Detail Diatribe: Superheroes in Empty Worlds

hello everybody and welcome to another uh fun and funky detailed diatribe I hesitate to call this one very special because this is at this point something like my fourth detailed I tribe about superheroes this one's different this one's different I'm complaining about several of them yeah this one's different because it's not just about Superman even though the subtitle of this is directly from Superman I promise I like other superheroes and I think about things that aren't superheroes sometimes too I contain multitudes but a lot of them are superhero comics so uh this uh this particular detail that I tribe and corresponding slideshow are the result of me kinda finally figuring out something that's been bothering me about superhero movie adaptation specifically and shows to a lesser extent for years and years this problem has has been kind of silently growing invisible under the surface infiltrating uh secret invasion of this problem in your mind damn it yeah but yes yes that is exactly what it is actually complained about this problem before but I haven't been able like to verbalize what exactly was bothering me about it so this is kind of my thesis on like oh that's why I didn't like these movies specifically but did really like these movies or why this one didn't work for me or why this specific plot Point rubbed me the wrong way it's all been leading back to this so uh let's talk about why do all these superhero universes feel so empty and like they don't really need superheroes at all to Toys Toys they gotta sell toys they gotta sell toys we gotta get them Funko pops but let's pretend for a minute that we live in a world that is not dictated entirely by the whims of capitalism let's pretend that artistic vision is truly what matters in these stories in that case why do all these superhero universes feel so emptied weird so to start off we should go back to the very beginning why we have superheroes at all the very first superhero as we currently categorize them was the Phantom the ghost who walks It Was Written starting in 1936 his gist was that he was like the latest holder of the title Phantom carried on a family oath to destroy all forms of piracy greed and cruelty he was quickly overshadowed by Superman and Batman and all the other cool big names from back in the day destroy all forms of piracy I didn't realize the Phantom was a narc hey it was like 1600s piracy all right he didn't know yet yeah sure the Phantom just crouched over reporting email addresses he finds on the Pirate Bay oh okay but there were a lot of other characters that were sort of cast from the same mold that contributed to the current concept of superheroes a lot of them had secret identities obviously you got you got Zorro in there the explicit in Universe inspiration for Batman which is kind of cute he had a secret identity with his civilian identity being a rich ditzy Playboy and his secret you know vigilante identity wearing all black with a cool Cape it's pretty obvious but you know so she got that you got you know Robin Hood folklore a noble Outlaw undercutting tyranny helping the poor Scarlet Pimpernel is a kind of classic referenced prototype superhero he was a wealthy Englishman with a secret identity as a rich idiot Playboy and he like saved Aristocrats from the French Revolution so this is fascinating I'm gonna read this one after we're done today oh yeah weirdly because uh people who sort of come around on elements of the French Revolution but you know the Scarlet yeah I'm very curious to see how they handle it because oh he helps the aristocrats get out of the guillotine it's like okay yeah well I'm gonna need you to contextualize this so I can see what angle you're taking here I think she was writing from the perspective of an aristocrat who was kind of watching this happen from a distance and was like man so someone should do something about that I'll make up a guy who could do something about that you also got the shadow he originated in radio plays which was kind of interesting because that meant his power set was like it had to kind of make sense in an audio only format and then when he was adapted into visual media later they were like the shadow can be invisible uh maybe or maybe it's hypnosis you know what it's fine but his his gist was who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men the shadow knows and then he turned up in a trench coat and Cape and big gun and uh stopped bad people from doing bad things and you also got some space age superhero types you got Buck Rogers and shortly thereafter Flash Gordon legally distinct from Buck Rogers and they kind of just went on Wacky Adventures and stopped bad guys and you can kind of see how the ingredients of modern superheroes were all sort of filtering out of this this Corpus of literature you had the secret identity thing you had what if they had a fun Rogues gallery of recurring villains for them to deal with you know you had why are they doing this they're doing it because something bad is happening and they can stop that and yeah so as superheroes kind of developed things got a little bit separated from that original in-universe reason for the heroes to exist that the broad development timeline for this sort of story is laid out on this slide with the example of Sherlock Holmes who is not a superhero but he is a hero and he fits the shape that we've discussed pretty clearly he exists because there is a problem that he is uniquely qualified to try and help people with so the development timeline and this sort of thing is that you have real world crimes problems you know just scary things happen and the writer is like oh man that's scary what if there was a person who could deal with that let me make up a guy and then get really into that guy so for instance you know Sherlock Holmes fictional detective he solves various crimes he helps victims that like the police won't listen to or perhaps can't go to the police you know people who otherwise have nobody to help them Sherlock Holmes helps them as time goes on this fictional hero will take on a life of their own as they get more popular stories get more complicated the writer contrives more problems and dangers for this hero to deal with this can lead to the end antagonists becoming more threatening and maybe escalating into full-on Nemesis territory instead of it being kind of a problem of the week setup you might get recurring threats kind of a Rogues Gallery as you were so that's when you start getting Sherlock Holmes dealing with Professor Moriarty who is only in two stories in the original run that is you know one more story than most people he typically deals with wasn't Irene Adler only in a story she's only in one story yes uh she's a she's a problem of the week what happens then is that later adaptations of this Heroes will fixate on those standout characters frequently the villains which can lead to them sort of disregarding the underlying substrate of you know the everyday problems that this hero exists to solve and was inspired by and probably spends most of their time dealing with rather than just the few bright flashes of fun scary Nemesis or Nemesis that you're maybe a little bit gay with that kind of thing so in these adaptations that Focus entirely on the character facing off against their greatest foe rather than all the other little flows that kind of Define who they are the hero can sort of be separated from their reason to exist and this is a problem that mostly arises in adaptations that are separated from those original formative conditions that led to this character arising in the story yeah this is where we essentially see the friendly neighborhood to Avengers level threat pipeline where you start first bullet point just doing stuff in a place helping people out and then by the end with enough time I mean granted the original Sherlock Holmes ran for many many many short stories there's a lot of OG homes but even then when you add you know a century and a half to the mix you have a lot of time for people to Stew on this and fixate on what they deem to be the most important aspect of this character which is gay best friend Amy Moriarty and then you get you know once you're at BBC Sherlock you have literally every threat that he has faced not only pales in comparison to Moriarty but every other threat was orchestrated by Moriarty the whole time which is we're getting into Sherlock's garbage and here's why territory but I shall not step on the toes of H Bomberman of course our age bomber guy um and this is a really good example of how with time that pipeline can naturally run its course over a century and a half but I'm sure we're gonna see how that can also happen way the hell faster yeah yeah well we start running into this specific kind of problem this I chose this example because it kind of shows this process in the cleanest quickest form I could find even though it did take like a century and a half but you know what I mean because in a universe where Sherlock Holmes is entirely defined by his mind battle with Moriarty who is both the greatest and the only threat he ever deals with why does Sherlock Holmes exist like why does he what because he's already doing his thing before Moriarty shows up because he doesn't arise in response to Moriarty the implication is that Moriarty arises in response to him you know even even in Sherlock that's like oh he's you've got yourself a fan it's like he does but what does he even do there's this implied background of normal crimes happening normal bad things that these heroes are dealing with but we rarely see them and it's kind of an out of sight out of mind thing unless we see them unless we recognize that they're happening the less we think about them the less the writers think about them and you end up getting this character who's sort of completely cut off from why they exist but we are getting ahead of ourselves a little let's start with again superheroes why does a super fire Superman firefighter Superman what does a superhero do what they do two simple reasons because it needs to be done and because they can do it because of who they are as a person they will always feel the need to do this thing that needs to be done opposing this danger this Injustice avenging a tragedy there's something at work in the world that's doing harm and it needs to be stopped Factor number two this character has some skill or ability or power that means they can do something about it and because of that and because of who they are as a person they are going to use their power to do the thing that needs to be done that's it it's very simple it's a one-two punch so basically what we have is that superheroes arise in response to pervasive evil and Injustice and problems that they want to solve and they exist and continue to exist to oppose that ongoing issue the thing is basically the thesis of this dubiously titled presentation is that a perfect Earth doesn't need a Superman this is taken from I think this is like Crisis 2 Electric Boogaloo the gist is that this Superman has been trying to mess things up uh in a crusade that he thinks is for a good reason he wants to bring back his perfect Earth our Superman points out that if it needed a Superman it wasn't a perfect Earth and that's the simple fact of it that like just that is enough to make the Superman realize like oh whoops I completely lost the plot on this um yeah basically and that's the thing like if the world is perfect it doesn't need a Superman Clark Kent could just do his own thing but the world isn't perfect so the hero has something to do again it's an order of operations that becomes easy to reverse if you lose track of things even in the Grim Dark Age superheroes existed for a reason even when they were being all horrible and depressing and it was all meditations on humanity and cruelty the superheroes were still very much necessary I really like this interpretation of Venom I like it too and it's completely in character as well he's just a little goofball sometimes I think this is from the beginning of lethal protector oh yeah I'm a fan of Venom as kind of just normal cartoonishly evil black suit Spider-Man Arc but I will admit I really like it when he's just a Goofy Goober we'll have more to talk about on that in an upcoming detail that I try oh yeah boy planting payoff let's go so the thing is when we've had superheroes for nearly a century they become the status quo we stop thinking to question why they exist we stop recognizing that they exist in direct opposition to a constant ongoing problem this is a panel from a thing we'll get into in a few slides but the gist is that you start getting these superhero stories where the superheroes don't exist because there's a problem to solve they exist because they want fame or money and they're going out and like picking fights and looking for trouble and there isn't any trouble for them to find which is a baffling direction to take a superhero Universe in because yeah that's yeah yeah you you start with the premise that this is a world that needs Heroes and then you're like but what problems I don't see any you're just picking fights with homeless people what are you doing man and it's like hold on I did this whole operation was your idea there's I'll see if I can find this but there's a little webcomic where someone says help that person stole a loaf of bread from my bakery in this this super I think it's like a cat is like don't worry I'll deal with this and they go to the mayor's office and it's like how come people in your town can't afford food it's like you don't need to go beat up the poor you can actually just solve problems yeah instead it is truly baffling that an interpretation of a superhero story can somehow get to the point of like well we need to to find something to do like there's always something to do I oh man that that is throwing me I'm sorry that's that's the thing that's years you get these superhero stories that are heroes in this world and then don't give them anything to do and then make the superhero feel all like oh I just don't know there's nothing for me to do and then they throw one problem at them per movie and then they usually kill the problem and then they go back to being like Oh the world doesn't need me and it's like then why am I watching this movie why did you make it 10 slides till Man of Steel I I'm trying to make it a rule to not talk movies I haven't seen and I desperately don't want to watch Man of Steel I watched Man of Steel okay that is a very thorough and solid description of the back half of Man of Steel because once Clark is established as Superman he speed runs into weight but what am I here for and like we talked about this in the in the last Superman one like early Clark and Man of Steel wants to help people yeah he's he he does so many things to help people the oil rig the kids on the bus there's so much stuff where he's actually being a good Superman and then once he gets the suit it's like okay well now you need to to brood about it now there's nothing and then it just completely inverts the whole point of his character so you haven't seen Man of Steel I have and I think that's accurate to the second half awesome great I did notice that from what I've seen of the DC EU it started with this problem really bad and then it sort of ratcheted it back over time it sort of tried to course correct Because by the time we got to Justice League or at least the Snyder cut it was kind of working for me a little bit you know Wonder Woman I thought I pulled it off really well Aquaman actually did a very good job making the world seem like it had a lot going on