Man, did that formula wear out for me. Marvel was doing sterling work, keeping their MCU movies fun and well-cast and reasonably well-written, but holy shit did they just overdo the whole thing. What are we, fourteen movies into the franchise? (Not counting the X-Men movies, four (of ten) of which I’ve seen, nor the five recent Spider-Man movies (three of which I’ve seen), nor Ang Lee’s Hulk (which I saw), nor B-Fleck’s turn as Daredevil (which I saw), nor any of the god-knows-how-many Punisher and Fantastic Four movies there might be.) Of those 14 big MCU movies I watched eight of them before I gave up. All eight were perfectly competent and reasonably entertaining timewasters, but I simply ran out of any give-a-shit I might have been able to maintain for any of the characters. I didn’t bother with any of the five MCU TV series that have aired so far, even though I think I might like one or two of them. I just can’t be arsed to care about superheroes anymore. They’re usually not exotic enough to be fascinating, nor are they usually human enough to be relatable, and the vast majority of their problems aren’t the problems of anyone with whom I can relate. And the spectacle itself just gets as repetitive as all 52 years’ worth of Godzilla movies, but compressed into a single decade. Way too much screen time is devoted to some all-powerful evil thing blasting chunks of asphalt and masonry off All-American city streets while Our Heroes launch a mini-missile here, no-scope an explosive arrow there, and clobber some villains over the head with a city bus down the block, but mostly you have buckets of CGI pixels spinning around the screen incomprehensibly while large subwoofers insistently pound our skulls with the message that Something World-Endingly Awful is scarring the cityscape and threatening all of humankind again and again and again and hey look there’s another Infinity Stone and you know those will be EVEN BIGGER PROBLEMSzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
God, I can’t even keep awake for my own rants on this shit anymore. My 9-year-old and I saw Fantastic Beasts last week, and mostly enjoyed it, except for the city-smashing CGI Cloud Of Destruction that was ravaging 1926 Manhattan, straight out of The Battle of New York from The Avengers. My daughter’s one criticism of Fantastic Beasts: “too many explosions.” Preach it, my girl!
That’s the trouble. My brain actually likes to go to the movies, too. It doesn’t enjoy having to be put on hold and told to go play pinball in the lobby until the dumb story is over.
This this this this this this this. Once I read Watchmen I didn’t feel much need to read another caped-superhero story since Moore had kinda given the last word on any kind of adult perspective on the topic. Everything else superheroic might as well be six-year-olds playing in their toybox. “Can Batman defeat Superman in a fight?” Son, please. Let’s go play more Skyrim or go ride bikes or something. That question didn’t occupy more than five minutes of my imagination back in 1976. Why would I care about it now?
Isn’t it weird that I still have bottomless love for postapocalyptic road wars, intergalactic space battles, cloned dinosaurs, werewolves, magical academies, hobbits, pirates, Westerns, and kaiju of all flavors, but I have finally been driven to the opinion that costumed superheroes are irredeemably childish? It makes no real sense and is embarrassingly hypocritical, but there it is: even though I pretty much thoroughly enjoyed Phase 1 of the MCU (and really kinda liked GotG and Ant-Man, if I NEVER see another superhero movie it’ll be too soon.
I really want Disney and WB to spend all that money on something else. Really, anything else.
