With the three Marvel films that came out this year, I’m pleased to say that Superhero movies have become good again. Fantastic Four First Steps is by far the best of the three, and the only one that is pretty great, but starting with Captain America: New World Order, superhero movie are showing that they are on the right track, figuring things out.
That fourth Captain America movie wasn’t great, by any means, but it was good enough and had lots of well-executed ideas. For example, it finally gave us the ramification of the events of The Eternals, explaining how the world reacted to a giant stone god showing up in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It once and for all tied up the events of the Incredible Hulk, featuring the Leader (Tim Blake Nelson,) who was teased back in 2008, over a decade earlier, as well as Liv Tyler’s character, Betty Ross. In a way, it served not only as a Captain America movie, but also as a Hulk movie (without the Hulk.) But then it also included Red Hulk, which was awesome. If only they kept him out of the trailers, and let that be a surprise.
Thunderbolts was their next movie, and it was also pretty good. Florence Pugh stole the show with her brand of self-deprecating humor. And David Hardbour as her loud and foolish “father” was also right on point. The two of them made that movie what it was. And it also had nice tie-ins to the MCU including the follow-up story to what happened to the Avengers Tower. The movie could have used more action towards the end, and it would have been nice if the name Thunderbolts was connected to General Thunderbolt Ross (Red Hulk,) from the previous movie, but other than that, it was pretty good. Sentry looked fantastic in his yellow and blue costume. If only he donned it for more than one scene.
And then there was Fantastic Four First Steps, a movie that hit it out of the park in nearly every way. That movie came out firing on all cylinder, from the opening montage explaining what the heroes had been up to for the past four years, to the amazing way they brought Mole Man, The Silver Surfer, and most importantly… Galactus to the big screen. The movie was smart and funny and the effects were truly great.
And that’s just Marvel. It’s hard to talk about DC, (other than Superman) since that is the only movie the studio has put out since it relaunched. Everything that came before it, in the DCEU, is part of the past. Look at the picture above about the new trends in Superhero costumes. Five pictures, and four out of the five are from Marvel. Only Superman is there, representing DC. So, since all we have to talk about from them is Superman, let’s talk about Superman.
The James Gunn Superman movie was okay. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t really good either. The tone was right (menacing and dark, not in terms of color, but in terms of content and story.) But it was just too stuffed full of everything. In a moment we are going to get into trends in Superhero films these days, and one of the big ones is no more origin stories. Well, that actually hurt this Superman movie, because they didn’t even attempt to explain anything about his origin (the way Fantastic Four, for example, included a montage to help do this at the beginning.) But so what? Spider-man Homecoming never gave us an origin. True, but that movie at least gave us a beginning of the conflict with the villain. We saw Vulture the very first time he attacked. Superman doesn’t even do this. It throws us right into the middle of the conflict between Superman and Lex Luthor. There is no “beginning,” to the movie, and that definitely hurts.
But now let’s get into the new trends.
TREND 1: No more origin stories
This started with Spider-Man Homecoming. Origin stories were out. Since then, other franchises and movies that continued the trend are The Batman, Superman, and now Fantastic Four. And coincidentally for each of these franchises, the origin story has already been shown on the screen exactly two times before. With Spider-Man, we saw how the wall-crawler got his powers in the Tobey Maguire Spider-Men movie and the Andrew Garfield one. In Batman, we saw it in the Michael Keaton Batman movie and the Christian Bale one (not to mention a very brief version in the Ben Affleck – Zack Snyder movies.)
With Superman, we saw his leaving Krypton, and his parents sending him off in the Christopher Reeve movie and also in Man of Steel with Henry Cavil. And finally, with Fantastic Four, we got the origin story in the Tim Story-directed movie and then in the horrible Josh Trank directed film. Exactly two times for each of these (with a small asterisk next to the Batman, for Zack Snyder’s brief inclusion.)
So, now instead of giving us origin stories, the movie studios are aware that people know the story by now, and don’t need to see it again. And so they generally start their new take on the character in year two of his superhero life. In the case of Fantastic Four, it’s year four, but generally in most others it’s year two. Which means the characters have already been superheroes for one year, but are still pretty new to the game. It’s a weird situation, because it means the protagonist has already taken on other villains in stories we never saw. Batman apparently faced off against the Joker before, and we see him visit the Joker behind bars toward the end of The Batman. In the Fantastic Four, the opening montage shows us monsters and villains the team has faced off against alike, including Mole Man and the Red Apes of a John Malkovich character who was actually cut from the film.
No more origins might sound like a bad thing, (and in the case of Superman it is,) but in the case of three out of the four of these superhero franchises, we are looking at our best incarnation to date. There aren’t many who would claim that the Robert Pattinson Batman is better than the Christian Bale one, but the argument does hold merit. It’s a tough call to make after just one film. After all, the first Christian Bale movie Batman Begins was superior to the Batman. But then the series went on and on, and by the time they got to The Dark Knight Rises, it was clear that they had lost whatever magic they used to have. With the Robert Pattinson Batman movie, we get our absolute darkest, most atmospheric, and cool Batman to date.
In the case of Spider-Man and Fantastic Four, there’s really no debate. Tom Holland is highly regarded as the best Spider-Man yet, and the actor, himself, is loving every minute of it. How could you not, after not only playing the most iconic superhero of all time, but being told that you play him better than anyone ever has before? And how lucky are we that this is the version that we keep getting more of. They are now making a fourth Spider-Man movie with Holland. Tobey only got three. Garfield only got two. And with Holland, it’s not just these four movies, but he also made appearances as the wall crawler in Captain America: Civil War and the two Avengers vs Thanos movies. That’s seven movies with Holland playing Spider-Man. And it all started with them reimagining the Uncle Ben story, putting Tony Stark in Uncle Ben’s place as Peter Parker’s mentor / father figure, and beefing up the Aunt May role to be a much younger, more involved character than we ever saw before.
Finally, with Fantastic Four, the movie we just got, Fantastic Four: First Steps is truly better than the versions that came before it in every way. There’s not much point comparing it to the Josh Trank, way-too-dark and too stupid version, but compared to the Tim Story versions, this new Marvel film runs circles around them. Let’s put it this way… the Tim Story versions were too light, campy, and colorful. They were goofy. The Josh Trank version was the exact opposite, and was way too dark. But this third incarnation finds the balance, and finally gets it just right. And, getting back to the no-more-origins idea, the way they do present some backstory on the characters, with that opening montage, is just terrific. It’s one of the few montages in movies that is done so well, it actually elicits some emotion from the viewer, who right away is given the sense that they finally figured out how to do this movie right.
TREND 2: More colorful costumes
The second new trend is colorful costumes. For this one, I must once again refer to the photo at the top of this article. Back in the early 2000s when the superhero movie genre really took off, darkness was all the rage. The Matrix had just come out, with Keanu Reeves and his buddies wearing all black leather coats, and that movie was a sensation.
TREND 3: Lots of villains