and it was believable that like hey this hero can't come to the phone right now because he's busy dealing with some crazy in the ocean you don't want to know about man like that's the thing that most of these superhero settings can't pull off because it's like one thing per movie and they never really hang out with each other so and I did notice in in Batman v Superman there's like a little Montage of Clark doing superhero like Superman stuff to kind of drive home like he's doing this like this is the thing that he's doing and when he's dead at the beginning everyone's like oh we miss Superman everything's gone to without him and it's like all right your tail don't showing it but I respect that you're at least telling me that things went wrong without Superman like that's better than we were at for the last couple movies anyway let's kind of show Batman being a little bit on the back foot trying to pick up some of the pieces and yeah two superheroes jobs at once but it's it's implied it's really not shown invade very strongly yeah but it does feel like they sort of recognize like Man of Steel had a problem because we did not convince the world that Superman was anything but a giant liability because like oh he shows up in immediately New York City gets pounded into the ground by a gravity machine oopsies like yeah it doesn't we don't get to see him fixing things practically what we see the beginning of Justice League is the world is sad because Superman's gone it's not the world is now hopelessly incompetent against the massive amount of problems that it is facing because Superman is God yeah because Superman is gone I should say yeah well whoopsies accidentally said the quiet part out loud no I just uh I think my model stopped I swallowed the syllable on that one so the Freudian slip if you just mispronounce the word yeah I guess yeah Okay so in adaptations you run into this problem a lot it's easy to focus on the second factor of why we have superheroes because they can do this cool thing that nobody else can do that's why they're a hero great but if we neglect reason one there's a thing that has to be done we end up with these sort of disconnected directionless Heroes that exist because they have to exist their face is on the poster but like there's not really anything in universe that's like motivating them they might have a single inciting incident you know Batman cannot get through a movie without his parents getting iced But like after that part the writer needs to remember that they have a continuing motivation they can't just drop the cowl and retire whenever they want which is something that a lot of superhero movies have completely forgotten about because so many hero movies nowadays and with the hero just retiring and nobody notices and this has been driving me nuts since the Nolan Batman movies an important distinction is that like what you said a inciting incident is not a motivating force it smacks him on the bum and gets him moving but it doesn't keep them going after the beginning yeah like that'll get you to the end of act two but really yeah that's about it right now I did want to talk about what I think is not not the reason this problem exists but has definitely led to some difficulties in adaptations of especially Marvel properties and that is the Civil War run uh from 2006 to seven a little seven issue massive crossover event and I initially started making this because I was like you know I really feel like the MCU Civil War movie is where it really started to feel like they kind of lost the plot on why superheroes exist because that's a movie where literally the only problem in that movie is caused by superheroes like there there is no outside threat even Zemo is just turning them against each other and I was like oh that's so annoying I really feel like that's the problem let me go looking for the comic I'm sure they pulled this off much better uh I was wrong about that but it was a learning experience because of course the MCU Civil War was a Loosely an adaptation of this big crossover event and a few people who talked about the movie were like look you gotta understand the crossover event in the comics was this absolutely massive Titanic thing like like it was every Marvel character taking a side it was the biggest event it wasn't necessarily good but like it was a big thing and then the MCU was like we got like a half dozen middle-aged actors in an airport parking lot uh and Spider-Man we got Spider-Man guys he's in the movie now and uh so that was kind of it didn't feel as massive it kind of highlighted The Emptiness of the Marvel Cinematic Universe at that point that this was everything we could pull together that it was just these like half a dozen to a dozen co-workers and some kids they found and that was the extent of this giant crossover event that was all they could pull together and it kind of made the world feel a little bit cavernous and empty but the comic run is definitely partially responsible for how the adaptations started getting all chin stroky about do we really need Heroes etc etc so the gist of the comic run is that superheroing has become a very very common career there are Solo actors and little teams getting into the gig picking fights for Fame and Fortune the inciting incident of the series is that this minor superhero team of teens with a real TV show picks a fight with some actual Heavy Hitters one of them blows himself up and in elementary school and the team of teenagers although nobody really brings that up gets fully exploded in the crossover so after his fire yeah sorry in the cross in the crossfire and the crossover so after the uh baby exploding incident this kind of becomes a hot button debate issue and everyone is forced to take aside and like immediately the first thing the comic does is like well we can't ban superheroes because we live in a world with thousands of super villains and they're not just gonna go away because we make it illegal to be a superhero so that's categorically not on the table but the question is basically would it be better if superheroes were just cops because cops never do anything wrong that would be good um a bunch of stuff happens uh super villains still obviously exists and will continue to exist so superheroes still have a reason to exist but the idea that maybe superheroes should be regulated kind of just becomes this back and forth thing there are several factors in this conflict one of them being a superhero as Government approved civil servant does not work with superhero has a secret identity but for a lot of Heroes secret identities are like necessary to protect their loved ones superheroes working for the government means the government is telling them what problems they can and can't solve which means the government needs to be morally right about everything and all that good stuff uh which is they ask big ass yeah um the X-Men point out that they already deal with unjust persecution from citizens and are in constant danger of the government going from regulating their actions to regulating their existence so they're kind of categorically not in this they just really would rather none of this is happening once the registration act in the comics becomes a loss Shield cracks down really hard on Heroes doing things like stopping muggings which kind of makes it seem like they're maybe losing the plot a little bit and as things go on team Tony which is Team Pro registration starts releasing super villains from prison to hunt down the Renegade superheroes that are just trying to help people and that's the point where I was like oh cool Tony has fully lost the plot wow what a tragic it's crazy how the road to hell is paved with good intentions unfortunately everyone in Civil War is a big dumb idiot because the apparently nobody told the artists and the dialogue writers that Tony was actually supposed to be right the whole time so they're like wow he's doing all these really bad stuff we should probably highlight how it's bad and he's being a super villain and then they were like no actually Captain America is bad you see Captain America noted bad person we had in the final boss fight we made sure he got tackled by a paramedic a cop and a firefighter all at once so they could tell him he was being bad and you had to listen to them he gets like the reverse Spider-Man 2 train sequence for a bunch of New Yorkers are like hey you're a dick you know literally he's like oh no if I become I'm gonna immediately immediately turn myself in and also like there's just all these weird little secondary things in the plot like when Tony goes kind of full like everyone who isn't on my side should be in prison and I'm sending super villains after Spider-Man to nearly beat him to death in a sewer but I'm the good guy there's like this mention of like hey normal crime is down to like zero percent and I was like oh no oh no they're just hand waving that bad things will still happen sometimes but even in this even in the now Arc typical do we need superheroes plot the need for Heroes is not actually ever in question it's pretty much taken for granted that in the Marvel comic Universe they are absolutely necessary you know there's snake people coming out of sewer tunnels and like blowing up Banks of course you need somebody with superpowers to deal with that but this is because the Marvel Comics Universe has been running for decades and is absolutely packed full of bad guys and nobody ever stays dead it's really busy we believe that there will always be something for Heroes to do we can take that for granted and the comics Universe because the comics Universe has Decades of precedent established they don't need to do any work to be like oh no we put all the superheroes in jail and then a bad guy showed up what were the odds it's like yeah of course a bad guy is showing up there's bad guys everywhere there's bad guys in this Arc but when you're doing an adaptation things get more complicated because you need to do a lot of work to establish those things and in the run time of a two-hour movie it can be really hard to do that it's not impossible but it can be really hard gotta fast forward through a lot of stuff yeah so I've identified some problem children just some general patterns I've observed in these movie adaptations you generally get one threat per movie and they usually end the movie by dying and for the most part you don't get any villains that recur I'll highlight the Nolan Batman movies in the next slide but uh this was kind of an unfortunate real life writing the plot because in the first movie Kill racial ghoul fine whatever in the second movie they clearly wanted to bring the Joker back they kill Two-Face but they are like yeah yeah the Joker's like ah we're gonna do this forever and then unfortunately Heath Ledger passed away and they clearly didn't want to recast him so yeah functionally speaking oops and then the third movie is the last one so you never build up a Rogues Gallery you never get these villains that get arrested go to jail and then come back bigger and badder you just get one threat per movie and then the hero just tortuously continues to exist with nothing to do also typically these threats will arise in direct direct response to the heroes they might have already been doing something bad but they get notably worse when the heroes get a hold of them the superheroes cause the super villains to exist it's not the other way around the superhero is already doing their thing before the bad guys show up now this is not inherently a bad thing because again in the timeline of narrative development you usually start with normal problems and then narrative escalation causes you to bring in problems like super villains or genius crime bosses and stuff like that you start with the normal problems and then the super villains show up so it's not the worst thing in the world to have the super villains be inspired by the superhero running around you know with the cape and all that but it doesn't work if the super villain is the only problem the hero ever actually deals with yeah when you're dealing with a larger world and you have more time to play with it having a superhero show up who is a response to the hero in some way whether it's the hero's actions or their ideas what have you that that makes sense as a story idea to play with in a field of other story ideas that are not that exact plot idea but when that's the only thing there is it it flattens everything out and you can do interesting character work with that and having foils and all that kind of like fun you know writing 101 kind of stuff that we like but it creates problems when you're in the confines of a two-hour two and a half hour movie and if if this is your origin story you basically get the hero now exists and the super villain immediately shows up to fight them about it yeah and that becomes a very flat world yeah exactly and as part of it the heroes are just not typically shown solving low-level problems between Super Villains The world seems very safe it's either the literal apocalypse or it's just a lazy Sunday afternoon we can throw a party hang out this is like the Nolan Batman movies were kind of okay at not doing this in the first movie minimum and they were pretty good at showing like bad stuff is happening but you know not like much of it it's not a huge problem for Batman to retire twice in three movies um the MCU gets oh gets us a lot worse the the world of the MCU is very clean and pretty and there's never really an implication that any bad things happen between super villains like they did a little bit of this in the earlier movies and we'll get to that in its own slide but like as time has gone on the world has only gotten more uneventful between super villains scares you don't even get like Spider-Man stopping a Mugger in an Alleyway it's it's a whole thing we'll get to it but it the fact that we started with Iron Man Who is kind of a complicated hero to set the precedent for an entire movie franchise because his thing is that he is almost always cleaning up problems he indirectly caused like Stark Tech weapons are all over and they're all problems and they're all making bad guys worse and he's just trying to make up for that and that's an interesting Arc for a character to have but it means you don't really get Iron Man like stopping muggings or like convenience store robberies or other friendly neighborhood stuff and once you have a certain amount of power from a giant robot exoskeleton stopping street level crime seems so narratively imbalanced that it would almost be silly to show that right but then you're left with a situation where there is nothing for Iron Man to do exactly uh and the fact that almost all of the problems are things he caused while in character does only contribute to this idea that the threats come around because of the hero and they are not the reason the hero exists so these are worlds that just don't give the superheroes enough to do and then inevitably over time the stories begin to start chin stroking about oh do we even need these Heroes and once the supervillain du jour is dead in the movie's ending the answer goes back to being no like between these massive threats the heroes don't have anything to do we don't need the heroes until the next villain yeah it's not a moment before yeah uh and as is the nature of this problem which is caused by slowly losing sight of the origins and you know reason for a character's existence this problem develops slowly and gets worse over time for instance if we just look at the Nolan Batman Trilogy the first movie is pretty good about this Bruce Wayne becomes Batman because