By CONOR SHEA
Executive Editor
It used to be that a “super hero film” was a genre, not a classification of the characters involved. The term is a throwback to the days when movies like Shaq’s “Steel” were being produced. And yet we find ourselves in a sort of renaissance for the super hero film, where the fact that super powers are involved is less important than the world that surrounds them.
There will always and forever be a debate in cinema as to whether character or story drives the plot. You can have impressively-written characters dropped into an unrealistic and uninteresting world. You can just as easily have flat, unrelatable characters dropped into a spectacular and captivating environment. These are the two extremes, with the desired outcome for any filmmaker being somewhere in-between.
Marvel Entertainment did something that had never been seen before in a super hero movie with their first feature, “Iron Man.” In it, the audience was treated to a world and character that kept eyes glued to the screen. Despite this grand kick off, they would fall flat in their attempts to build interesting characters in a number of their subsequent movies.
It was only after the film “Avengers” and the beginning of their cinematic universe’s “phase two” that we begin to see the trends changing. “Thor: The Dark World” has been categorized by its directors as a science fiction thriller. “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” was called a political thriller by Marvel reps at almost every press junket. “The Guardians of the Galaxy” was hailed by studio head Kevin Feigie as a comedic space opera.
I’m sure you can see the trend emerging. These are not super hero movies, but in fact movies that just happen to have a super hero in them. By placing greater emphasis on the world being built around the characters, the tone of these movies change. In “phase one,” the movie-going public needed to be sold on the characters, not the worlds. As a result, we saw only glimpses of Asgard in the original “Thor,” and then spent most of our time watching the God of Thunder blunder around a small town in New Mexico, powerless.
These new films are telling stories with the character, instead of telling the story of the character. This means more interesting and complex plot lines, and more attention given to the film as it plays a role in the larger expanded universe.
Up next is “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” which even has director Joss Wheedon confused as to what genre it might be. After that comes “Antman,” which is being called a heist film. The biggest challenge Marvel will face going forward is keeping it fresh in terms of the genre, and being careful not to introduce heroes to us in formulaic ways.
Who knows, maybe one day we’ll see a Marvel horror film.
