we're more accustomed to getting from television.

Or, you know, like comic books. We've been saying this for years, of course, but if it took an awesome Avengers movie to get the point across, i'm fine with it.