murderous parents yada yada racial Ghul is a villain but he pre-exists Batman and when he trains Bruce Bruce doesn't become a hero in specific fake opposition to him he doesn't know that race is evil and then he thinks that he's already defeated the League of Assassins when he goes off to start batmaning so he's not doing that to fight them but he you know he was trained by them and you get independent bad guys like scarecrow they're just around causing problems I mean he's working for race but Bruce doesn't know that so in this movie Batman has a lot of stuff to do in the Dark Knight The Joker in Two-Face both arrive in direct explicit response to Batman they would not exist without Batman and when he ends the movie by taking the fall for two-faced victims he retires he's literally like this Gotham doesn't need me right now and it's like what do you mean it's it's better to have the idea of Harvey Dent being a good little noodle than an actual Batman to do physical things in the world I think um your your point about both of them arising in explicit response to Batman they do that in two different ways the Joker explicitly states that he is essentially a philosophical Counterpoint Point Newton's second law of like big Newton's second law of the Ubermensch essentially for every big guy there's an equal and opposite big guy um where he's like because Batman is so good I need to be a little bastard whereas the two-faced villain origin is explicitly a choice that Bruce makes that directly creates him by his own hand even though Joker set it up yeah um again because he's just a little this is a little Gremlin also Newton's second law is uh Force equals mass times acceleration I think it's Newton's first law but anyway dang it yeah it's three laws who cares about the order anyway so again in the dark night it's like all right we've got Batman established and now we can start expanding the Rogues Gallery this is like a reasonable direction to take the franchise in it's like okay we've got we got Batman he's doing stuff there's problems for him to solve and now he's caught he's attracted some attention The Joker has arisen as his ideological equal and opposite and the Joker makes Two-Face for shots and gigs uh but also it's Batman's fault for not stopping him or coordinating with the cops Batman ends the movie by retiring which is a weird decision for part two of a Trilogy um and then in the Dark Knight Rises Talia al Ghul and Bane are again direct responses to Batman you know they were doing their own thing but Tali al Ghul is here for revenge for her father and she brings Bane and locks the city down for evil reasons and Batman comes out of retirement to stop him then immediately fakes his death and retires again and it's like okay okay cool we really can't just keep him on Ice until the super villain du jour shows up and he finally has a reason to exist again and there's another like slightly weird undercurrent in the change between the Dark Knight and the Dark Knight Rises which is in the first two movies it is just categorically established that Gotham police are incredibly corrupt they're the worst Gordon is the only good cop and then the Dark Knight Rises is like what what are you being they're The Thin Blue Line the standing between Gotham and total Anarchy and there's gonna say oh no all those blue lives are trapped in the cave underneath the city it's such a weird just complete reversal and it inadvertently like reinforces the idea that Batman is not necessary and hasn't been necessary because it's just like what do you mean if we just had all them Gotham cops back with everything would be fine which is just weird I watched these movies back to back in one night and you really notice if you're doing doing it that way so basically after his origin movie this version of Batman is completely unnecessary except when he's stopping the threats that he himself has contributed to and his retirement does absolutely nothing bad to Gotham ever I don't even know if I pay lip service to like since The Disappearance of The Dark Knight crime is up 50 like I don't even think they do that they might but if so that's tell don't show because it's not at all indicated in the Dark Knight Rises I I have not seen that movie in a very long time but to my recollection they're mostly still just sad about poor old Harvey God it's been like eight years yeah and these movies made like a bazillion dollars but like yeah it's just this has been bothering me about them for ages and ages I think it's the honest trailer for it that mentions like a who clocks in maybe a year as Batman and I was like hey yeah wait a second we don't need Batman in these movies and like the movies I previously I thought the problem was that they felt embarrassed to be superhero movies because it's like we gotta explain the silly ears they can't just be bad ears because he looks like a bad Ambassador scary they've got to be radio transceivers because that's cooler and it's just like guys come on he dresses like a bat his name is Batman what are you doing but like I think this is actually the problem that was bugging me like they are embarrassed to be superhero movies but also they're embarrassed to let him be a superhero he doesn't really do superhero things most of the time even in the beginning of the Dark Knight the one instance that we really see of him fighting crime is those those goofballs in the parking lot where it's I'm not wearing hockey pads oh yeah they're not even treated as a real problem well no it's just a joke because there's like fake Batman's in there right that's the hockey pants guy yeah because he's inspiring people and he's like inspiring hope stupid whatever why would I want to do that and then it's not actually really him taking on like even the semblance of a problem it's still something he caused indirectly by dressing like a bat I do think the other Batmans were fighting some kind of criminals I think that was part of that scene but like it's so it's it's so secondary to him being like oh these posers and nerds who don't have one billion dollars to fund their power armor and their fun toys and car a bunch of weenies am I right anyway so I really want to beat the hating the MCU allegations and I'm not doing myself any favors by doing this slideshow but I do want to highlight that the early MCU was pretty good about this um yeah Iron Man again Tony's whole thing is kind of trying to redeem himself for previously having been a callous unthinking warmongering Jerk by making these incredibly powerful weapons just because they thought they were cool and then not really processing like oh someone's gonna use these on like real people whoops I don't think the Rockets would eat my face yeah I mean the fact that it does take him getting blown up by a rocket with his literal name on it it's to figure out that other people are human beings is a little bit dubious but again nobody said Tony Stark was a good person that's like the whole point this movie also came out like five years after the start of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars yeah yeah didn't it oh boy it was fresh it was topical but again like he he became a superhero to stop people from misusing his weapons more sorry seven years my bad oh I can do math ah it's still fresh uh but like that's the thing it's like he starts off the movie and he makes this first you know the mark one armor because he's stuck in a cave and he wants to be out of the cave that makes perfect sense great and then after that he's like oh this is just a fun new idea to Tinker with also we're decommissioning the entire weapons thing I have this weird thing about not wanting to make rockets to blow people up anymore don't question too hard and then he has that sort of moment of like I can stop this all I want but the weapons I made are still out in the world and they're still hurting people so I am going to stop that and then he builds the armor the better armor he starts using the it as like a weapon and he goes to basically try and make up for the damage he did before he became a slightly better human being that's a good reason to exist and the implication that he's been at this for years and years and his weapons have been trafficked all over the world makes it seem like he's gonna have a lot to do for the foreseeable future this is a very good way to start off a superhero who is presumably going to have a long and very lucrative for the Creator's career ahead of him of stopping bad guys and the fact that obadiah's stain only becomes ironmonger because he basically steals Tony's new weapon design is just playing into this theme of Tony's entire Arc which is he keeps making weapons and other people keep using them bad but only he can use them good not saying that's the best way to frame that story I'm just saying that is the way that the story is it makes sense as a character Arc rather than a philosophical statement exactly the fact that that's how Tony thinks makes perfect sense but he still has a lot to do that's good and the fact that work is still distinctly undone at the end yeah or unfinished I should say and the fact that he's splitting his Focus between like hey let's stop the bad guy weapon people and also hey this Arc Reactor clean energy thing is great let's start doing more like societal infrastructure stuff and like help the world like that's good that's excellent he's got a lot to do we do actually see a lot of that kind of like Stark Tech doing XYZ in like civil infrastructure in later movies pretty far down the line I want to say we see a little bit of that and even like Spider-Man homecoming as well yeah yeah like Stark actually starts to use his stuff for anything other than weapons he's really cool yeah yeah it's good it's a good Arc for this character to have um Captain America the First Avenger World War II is happening very good reason to go punch some Nazis yeah he's a busy boy uh the movie does end on the note that he gets frozen for you know 70 years wakes up up in the present and now there's sort of this overlap like this this overarching existential question of like does the world still need Captain America the more two anymore we definitely cleaned up all those Nazis they're not coming back uh Kathy you came back just in time uh we'll get to cap later I have a whole slide for him uh and then of course for Avengers uh you get all these wacky goobers with fun powers and you get them together to fight a space Tyrant and his army of faceless goons that's good we want superheroes to deal with that kind of thing that's awesome it's also very clear that in Avengers the team assembles in response to a threat it does the threat is not levied against the concept of the Avengers no the threat's gonna happen anyway The Avengers need to do a little bit of work to rally and it kind of takes the um the same rhythm of Iron Man where like they sort of exist at the beginning but they exist in isolation for kind of self-centered reasons it takes a moment of Revelation for them to be like actually let's do this hero thing let's not just do our own thing you could like draw a parallel between the difference between the Mark 1 suit and the first proper Iron Man suit and Tony taking that up for a spin to like stop bad guys rather than just stick around and save himself it's Avengers won the best Avengers movie probably I haven't really watched it in a while I'm hoping it's still good so the later MCU got a little bit dicier Iron Man three uh I I've been in Camp I didn't like Iron Man 3 since Iron Man 3 came out which was a controversial take it's controversial at the time I remember those conversations in the hallway during lunch I just think if I'm watching an Iron Man movie he should have to put on the Iron Man suit for more than like four minutes of screen time I'm sorry I think that's also the movie where he starts using the suit as like an independent drone without him in it yeah which really rubbed me the wrong way for reasons I couldn't identify for a while but it really is just like Tony does not put on the suit and be Iron Man because it is the most efficient way to do you know suit robot drone stuff he does it because having a suit of power armor is sick as that's why Iron Man puts on the suit and this Tony was just like oh it's more efficient if I just sit on my couch drinking martinis while the suit goes out and does stuff and it's like come on man did you read the title of the movie or not again classic Tony accidentally creates the villain then at the end he blows up all his suits and retires and then at the end he's like but you know I don't need that stuff to be Iron Man I'm still Iron Man and it's like no you're not you're Tony Stark put the suit back on Avengers Age of Ultron I've been pretty upfront about how I feel about this movie the fact that Tony creates every single problem in this movie by trying to make superheroes obsolete that he goes on the record by being like isn't the point of this so we can go home it's like is it Tony is that the point that you will solve every problem in the world and there will never be problems again like I believe that Tony believes that but I worry that the writers believe that too this this pairs interestingly with the idea that a perfect world doesn't need Superman it does because Tony's trying to essentially speedrun that process to a perfect world doesn't need Iron Man but of course his idea of the perfect world is defined by there is still an Iron Man it's just not me I get to go home there is still an Iron Man it's just an AI it's chat GPT it's Iron Man GPT that's in charge of protecting the world oh God I think I because in my head when you're saying I'm like wait a minute that conflicts I as I'm spelling it out right now I I don't think it does because Tony's idea is not that oh if the world was perfect I wouldn't be necessary the world is I can make it perfect and then I won't be necessary yeah exactly he keeps trying to retire he spends every movie oscillating between accidentally creating more super villains and desperately trying to stop being Iron Man and it's like I get that that makes sense for the version of the character that they've created but it's it's kind of a hard watch after a while it's like why are they forcing this character to exist when he clearly has no reason to at this point like every time he does something it makes things worse and that's just a bummer and then when we get to Civil War we get Vision directly stating that like since they became like a thing since superheroes became a thing there have been like way more world-ending threats than usual and he's like I don't know maybe that correlation is causation and the movie is like yeah he's right and that's just a weird angle to take because again it feels like we've kind of lost the plot at this point it's like you got these superheroes that existed for in Tony's case very personal reasons in Captain America's case a reason that stopped being valid like 70 years ago and then they all teamed up to stop one really big apocalyptic world ending threat which which was great and then the movies were like okay they're like cleaning off the last drags of Hydra they're they've still got stuff to do they've still got stuff to do it's great and then this movie was like actually every problem is because of superheroes they they just should stop existing maybe and then I mean Zemo is a consequence of uh Avengers too which I mean I thought was cool at the time it's like oh wow it's really cool that their actions of consequences but of course then the problem is when you zoom out and look at a macro scale it's oh they're just consistently making their own problems for themselves yeah and I think there's there's an important difference to because even as we're having this this detailed diatribe I'm I'm finding myself like just snagging on this little bit of cognitive dissonance of oh well some of these things do make for good character drama yeah and I still think that's true a lot of the things in uh in Civil War especially but less so but non-zero ageable Tron and Iron Man 3 right are there are interesting character developments that are happening here the problem is that those interesting character developments are in direct conflict with this kind of philosophical underpinning of the concept of a superhero and those two things can both be true and the general movie going audience seeing these as they came out can look at each individual one and say that was an interesting character drama yeah so that was an interesting character Drama Oh it's cool this interesting character drama pulled off of this interesting character drama when they crushed that City full of kids and he's from Europe but when we look at it as a whole is specifically when we start to put these things together and see wait this feels weird and it's not that it is a writing failure that breaks the entire point of the movies I think that would be a stretch right but it feels weird that's the thing a cognitive dissonance of what the movie is showing you is important and what we as viewers think is important about superheroes and those two things don't match and if we don't think about it it's not going to make us lose any sleep but as soon as you notice it you can't unsee it and it doesn't ruin the movies but it just makes everything feel weird when you watch it yeah that's really this has been me basically identifying why these movies felt weird to me I had fun watching all of them the first time there's Great Moments in all of them but in each case I was like something about that didn't quite feel right to me and I'm not sure why and the fact is like civil War's primary conflict is interesting the fact that it is at this point the only conflict these characters are dealing with is the problem that I started running into the idea that every problem we ever see them dealing with is something that they directly caused we don't really see them except for like little montages of like oh they're fighting this Hydra base and it's completely fine it's super easy barely an inconvenience don't even worry about it like why is that why is that getting glossed over why are we every movie at this point focusing entirely on a problem that they created and I really do think it's because Iron Man the first movie was such a wild success that nobody was expecting that when they were making later movies they kind of had to take that first movie and like take it apart and try and figure out what had worked about it so that they could turn it into a formula you do see a lot of that in the first phase of the MCU it's fascinating to see each movie pull on a different thread of what made Iron Man work so well exactly but the fact that the the villain is basically just the hero but bad was definitely a thing that they all kind of mirrored from the original Iron Man and I think the fact that the villain is kind of the protagonist's fault was something that they clocked is very interesting in the first Iron Man that they started using in every later movie and it it ends up creating this world where the superheroes just kind of pop into existence fully formed because they want they have powers they have cool things that they can do so they're gonna do what whatever the plot throws at them and then the plot's like aha by popping into existence fully formed you have accidentally created your antithesis and now you must fight them for the next six to eight hours of mini series what makes Iron Man 1 work so well I think is that Tony and Obadiah were friends and co-workers they were in on this together from very early on they knew exactly what they were doing they were warmongers they were profiteers off of untold amounts of human suffering Tony goes through her character change becomes a superhero and realizes he was wrong but Obadiah stain doesn't Tony changes stain can't and that's why he becomes a super villain not because he just materialized in the story as an oppositional Force to Iron Man but because of a representation of what Tony used to be and what he would have still been if he hadn't decided to be better and become a hero yeah and that I think is what is so fascinating is it's not that he is a force that appears to meet the hero he's not Iron Man's fault he is an important part of who this character used to be and in defeating Obadiah stain and defeating the Iron Monger Tony is asserting in not just his his martial prowess as big iron suit guy but also philosophically that he has beat in that version of himself from the past which is why I think that version of the villain is the hero's fault is is not really the villain is the hero's fault but why that kind of idea Works in that context because it's so grounded in this philosophical battle inside of Tony from who it was before and who he is now yeah I actually wanted to again to try and beat the hitting the MCU allegations uh Iron Man 3 has one of the only scenes of Tony's saving civilians and it's awesome awesome which when they're all like falling out of the plane and he uses the unique skill set of the suit and his big thinky brain man thing to like save everybody and that's awesome that's such an important thing to have yeah that's like the best part of the movie like and then if you ever watch that on an airplane that scene is cut and they don't show that that scene if you watch it on an airplane oh my god of course of course that's terrifying terrifying like there are moments in these movies where where they feel like little glimpses into a more balanced adaptation world where these Heroes feel like they are byproducts of a universe that created them rather than they are actively distorting the world around them usually making it worse but the MCU after a certain point really felt like it was kind of dedicated to like like even in the five years skip you know the blip they kind of had to be like oh you know everyone's sad and you know the lights are off but like you know Tony retired and everything's kind of nice you know people are bummed out but it's just about the only crime we see is when Hawkeye is off doing some vigilante justice that we're gonna frame is a bad thing and very different from all the other stuff that we've been doing for the last hot minute it's just kind of like even in the literal end of the world they have to make it so that the world doesn't go to too much because they're not going to hit the reset button they're just gonna bring everybody who got disappeared back and then be like see everything's fine the world will carry on as usual don't even worry about it little pockets of problems might pop up at a rate of about one per mini series but other than that it it's fine we're good Peter can just go back to high school and it's not even that weird it's like what what flip has played for last that's really wild and the heroes don't even like seem to be doing anything during the but they they're like oh uh Captain Marvel she's off in space taking care of how everyone else in the universe also got blipped uh and meanwhile on Earth everyone except for Hawkeye is either retired or sulking and we never see them do anything and it's like what you do get the sense that cap and Natasha are working on stuff in that five-year span right but like that sense we don't see any of it so it's a little hard to actually picture what it is that they are doing the movie does assure us that they are they all keep out on it but the thought was there we are told not shown I will grant you we are told not shown but they did take the effort to tell us that's the thing the thought was there they knew it was important that these Heroes had stuff to do but they seem really unwilling to create the kind of world that seems like it actually needs the Avengers on a regular basis I did want to highlight specifically the evolution of Captain America through these movies because I think it's very interesting yeah as we mentioned in the First Avenger Steve Rogers has a very very good reason to become Captain America World War II is happening he can't participate because he's sick but he becomes a super soldier so he can fight in World War II he's initially stuck as a mascot but he ends up going rogue and taking matters into his own hands to save Bucky and also everybody else does a lot of cool hero stuff in a fun Montage the Montage ends when Bucky explodes but that's fine but like Captain America has a lot to do and he knows it but then when he sacrifices himself and gets frozen for 70 years wakes up in Times Square the question becomes do we still need Captain America you know the war that created him has been over for decades so what is the place of Captain America in this new world next time we see him is in Avengers and it's like well good news there's a giant world ending threat Captain America has just been parked on the Shelf in Shield HQ so they can just pull him off and have them do stuff and it'll be great he gets in like some combo moves and a couple one-liners he's very underpowered for the battle and doesn't get to do a whole lot it also really seems like Whedon just doesn't like him as a character and doesn't enjoy writing him so he doesn't really get to do much uh except to be colson's celebrity crush so this doesn't really answer that core question that was posed at the end of Captain America which is does the world still need him because they sort of try and do a little like oh he's the one who sort of pulls the team together he's the leader he's got actual combat experience and knows how to coordinate a team of people with different skills but again suffers a little from the fact that Whedon clearly doesn't like him very much so he doesn't get to do a whole lot and he mostly just get owned by Tony with facts and logic a few times as much as I don't like to just kind of pick on Joss Whedon for no reason um there are reasons to pick on him I think it's very telling that the the closest thing we got to a real look at cap was this little like three minute sequence of just what he's up to before he's in the gym where Fury comes to meet him he's just kind of walking around through New York trying to find his way but clearly struggling he goes to the restaurant where Ashley Johnson's character is and he like tries to say hi and he doesn't and then Stan Lee's like ask for a number you of course he doesn't know how cell phones work wait I'm sorry there's this whole sequence of him trying to exist in the world and they just cut it from the movie eyes doesn't care about cap at all I knew it I knew it had to be a deleted scene I was like this sounds awesome oh wait Ashley Johnson waitress character yeah that's the thing like there was a whole little subplot in the movie where we see the Battle of New York from the perspective of this random civilian and how she's like trying not to die and getting rescued on occasion and like it was such a cool idea and then they cut it and when I was starting that sentence that's what I was going to talk about and then remembered that oh actually Not only was like the stuff that cap was doing in the battle with Ashley Johnson's character not shown but the entire Preamble which was more important to his characterization of how he's feeling at the start of the movie is also not shown and I forgot that even existed until I was halfway through explaining that Ah that's sad yeah and the actual code of the movie he gets introduced as first doing some calisthenics in the gym which is a choice but like the thing is he's just kind of there in this movie he's there because he has to be he gets in a couple moments you get whole smash you know whatever reflects the Repulsor beam off his shield that was pretty neat pew pew then in Winter Soldier cap is much better written I think Winter Soldier is the movie where most people went from like ah Captain whatever to being like Oh Captain America is the best superhero ever he's so cool did you see how he beat up that jet it was awesome you see how he kicked that guy off the side of the boat what happened yeah so the beginning of the movie cap is doing missions for shield which is great the indication that Shield is like doing stuff in the background is awesome and the idea that cap has now been looped into that so he always has stuff to do that's good cap is basically a super secret agent that's cool he's fighting the last traces of armed conflict in a post-cold war world he's still a soldier he just doesn't have a clear War to be fighting and he's clearly having a bit of existential malaise about it and then of course with the reveal that Shield has been infiltrated by Hydra cap kaida has to go Rogue again at this point that is kind of his main his signature move as it were and honestly him and black widow just vibing all movie is excellent I love it yeah and again Black Widow kind of carries with her the indication that she has a lot to do we don't know about it because she's a super spy but like she's just in the background doing stuff the the indication is that when the camera is off of her she's probably off doing some crazy that's great almost none of the other characters have this energy and when she joins the movie and teams up with cap that energy sort of transfers to him a little bit there's always a lot of stuff to do it's like he's getting a peek into her world and of course cap is motivated predominantly in this movie through trying to save his his brainwashed best friend Bucky historians will say that they were close comrades uh but like he you know he has other reasons to be doing and at the end of the movie he basically is like all right Shield has been infiltrated by Hydra it all goes down we we have to burn the system to the ground and I like that that's very in character for him it does unfortunately mean he is once again left with nothing to do because she doesn't have Shield they've axed Hydra they got rid of the the uh TV screen guy who was you know the guy I am afraid I have been stolen captain that guy uh he's that guy computer man yeah he's supposed to be a guy in the comics and the shows but like he's exploded now so he's gone and uh they didn't do the thing I was hoping they would do where it turned out that Robert Redford's character was the Red Skull in a rubber mask but um I just I just will love my heart Robert Redford kind of looks like his face doesn't quite fit anywhere what a good reveal that will be and then he was just an evil guy he was just like a Nazi so okay cool because again in the end of Captain America Red Skull gets quote unquote disintegrated into a sky beam so I was like oh he ain't dead he's coming back and then the movies were like Red Skull who never heard of him we can't get Hugo weaving back with such a bad roll so we're just gonna not okay bye anyway so the thing is by the end of winter soldier there's no shield and any remnants of Hydra are scattered tiny doesn't really seem like they're a huge issue and then we get so many inconvenience [Laughter] Ultron is in there so somewhere I think that's post Winter Soldier yeah yeah between Winter Soldier and Civil War right and of course Age of Ultron it's another Whedon number cap again has very little to do RIP logs sexily yeah he he looks he looks damn fine while he's just standing around getting facts and logic debt by Tony they do have the implication that there are Hydro bases that the Avengers have been cleaning out that's kind of cool yeah but it's also like the beginning of the movie is them fully beating Hydra like that's the last one they got them all cleaned up which is like why couldn't we have a movie about that I don't know again at this point I was doing a lot of like internal compare and contrast with how Earth's Mightiest Heroes the cartoon adaptation was handling this stuff where uh Hydra is a constant present threat that just has giant robots that just walk out of the ocean and cause problems sometimes and the heroes will sometimes just have to deal with Hydra or aim a completely different evil thing that I think they they may be like referenced in later MCU movies but didn't really make a big deal out of Modoc is normally part of aim but that's not really true in the movies uh so like like the implication that there is just always stuff happening there's just all these characters that can pop up and cause problems every bad guy has an army of robots that can just turn up and be an issue and the movies just can't really do that because they feel like they need a movie to establish oh yeah aim of the bad guys in Iron Man 3 they make the extremist soldiers oh yeah and that ends with them all exploding threat there are one time none of these guys ever get to go like I'll get you next time Spider-Man they just like die they just die it's superhero stuff nobody stays dead anyway so skipping over Ultron we get to Civil War this is kind of the the turning point for Cap's character that's clearly what this is framed at this is like what the culmination this is what the conflict has been building to so you get the Accords they're proposed to establish government oversight for The Avengers after a mission results in some pretty devastating collateral damage at this point cap is like four movies into not trusting Authority and going rogue Tony meanwhile is tired of accidentally making doomsday weapons and super villains and wants somebody to stop him so obviously it's a fascinating way to start the concept of or to start the conflict of the movie because you know in the very beginning Tony is a complete Loose Cannon who eventually after several movies learns I need to be put in check his own words where his cap starts off as the absolute government boy and then just slowly gets more and more like actually screw this I'm doing it my way I mean to have this like character convergence and reversal in Civil War which on itself is interesting but it feels weird in the context of what's the point of superheroes sorry I just wanted to throw that out there no yeah I mean to be fair Captain America does go Rogue in his very first movie because they're like we need you to sell more war bonds kiddo and then he's like no my very close friend is in prison I must go save him so like he's still going rogue on behalf of the United States government well that's certainly true um so the thing is in Civil War the movie Cap's side is kind of broadly framed is the correct one like they try to make it ambiguous but like by the end of the movie Tony is fully motivated by personal Vengeance the Accords are thrown out the window he's just really mad the problem is a matter of this is supposed to be payoff for some planting that they failed to do which would answer the fundamental question why exactly is it so important for cap and the others to stay independent when cap has absolutely nothing to do he spends the entire movie rescuing Bucky because when he's between Avengers movies rescuing Bucky is the only thing that he has to do there's no other problems left for him to solve Hydra has been beaten aim exploded in that movie cab never even met them he has nothing to do he's not doing fun missions with black widow anymore because Shield is exploded and widows underground so like the the entire movie is like the best hands are our own you know we need to be in control of ourselves and it's like to do what man yeah so so that's the problem they never answered the question it's the future what does Captain America have to do because typically this question is answered with Captain America is the best of all of them he is the Superman figure he is the Paragon he sets the moral standard he was the first and the best he is who everybody else has to try to live up to and they don't do that in the movies they sort of play with it a couple times they're like oh Tony's dad was a big fan of cab you know when they hung out for like two weeks like that's all you get but you don't really get the fact that when Captain America enters the scene the story gets better it makes more sense around him he's this ideal of heroism and they don't do that in the movies and without that he kind of struggles to justify his existence alongside physical gods and super-powered robot badasses and people like Captain Marvel like you try and put them in the same fight the same weight class and he really struggles but like again Earth's Mightiest Heroes season one is very good at making you believe that Captain America is absolutely necessary and they even pull off in season two he gets replaced by a skrull and you've gotten so used to the actual character of Captain America that you can tell that he's not acting right he he's acting like he's being written by somebody who finds Captain America boring and then when we get him really back it's like oh my god I've missed him so much he's doing actual heroics the scroll cap in Earth's Mightiest Heroes acts like the first thing you'd ever expect Captain America to do but never anything more complex than that it's the most like flattened simple full core concept of like oh yeah this is a guy who is big and strong and heroic and he doesn't know a lot about the present day scroll just doesn't understand enough of what it is to be a paragon because how could it it's not caps so it's version of cap like hits some of the notes but can't actually compellingly sell the idea that cap represents and it is really cool that you can see that in just the way that scroll cap acts yeah and um the MCU kind of never really figured out how to pull that off and again they only had a like a handful of movies to do that in and two of them were written by a guy that didn't like him very much so like what were they supposed to do so they never answered the question of what exactly cap was doing there what what was the point of him he didn't get given anything to do he didn't get Hydra to fight he just existed and because he had powers and was hanging out with the Avengers he would come along on the missions and do stuff and like that was it and and they only really got missions on screen and the only times we got an indication that stuff was happening off screen is when they were finishing it up and then they were done and they were never gonna have to do it again so in Civil War Captain America's side which is again framed as like morally more correct and more like hey we have superheroes for a reason and it's not to be super cops the fact that cap is fighting really hard for like we have to be in control of Our Own Destiny and power because the world needs us it doesn't need government with super powered thugs it's like to do what cap to do what to rescue Bucky again you were already going to do that so he doesn't really have an ideological leg to stand on because like he's fighting super hard for this Paragon thing to just do nothing and then at the end of the movie he breaks out the other Heroes to sort of form the underground Avengers that they kind of have at the end of the Civil War run in the comics and he sends Tony a letter and a phone and he's like if you need us if you need me I'll be there and then they don't they don't need him until Infinity war and end game and then after that he off into the past and retires forever they just didn't need him I mean even still in Infinity War Tony never calls him he's going to but then doesn't yeah the dawn speed dial but when we first meet cap he saves vision from getting got by some some space bad guys and you get the sense that like you know cap and Natasha are kind of running around doing some stuff on their little rogue quinjet that they stole from the Hydra parking lot but they're not really up to anything he grew a beard what was he doing between Civil War and damn sexy yeah he was just just going to to a real good Barber and that's the only indication of what he was doing in between those movies that feels really tragic because like these movies are a decade pair to the sheer magnitude of how much stuff the source material had to work with and they never really figured out a way to compensate for that by making it seem like the world was busy and stuff was happening I did want to highlight a different punching bag from the MCU MCU Spider-Man oh yeah really has this problem it takes four entire movies before the writers think of a reason for him to be Spider-Man other than Spider-Man was in Civil War and we got the rights from Sony so now Spider-Man's in the movie so timeline of operations when Peter is introduced in Civil War Tony asks him why he does his amateur superheroics that have been captured on video he like saves some people from a bus it's pretty cool and Peter says look when you can do the things that I can but you don't and then the bad things happen they happen because of you and of course this is a Twist it's like a perspective inversion on the classic power and responsibility speech that has historically been his entire driving motivation Peter has powers he has the responsibility to use them to save others he could use those hours for other stuff the reason that he doesn't is typically because of the tragic death of Uncle Ben at the hands of a criminal that Peter could have stopped now this movie subtly indicates that Uncle Ben has already died and that has all already happened we don't need Spider-Man's origin we're all familiar we've all seen the Remy movies we've probably all seen Amazing Spider-Man 1 and 2. we don't need to see that I really liked this interpretation of it in Civil War this whole sequence with with Spider-Man and Tony is really good it is in isolation yeah because that's the thing like so so the movie does a lot of work to subtly indicate that Uncle Ben has already died Peter has been Spider-Man for six months he and Ed may seem to have recently moved into a smaller apartment the place is a little bit messy it's not fully unpacked May wears a wedding ring on a necklace in every shot that she's in there's no sign of an Uncle Ben there's like other hints too did you know that MCU Uncle Ben has a Marvel Wiki page it has no photo references and he is only ever referenced as referenced indirectly because they never mention him by name when Peter uses a briefcase in one movie it has Uncle Ben's initials on it and that's all we get so the indication is that Uncle Ben power responsibility that's all already happened so that's why Peter is Spider-Man and then gets two more movies you get homecoming and then you get far from home and in the first part of homecoming Peter spends the entire First Act just pestering happy Hogan for Missions just texting him like Hey man does Tony think I'm cool you got anything for me to do and there's like a whole little comedic Montage of how he keeps trying to like thwart some non-existent street level crime that turns out to be a misunderstanding he tries to stop a carjacking that isn't happening stops a guy from stealing a bike and then can't get the bike back to whoever's bike it is and Peter's like bored and frustrated and neglected and he just wants Tony to pay attention to him and it's like what like people love this movie again I felt like I was going nuts being the only person who was like I don't really like this version of Spider-Man very much feels kind of weird that he he only seems to be doing it to impress Iron Man I don't know I do like this movie despite the the foundational very deep structural problems with it but that's because I I can occupy myself with looking at the the surface conflicts and the surface characterization and the Very quaint like high school friendly neighborhood kind of drama that's going on like that much I actually like where the vulture is a threat that exists outside of Spider-Man and Spider-Man comes into conflict with the vulture because Spider-Man's sticking his nose into stuff that's not his business because that's who Peter Parker is that's much I like but the especially in far from home where it's like come on let me do something let me do something let me do something that feels so weird we're just craving these Avengers level threads and just desperately needs he's like chasing the high of infinity War so badly but that's what's so weird is like they introduce him on such a high note and then it feels like they have to explain why he would like go back to being a friend friendly neighborhood Spider-Man after such a cool experience and it's like what why do you think he became Spider-Man in the first place and like the fact that they have the audacity to give him a New York city that has absolutely no crime for him to stop he's like well why are you doing this why would you do that like so why is this Peter Spider-Man he gave he gave that speech in the first movie of like you know when you can do the things I can and you don't and then bad stuff happens and it's like bad stuff isn't happening my man clearly fighting crime is not a serious issue they normally pepper in like carjackers and muggings and like other stuff for Spider-Man to just be dealing with to to keep him busy except he finds some problems on the movie's plot mandated vulture foreshadowing events and like I love how they handle vulture in this movie the fact that he's another incidental Tony Stark created back guys but again like that that's just kind of that ties in with Tony's theme I'm not bad about it that's fine and the way they handle vulture and the way that this all feels so small scale in high school compared to the stuff that we've been dealing with that's all really good and then in far from home there's parts of this movie I liked but oh boy oh they cannot get over Tony Stark in these movies like no the threat is a disgruntled like Stark employee who is literally creating fake disasters for him to fix the stakes are completely artificial that's probably the most like damn in comparison we can make of a bad guy artificially manufacturing imaginary disasters he's literally making up Stakes for the movie like he sucks I I didn't like Mysterio I was glad that he got uh hoist by his own batard in the finale but man man this movie is kind of a it's it's empty when you look at it all the Peter moments are really good and again like Tom Holland is putting his whole ass into this performance he's doing a good job it's just they gave him such a weird version of Spider-Man to play with very little to do and then in no way home the movie is like Uncle who doesn't sound familiar power and responsibility speech is gonna come from Aunt May she's getting Uncle Ben in this movie yeah and it's like okay so the overt implication is that Uncle Ben if he did exist at all did not give this speech that because this is the moment this is the iconic power and responsibility moment it would be weird if this was happening for a second time and we didn't know about about it so all that clever Civil War setup just wasn't anything apparently it was just nope it really felt like there was like a writer miscommunication or something like whoever wrote Civil War was like yeah it's great we don't need to do Peter's origin story again we can just imply it and then have him be Spider-Man and then the movies are like but we never said the thing we need to have somebody say the thing yeah yeah okay and again there is so much I love about this movie but this was another scene where I couldn't figure out why it was rubbing me the wrong way for such a long time because like the performance is incredible the moment is heartbreaking but why did Peter need to get his motivation four movies into a franchise yeah right and again right to your point like this stuff doesn't tank the movie it just gnaws at the back of your brain and feels really weird and undercuts the weight of some of the dramatic stuff that's happening on screen in a way that's really hard to put your finger on so it it doesn't make these bad movies there are different things that may or may not make them bad movies in your estimation your mileage may vary I like some of them I don't like some other ones of them like look that's just how it is but it's the stuff that just nags at the back of your brain that bugs you when you see it and you can't figure out why the scene isn't really hitting as strongly as it should and then afterwards when you you think back on the movie a few weeks or a few months later and you're like yeah I don't like what was what was really happening in that and it's it's that kind of thing yeah it doesn't really destroy your enjoyment of it in the moment but it just makes everything feel a little flatter yeah I I want to be clear that at least from from from my side of this that's what I want to communicate of what this does to the movies it doesn't destroy them yeah it just like sucks a little bit of the wind out of the sails I really appreciate you going to bat for the like no she doesn't hate the MCU I promise because I don't I really I complain about this because the movies are almost excellent for me the little like Obama's anger translator from Key and peel it's just what she means to say is get your hands off those keyboards boys but like I feel like these movies hit almost great for me like 80 percent right and then there's that little 20 where I'm like I don't know I just didn't really feel like it was working for me and then it took me so long to uncover what wasn't working about it and it's like all these superheroes feel like they exist because they're contractually obligated to and then they retroactively justify their existence with stuff like this where Aunt May dies tragically and gives the power and responsibility speech because Peter Parker needs to hear the power and respond responsibility speech or he can't be Spider-Man but like he's already been Spider-Man for three movies and now at the end of this movie he's like I am now motivated to try and murder Green Goblin and then after that I will figure out how to properly be Spider-Man and it's like I am glad for all the I talk about the thing at the end of no way home where they they hit the reset button and Peter is broke in a handmade suit and he doesn't have his girlfriend or his support network or his aunt I'm like okay they have reset it to kind of match the the Spider-Man characterization that he's supposed to have where he's the Perpetual Underdog and I don't know why it took us four movies to get here it felt like a course correction but again I'm excited to see where they go from here I hope if if they go from here if they go yeah if they want to but we'll see if they do I mean I I like no way home once the other Spider-Mans show up before that you have to get through a lot of doctor strange and Peter Parker being the dumbest characters in the MC you both significantly out of character we've talked about this in previous detail Dietrich yeah but yeah this this movie vastly improves once we get Spider-Man's to play around with because a lot of the character stuff they're trying to do just feels really really weird especially Aunt May dying for kind of no reason when I think it would have been more interesting if they only put the if they have to have great power comes great responsibility like verbatim put it in the mouth of one of the other Spider-Man that's a lot more interesting of a dynamic than just like offing another one of your adoptive parent figures yeah yeah it was just a weird weird decision and again like you can tell like there's the Nugget of some really cool writing in there that whole scene everyone says that like the fight with Goblin in the apartment complex is the most brutal most impactful part of that movie and it is it's terrifying the way it's choreographed is great the acting is awesome and then it leads into this and it's a huge moment and then like 40 minutes after the movie's over when I'm like looking in the fridge for a snack I'm like ah damn it this means that Peter didn't have the power and responsibility thing in the back of his head for the last three movies so what the this this gets to the the larger scale problem with Comics is that once you have a story that just kind of goes and goes and goes for long enough you're gonna have to make choices about which story is for lack of a better word the real one and you get do we let Civil War be the version of this establishing Arc that we want to tell or do we say actually screw that this is the movie that's coming out this year so we're gonna have this one do it yeah and in comics you have stories that run for decades and you have to make those choices over a long span of time it's it's very jarring to see within the continuity of like a decade those things happening in big fast forward yeah so outside of Spider-Man MCU phase four has kind of been running into some weird issues with this which is that they keep introducing these new secret groups of Heroes usually with a secret villain group or individual secret villain that is dealt with and then defeated and usually killed at the end of the movie so like they're they're flushing out the world they make it feel busier and like more alive and that should be counteracting the feeling of nothing is happening in the universe and the heroes have no reason to exist except the way that they're integrating all these secret groups is is through retcons which is like oh yeah these guys were here the whole time and when you ask why didn't they do anything when those movies were happening uh stuff that definitely would have affected them well they're all like sworn to secrecy or something or have just been hiding it's not that they've been busy with their secret villain group they just haven't been doing stuff and that's a weird angle to take in a lot of these cases because it feels like both of those writing angles would work like oh I couldn't interfere with the Thanos thing because at the time I was like off in space dealing with this completely unrelated problem or like we were fighting a bunch of sharkmen from the Marianas Trench or whatever the or like oh all the witches in the world were like stuck in the astral plane for unrelated reasons during the Thanos thing so we didn't do anything and it's just like that could work to make the world feel bigger and busier that there's stuff happening all the time and the reason why the characters haven't been interfering is because the world is actually that busy they did that joke or it's not right I mean they played it as a joke in far from home it was like this is like an Avengers level threat why aren't the Avengers participating and Theory like rattles off all the cool stuff that the Avengers are doing off screen and it's like what what why can't we watch that movie to your point it's it's a really hard sell to take a movie like the eternals and try to with a straight face say that they looked the threat of Thanos dead in the eye and thought ah no we kind of had like an oath that we swore to not get involved it's fine I know that the uh Celestial or whatever we're incubating in the core of the planet needs a large population and Thanos just cut it and half but no that's not enough reason for us to disrupt our lucrative Bollywood careers or whatever like I I don't know it's weird and some of this is cool and the fact that now they exist in the universe is good because now the world feels a lot busier there's more stuff happening there's more crossover potential if they did Civil War now that airport parking lot will be way more full but like you know it's taken away struggling to find parking oh boy and the thing is like in contrast in the comics that these are adapted from stuff is happening all the time forever oh my God it's really non-stop so if you have like oh why didn't these characters help out with this other plot it's like there are a million reasons that could be happening they could be in another dimension they could be dead they could be brainwashed for a while they could be just dealing with a completely different threat somewhere else like there's so much happening in the Marvel and DC Comics universes that they can just be like oh we can't call in help for this one because everyone else is busy or like we don't have time or you know the communication is down it's just us like it's gen generally expected that every hero is always busy and there are a lot of ways that this precedent is established one of them my favorite example being Superman's day off man of Tomorrow issue 12. Superman spends a day shouldering atlas's burden holding up the Heavens that's so cool it's so cool this chapter is excellent and basically the beginning of the chapter is like Lois and uh Perry white being like Oh I don't know about this but you know he did ask us and basically the headline is Superman's day off and it's like so now everyone's like oh yo it's open season on Metropolis Superman's not in town and every other hero just turns up to pick up the slack you get super girl you get Black Canary Firestorm Flash and then just like random people around town helping out you know saving cats from trees and facing down a gangster pointing a gun at his face because it's it's Superman City so you know we can't let gangsters run rampant here it's a very very cool very sweet and heartwarming issue but it also just kind of highlights like this is the amount of stuff that Superman is up to on an average day like it might be slightly worse than normal because all the super villains got wind that Superman wasn't going to be in town but like that's how foundational he is and the fact that all this is happening in an issue when he is literally holding up the sky is pretty like symbolically transparent like we get it that is so cool yeah it's so cool I'm looking at the the panel in the bottom right where the the kids helping with the cat it says no problem man I'm just doing what Superman would that's that's so cool even every regular person is just like oh I can I can I can take some of this weight yeah I can help it's not just other superheroes stepping in it's it shows that he is Superman is not only putting out fires and solving problems but he is actively an inspiration to other people and him being around one of the things he does is inspire people exactly that's really cool I like that a lot yeah this issue is great but also like this isn't explicitly a break from anything that's already been established it's not like it's new news to us that this is the amount of stuff Superman is typically dealing with there are tons of stories about that like we just kind of understand that this is how busy a comic book superhero is likely to be like the world is Big there's a lot of Heroes that can come in and pick up the slack but it's like a notable shift right and it's like these are some really Heavy Hitters it's Supergirl it's flash like these people are like all right we gotta work together and and make up for Superman not being here to do what what this job requires and that's a level of busyness and structural importance that is easy to get across in the comics and to the point where it's just the expected status quo and hard to communicate in an adaptation the fact that this is the precedent of the comics can be used for heartwarming moments I've told you about this I don't know if I've mentioned it to the folks at home but there's a bit in the current Nightwing run where Nightwing is yeah he's he's briefly like he gets knocked out and tied up and his mask gets taken off and it turns out it's not a problem the person he's dealing with is actually an ally but he doesn't know that at the time and when he puts his mask back on he's like Oracle I need you to call off whatever rescue you just called in and she's like oh are you sure okay and it's like oh turns out all of the Teen Titans and Batman were coming in to save him and it's like this is so sweet like this is the first time any of these characters have shown up in like chapters and chapters in this run because they're just off doing their own thing but like nobody's too busy to come and rescue everyone's favorite boy hostage am I right and I just think that's really sweet and like this wouldn't make sense in a superhero universe that didn't have things for these characters to do all the time the fact that they dropped everything to come to his rescue is a sweet and heartwarming moment but only because we expect them to be way too busy like we don't normally get this kind of crossover but the fact that this is enough to get them out enforces is sweet and cool and this is not something that a lot of adaptations have been able to pull off and part of that is because every single one of these characters on screen would need their own origin movie and probably a sequel where they retire and it's just and it's really expensive to get those characters to show up for three panels worth when dealing with a giant movie yeah are you really gonna burn one of Chris Evans nine movie uh appearances on something like this yeah it's like oh well uh cyborg Raven and Beast Boy didn't say anything do we still need to pay them for these pages okay now the thing is I really want to be fair superhero adaptations are dealing with a nearly impossible task there's 80 plus years of Canon there's a ton of obscure characters that the comics can just pull out whenever they want it's like hey remember this obscure one-off character who later got her own mini-series yeah we're just bringing her in who cares whatever there's no Canon there's just retcons retcons on retcons one could say and the comics have all these crossovers that the movies don't necessarily have the rights to do there have been like Marvel vs DC crossovers before that would just be Unthinkable in the current way that things are arranged the fact that they were like hey we really need Spider-Man for civil war he's really important in the comics but Sony has the rights to Spider-Man like the fact that they were doing all this behind the scenes negotiation for that the comics don't have that like there's a little bit of Rights shenaniganery but for the most part crossovers are much easier to arrange so adapting that stuff can become very very difficult and they just don't have this massive backlog of story to draw on whenever they want they're trying to build something from the ground up the world of superhero comics is way bigger and way busier than any adaptation could really capture they've had eight decades to do this stuff nobody ever stays dead the underlying universe is just full of like mad Geniuses and mutants and Rogues Galleries and even in the runs where the writers forget that there are non-super villain problems that these characters probably deal with there is just an endless stream of problems for everybody to to fight and like a continuously established reason for all of these Heroes to exist and continue to exist and a movie franchise that introduces only one problem per movie and usually kills them in the finale will never ever catch up to this precedent that's been established in in the way that the comics are laid out yeah I think this is also a similar sensation to when people say oh I really like the kind of street level MCU stuff I like the ones that are more grounded because the frame of reference of you know fighting crime in a city is something that we can very clearly conceptualize and fill in the blanks of what these characters would be doing in between words like I said earlier like with Iron Man like is he gonna go stop muggings in an Iron Man suit he could but that seems like weirdly mismatched and beneath his power set so it's much harder to fill in those blanks or as with comics when you have so many threats there's just a constant Rogues Gallery busting out of prison every other Wednesday it's a lot easier to imagine that the world is just busy all the time with this yeah exactly but the thing is like patients do actually manage to pull off this Vibe Blade the 1998 movie I Didn't Know was 1998. years old um so blade is big based on a Marvel comic run did you guys know that there's a secret underworld of vampires in the Marvel Universe they have their fingers in every government they control the police no good it's because blade is single-handedly fighting all of them all the time he's the only person who ever deals with these vampires it seems like but he does such a damn good job that they can remain a secret world under like urban fantasy threat without everybody constantly being like Oh my god there are so many vampires in New York City how did they get here so this movie has the urban fantasy advantage that the heroes and villains are in a secret War so it never really feels like the protagonist is unnecessary because he is blatantly and single-handedly holding back a globe spanning Undead threat or at least keeping them so intimidated that they can't come out of the shadows and become a huge problem forever so that's good good job blade this is a similar reason for why the first Doctor Strange movie works so well because their whole job is to stop the sky from falling essentially yeah it's like have you seen any magical incursions in the MC you up until this point good the sorcerers and kamitage are doing their jobs yeah exactly this is the thing they could have been doing with phase cabal of Heroes holding off the whole time to explain why they haven't been able to participate like it would not be that complicated I don't know why they haven't been doing that and they have done that in a couple places I have some examples later on this movie really just kind of sums up like you can just introduce a hero and the secret immensely powerful scary bad guys that they've been dealing with that they're trapped in an eternal conflict with they don't end the movie by winning outright they do end the movie by beating whichever individual super villain they were dealing with and then the status quo resets they go back to fighting vampires and everything's great it's not that complicated but they really pull it off and like they really show like yeah there's the secret vampire nightclub that he you know slices up at the beginning but also it's like oh this cop that goes to check in on the POV character he turns out to be like working for vampires they've got their eyes everywhere like it's a lot of paranoia fuel in this movie but it kind of gets across like this is a constant omnipresent threat and this is like one guy and his crotchety Mentor that definitely survives the movie like single-handedly holding it off it really makes the whole thing feel very necessary there's never a question of whether they're not blade should continue to exist because if he doesn't everyone else better get real good at fighting vampires real quickly other examples that a lot of people have probably been shouting at the screen for about 10 minutes Sam or Amy's Spider-Man too there's a bit in this movie where he briefly loses his powers because he's sad about Mary Jane turns out so he he can't be Spider-Man anymore his powers aren't working his eyesight goes back to sucking he can't stick to walls he clearly still kind of has his powers because like he survives falling off a building and he just kind of walks it off so is that the first instance of my back yeah that's the fight back good so practically speaking his powers aren't working he can't be Spider-Man anymore so he does the Spider-Man no more Arc in the comics you know they very painstakingly recreate the shot from the comics it's iconic and all that stuff and the thing about that is that being Spider-Man has been absolute hell on his mental health and his work-life balance it's been really bad he's bad at his homework all of his teachers think he's lazy easy and disorganized MJ's really mad at him and now that he's not Spider-Man anymore and he can actually like do stuff everything in his life gets better he's a dork but he's having a good time and everyone in his life is like wow Peter you're really pulling your heart together this is great except obviously not having Spider-Man is kind of bad actually they do the little like crime up 75 everything is bad now thing but the the necessity of Spider-Man is in is Illustrated in this one scene where he's walking home and he sees this burning building and he like reflexively goes for his suit and then he remembers he has no powers and his suit isn't on he kind of steps back and then he's like oh did they just say that there's a kid in the building and just Sprints inside Into the Fire he nearly dies but he does make it out with the kid and then when he's like recovering in the ambulance on oxygen because he inhaled a lot of smoke he hears that someone was trapped on the fourth floor and never made it out and obviously he had no hope of saving that person he could barely save the toddler but like if he still has Spider-Man Powers he could have saved both of them no problem equipping the whole time and we've even seen him do as much in the first Spider-Man movie where he's saving a burning building with relative ease until a Green Goblin shows up exactly yeah like we know this is very much much within his normal skill set and this is an interesting case because like he didn't go like oh the world doesn't need Spider-Man and retires he he doesn't have his powers right now he couldn't be Spider-Man if he wanted to but like that clearly is like affecting him because his life has been getting better things are working out but the the moral of this movie is like in order to be Spider-Man to do what's necessary he has to give up so many things that are important to him and that's sad but Peter Parker is much too responsible to sacrifice the world around him for his own personal happiness it's not easy being Spider-Man it doesn't make it easy to be Peter Parker but it is very necessary and uh and that's really the Crux of this movie and then he uh MJ gets kidnapped and he gets his powers back and everything's fine so you know it's a good movie um I also wanted to highlight Netflix's Daredevil uh which does a very interesting angle on this again this is like street level MCU stuff and this is also so I haven't watched She-Hulk but I've been a little bit concerned about what the MCU is going to do with my angsty boy because yeah that's well placed yeah like because they brought Kingpin into Hawkeye and he's still played by the same guy who's still doing the same really good job but he is so watered down from how terrifying he is in the Netflix Daredevil version so the way that Netflix Daredevil works is that Matt Murdoch's enhanced senses mean that he is constantly intimately aware of all of the private closed-door Horrors that are going on around him for like miles and miles so he's surrounded by this evil that nobody else can perceive but he very much knows it's there and when he can't use his lawyer skills and a court of law to reveal this and bring the perpetrators to Justice he dresses up like a devil and punches it a whole bunch it's very emotionally healthy and good for him uh but the thing is like haha funny but like no it's not this is bad for him he wants to stop and his friends want him to stop and he tries to on several occasions he keeps trying to retire and he can't because unfortunately the world really does need Daredevil like the legal system is not perfect perfectly infallible it can be corrupted it's it's not that he wants to retire he wants to be able to just be Matt Murdoch the lawyer he wants to not need to be also Daredevil he doesn't want to pull like a uh Batman Dark Knight oh uh Batman kills people Harvey that's fine I was gonna go hang out my billionaire Mansion Matt Murdoch still wants to help and still knows there's a lot of work for him to do but he wants to be able to not be Daredevil because not only is it hell on his physical well-being but it's also just abominable for his conscience there are several scenes where he's going to confessional like I am like beating people up so badly and inflicting so much pain to try and stop them from inflicting worse pain on innocent people but oh my God this sucks and the priest is like yeah oh boy that's a lot yeah Daredevil has the he's got this like uniquely angsty power set where his super senses make him very very aware of all the horrible things happening around him but they don't make it easy for him to stop them from happening and like because he's like hearing from like blocks and blocks away like I said like he's surrounded by this evil that nobody else can perceive and he doesn't have the benefit or the comfort of ignorance he knows that it's happening and he can't stand to let it happen of course he wants to be a lawyer of course he wants to help these people get justice but the legal system is easily corrupted and controlled by people like the Kingpin and when that happens and the legal system falls through he has no recourse but to be Daredevil more and like over the course of the three seasons of the show of which the first one's fine the second one's bad the third one's very good basically all of his friends kind of slowly realize the same thing he's already realized which is like oh sure we we do we do need Daredevil I'm so sorry because like like uh there's an episode in the first season called um uh Nelson versus Murdoch and it is heartbreaking because in that episode foggy who is Matt's like legal partner figures out that he's Daredevil and it's basically this like just like 40 minute argument but between the two of them where foggy is like dude you've been lying to me our entire lives are you even really blind and that's like oh boy I already felt like and now I feel like worse but after that point foggy's kind of like oh no actually Kingpin is really really hard to deal with I think maybe somebody does need to go punch him about it so this whole series is about how like everybody wishes they didn't need Daredevil including Daredevil but unfortunately New York has some problems and uh it's pretty easy for extremely rich people to subvert the legal system and sometimes you just need an extremely sad Catholic boy to go punch a problem about it and the main struggle of the show is basically Matt finding a way to be Daredevil without destroying himself in the process kind of a similar note the Batman yes the Batman really really does a good job of convincing the audience that Gotham is an absolute goal it really really needs help and like Bruce has been batmaning for two years years and it is not helping like he's trying so hard but he hasn't figured out what exactly it needs until the very end of the movie basically the entire Arc of the movie is Bruce realizing that a symbol of fear and Vengeance that just pummels the symptoms of the problem into submission is not going to save Gotham but that doesn't mean that Gotham is a lost cause like the Riddler thinks it means that Gotham needs a symbol of Hope Gotham has to believe that it's possible for it to be saved it can't be dragged into being a better City it needs to help him a little bit which is why it's so important that when he does that like flare scene when he's guiding the people out he doesn't grab anybody and pull them out they walk out to him like symbolically it's very very important that he sets the example and the rest of the city follows him which is very cool this is a this is a movie that really really makes it feel like Batman is very very necessary and it's it's kind of like the inverse problem of Daredevil where Batman knows that he needs to be Batman and it's like why isn't this enough it's like if Daredevil realized oh I also need to be Matt Murdoch and that's a very cool comparison to put them next to each other because they they get toward the same idea that both of these two things are required to to transform a city in a system that is just so unbelievably screwed yeah and it's really cool to see that that character Arc play out inside of of Bruce's head over the course of the film and to see at every Point How Deeply necessary it is and one of the things that I really like from the very beginning of the movie is that the movie shows with three different examples of crimes happening Batman cannot be everywhere at once there's so much stuff going on even if he wanted to he could not put out all the fires that are happening so he's gotten clever enough to use fear as a weapon to try and make people run away under the fear that they will be the fire Batman puts out tonight right he's turned it into a roulette wheel basically he's you don't know which crime I'll stop but I'm gonna stop one of them with punching but yeah I've said a few times that this is a Bruce Wayne origin movie that he's already Batman but he hasn't figured out how to be the billionaire playboy philanthropist he hasn't figured out how necessary Bruce Wayne is and like the one time we see him out is Bruce Wayne he looks so uncomfortable and like almost terrified yeah if he's not being Batman he doesn't know how to function but again by the end of the movie he's like oh yeah okay this new mayor actually has the right idea like in that scene when he's out being Bruce Wayne and uh the the mayoral candidate like gets his arm and is like no Bruce I've been thinking about all these very like good ways that you could be using your money in support of the city and like he kind of does not answer at all but like we the audience are like yeah Bruce Wayne should be doing that uh historically he typically does so you're telling me he's not doing that yet and it's a little bit weird until you're like oh this movie is him figuring out that he does need to do that and punch stuff yeah the Wayne estate is more than a slush fund for his hot rods so there's a whole bunch of other examples of movies and and shows that have done a very good job of making it feel like the superhero or superheroes involved are very necessary um I asked Twitter about some yeah Twitter's still alive at time of recording for context when this video goes out in a month Twitter is a website that people used to use to talk to each other on the internet oh boy but uh yes before I hit my rate limit for the day I managed to get some some names that popped up a whole bunch that's why uh hero Academia is on there even though it it's a little bit because it's it's not exactly an adaptation of an existing comic series but it's kind of doing the same thing it's unpacking a lot of the same stuff but yeah most of these do a very good job of making it clear that like hey yeah this character they are necessary we we need them or at least the world needs somebody filling their shoes so like again into the spider-verse came up a whole bunch because they really do a lot of highlighting like hey without Peter in this universe like things are bad there's like a hole in the city that needs to be filled and that's why the scene that starts with the leap of faith where he's swing through the city and you can kind of see everyone being like Oh my God we have a Spider-Man again like it's it's this very healing moment yeah mask of the Phantasm Batman tries desperately to retire concludes he cannot it's kind of a theme it's just unlimited brings it all up Spectacular Spider-Man Peter always has a lot to do Moon Knight an MCU example that I thought did a very good job of being like yeah he's got a lot to do he's got a lot to do and it's another case of like this is a secret vigilante that has a divinely mandated task that is gonna keep him busy forever because konshu is the protect director of The Travelers at night and those guys are always getting into trouble there are a lot of them yeah there's a lot of them and bad happens at night all the time and that's good that's really cool and it gives the moon night system a lot of stuff and it kind of explains why he hasn't turned up before because he's been busy yeah there's just a lot of these examples where the the story it might be like hey do we really need this character but like they'll go out of their way to show that yes yes these guys are necessary they're busy the world is complicated and full of a lot of different stuff and they have a lot to do and that's good it's cool that this is possible because when I look at the Corpus of comic literature and the the thing I'm tacitly asking these adaptations to pull off it gets really overwhelming it's it's kind of amazing that any of these pull it off like I I don't want to be too harsh about this stuff it's just like there's this underlying busyness that's present in the source material that it is so hard for the adaptations to pull off but I see adaptations that do pull that off or at least through careful precise writing imply that there is a larger world out there where stuff is always happening and that if these characters disappeared the world would notice yeah makes me feel like this is maybe a little bit less of a tall order than I think it is I think something to note on this last slide is that there's a preponderance of episodic shows yeah where this is happening and it makes sense why this would be a lot easier to get this idea across where the superheroes are dealing with a lot of things and at any given moment they're fighting one of them but there are a lot of things happening you know off to the sides or in the background or right before immediately after you know whatever villain of the week they're they're punching at and it's hard to do that in the film not impossible as we've seen but yeah it's a lot easier when you have a limited scope of you know a few seasons you know dozen or so episodes in each season where you can just tackle different threats and show that they're all these different things going on but not so long that you risk running into the Sherlock problem getting back to the very beginning where you eventually play around with these ideas so much that you get bored by the regular problems that these guys solve the crimes the fires the the kind of everyday stuff that isn't as exciting as a super villain and these shows are really good because you get that room to breathe and see what's going on in this world without getting to the point where you've just speed run all the way to there's only actually one threat that matters and everything else is either like less important than or a subset of this big Central threat yeah and unfortunately the MCU isn't able to square that you know on on the whole they can't square that Circle because the individual films are self-contained little bytes that have to tell a singular story for usually a singular character yeah and when so many of them are origin stories you get the idea that the heroes have one defining moment in their life where they became a superhero and fought their first bad guy and then they're just kind of waiting for the next shoe to drop where they have to be useful again and in between that there is oftentimes just not that same thing there so 17 different movies in a Multiverse kind of thing are not as cohesive as 17 episodes of a season of Justice League Unlimited for instance yeah because the structure is just intrinsically different and it doesn't lend itself to being able to see what are the superheroes doing because every single movie has to be this big huge threat and when every thread is big and huge none of them are yeah exactly we we talked about a lot of this when we did your Superman detail that I tribe about Superman is the ultimate firefighter there's a bunch of Justice League Unlimited episodes that kind of tie into that they were like I'll fight Doomsday the rest of you handle the erupting volcano in the evacuation like there's always something happening in terms of like character has the defining origin moment and then sort of struggles to find their place I have Wonder Woman on this list of like other movies that really pull it off it's one of those cases where like she kind of single-handedly ends World War One and the shot of her Crossing no man's land is widely considered to be like the most iconic most important part of the movie because it really shows like this is what she can do this is what this character is capable of doing and it's incredible and then for various reasons she didn't really have a lot to do in the other movies about her uh I haven't seen Wonder Woman 1984 for the record the dceu is pretty good at making the world feel generally kind of shitty like there's always a reason for superheroes to be doing stuff but sometimes the superheroes feel bad and then they don't do stuff yeah weirdly with the exception of Superman the dce you actually did a pretty good job of giving the heroes reasons to exist that was one of the things they actually kind of did pretty well yeah well it's because they made the world is miserable massive exception of Superman yeah but that's the thing like they made the world just so sad and miserable like they could definitely use Heroes it's just kind of like the movies seem like they they don't want to actually let the heroes do anything to make those worlds better like again with the exception of Wonder Woman where she single-handedly stops World War one it's kind of like you've got these two sides of the adaptations kind of not not quite hitting it right because in the DC EU it's like the world is a dark sad place that desperately needs Heroes but our heroes suck and they're they're mean and jerks and really angsty and they say stuff like Superman was never real and then they die or retire and then meanwhile Marvel is like crime never heard of it everything has been fixed forever you know when everyone disappeared and the world went into chaos everyone just had depression and and went to therapy About It featuring Marvel's first gay character so like it's it's like two very different sides of the same coin where it's like the world still doesn't really feel like it needs the heroes but in one case it's because the world has no problems and in the other case it's because the heroes don't do anything but again this is Broad straw I'm painting with a very big brush on these because there are these standout moments that really pull them off there are things about these that that make it work but that kind of makes the weird imbalance kind of stand out more when it shows up so yeah uh in conclusion superheroes need more stuff to do they need more enrichment in their enclosure oh boy I told you this is going to be a shorter one didn't I no you did not oh my God I mean I was like oh it was old Child's Play No obviously we had a lot to say about this one no you're talking about a fundamental problem in all superhero media adaptations that's that's pretty expansive oh no definitely definitely I have to go to bed for blade 1998 before people are like no maybe red doesn't hate Marvel on principle I think I mean I've tried to kind of like pepper this in throughout the course of the detail diatribe so that will will get the odd commenters who who speed through and then and then hastily uh scribble uh a take um but I oh that that was uncharitable of me to say um I do want to make it clear that when we come to these kind of ideas of hey there's there's something about this that isn't working for us sometimes it's like and because of this we just don't like what's going on in this at all and and there are many times that's happened in the past there many times it's happened in the future or that will happen in the future but yeah this is a case where in some instances it really like takes the movie off its foundations and just makes the whole thing feel weird I think the Nolan Batman movies are a good example of that yeah movies just feel completely empty if you look at it on that level if you just acknowledge the weirdness of Batman retiring for eight years in Gotham being fine it is so hard to invest yourself in what's going on in the movie and it I think tangibly detracts from your ability to enjoy it that's I think a non-zero portion of why people will point out that they really didn't like dark knight rises even though the problems also there in the Dark Knight people just really liked Heath Ledger's performance and that's entirely valid yeah there are other examples like with Spider-Man where it's like this is really weird and I can't put my finger on why but something's wonky here where that like whether or not it ruins it is depends on your preferences and your tastes right and then they're the ones where it's like this is just kinda interesting and it informs what's going on hi Cleo baby I think she's like you've been recording for two hours chill out I've heard that one that was amazing loud squeak hi hi baby um do you have thoughts on superhero adaptations yes you do me treats it may as well leave me stuck in the tree forever completely like the the Iron Man stuff where it's I think also kind of on the level of the Spider-Man like whether or not it breaks your immersion will will be you know your mileage may vary but the the Captain America stuff again in that level of once you realize it it's hard to un to unnotice it then you get the kind of things like Spider-Man raymie movies and Daredevil where once you acknowledge this this trait of the world your enjoyment of the thing deepens and you're able to really appreciate what they did right and I I think it is important to acknowledge that this is not a problem of universal weight across the different adaptations yeah different movies kind of do this and get away with it or do this and don't get away with it and it's a function of the story and what they're trying to do that will affect how much the lack of stuff for the superheroes to get up to in their non-avengers level threat time will damage uh the the immersion of an audience yeah I mean I don't want to make it seem like this is a this is the only thing I ever think about stories like I said there's a lot of points in these movies that I really like this is basically the culmination of me finally figuring out what's been bugging me about this for the last like 10 years because I keep noticing these little things about about what bothers me about these and which adaptations I like and which ones I don't and when we were talking about like super hands the ultimate firefighter I was like that must be it it's been bothering me that these characters never actually save anybody but like that doesn't really that that doesn't really hammer in on the point it's more like nobody ever needs to be saved in these movies unless it's you know flavor text on the super villain of the week or it's somebody's like love interest or something like that if a character isn't plot relevant they don't get to show up and that means that they don't get to add texture to the world and you end up with this this setting that feels very empty and the thing is that is a problem that is not restricted to superhero media I wanted to focus on superhero media because this is where I think this problem is most visible but there are a ton of stories where it kind of feels like the only real people are the main characters and everyone else is just this interchangeable Blank Slate uh and in contrast you get stories where it really feels like every character is like the hero of Their Own Story the world feels busy it feels like there's more going on in it than just what you see when the camera's on uh and that is a tricky thing to pull off but a lot of stories do it and there's like this this Secret Sauce in there to making it feel like there are real human beings present and real things are happening even when you don't see it and I think that's a very interesting like writing hurdle to get over but I don't really see anybody talking about it in isolation because of course like the main point when you're telling a story is to tell the story like why would you focus on telling the parts of the story that you're not showing why would you focus on the parts of the world that never get seen But like it does so much to make a world feel more alive uh I I think the last movie rubbing your face against my microphone no sorry more ADR um but like I I think the last movie I I complained about in that specific Dimension was not a superhero movie I think it was when I was thinking about um Avatar again uh blue cat people won that created a world that felt like it was a very very beautifully rendered backdrop for like three real people and one of them dies in the movie so like whatever I haven't seen way of water in a large part of that was because I never had a reason to want to and from what I've heard it does more of the same it's it's a very very beautiful backdrop on a story about the only real human beings in the world and that whale and a whale I've also heard very good things about the whale you don't need to comment about the whale I already know about the whale that's kind of another facet of this where where you create these absolutely gorgeous settings and then they just feel like the backdrop of a School play it's all two-dimensional and it stops where the camera stops and a lot of stories don't do that and I like those a lot better yeah oh my God I need to make another cup of tea um I think that about covers what I wanted to say um so so uh bye laughs [Music]

Channel: Overly Sarcastic Productions

Views: 217,836

Keywords: Funny, Summary, OSP, Overly Sarcastic Productions, Analysis, Literary Analysis, Myths, Legends, Classics, Literature, Stories, Storytelling, History, Mythology

Id: dEeZOn962QI

Length: 116min 18sec (6978 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 11 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/MirrorMan68]

While I do see where Red is coming from, I feel like she doesn't give enough consideration to the fact that these are, at their core, still movies. Even in a shared cinematic universe like the MCU, each movie has to be a relatively self-contained story, and that story needs to be told as efficiently as possible. There isn't as much wiggle room to show the heroes do things like stopping muggers like you can in tv shows because they take too much attention away from the primary narrative. You could always show them doing casual heroics in a cold open, but even that might get stale after a while. There are only so many ways you can foil a bank robbery.

Plus, I think it really depends on the hero. Like Thor doesn't seem like the kinda guy to chase after a stolen armored call. Feels like he'd have more important things to do. That's more of a Spider-Man job.