The Marvel Problem
Image Courtesy: Depth of Field Magazine
In the over a century-long history of motion pictures, I don’t think there has been anything like the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Likely the largest form of serialized storytelling ever attempted in terms of scope and popularity, the MCU has dominated the entertainment industry for almost a decade and a half now. Since the 2008 film, Iron Man, there have been 29 films, and 17 TV shows, 8 of them being released within the last two years on Marvel parent company Disney’s streaming service, Disney+.
All these films have grossed over $100 million and generated worldwide public discourse, with Avengers: Endgame becoming the highest-grossing film of all time before the previous #1 movie, Avatar being rereleased in theaters in anticipation of its sequel coming out in later 2022. This franchise is popular, with producer mastermind Kevin Feige at the helm, multiple high-budget projects are being released every year to generally positive reception.
But in 2019, promoting his then-new film The Irishman, legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese had this to say in an interview with Empire “I don’t see them. I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema. Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well-made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”
Image Courtesy: Digital Spy
If you pay even the slightest amount of attention to the entertainment industry, you’ve likely heard about this as Scorsese’s comments generated a frenzy throughout the business. The “not cinema” aspect is the part of the statement that was put on all the headlines and the main phrase most defenders of Marvel tended to latch onto. Superhero film directors and actors responded in various ways. Various filmmakers and actors like James Gunn, Taika Waititi, the late Chadwick Boseman, director of the Best Picture-winning Parasite Bong Joon-Ho, Chris Evans, and Tom Holland denounced or dismissed Scorsese’s statement with Gunn calling it “cynical” stating that Marvel films are “cinema”. While others came to Scorsese’s defense like superhero actor Robert Downey Jr., writer/director and frequent collaborator of Scorsese’s Paul Schrader, and fellow filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola who harshly stated “Martin was kind when he said it’s not cinema. He didn’t say it’s despicable, which I just say it is.”
However, beyond mere controversy that the 24-hour news cycle would use and discard within a week, Scorsese’s comments seemed to have a wider long-term effect on how some fans would view future installments of the MCU franchise. They began to become more critical, seeing the shortcomings more clearly and how they measured up to their comic counterparts. An effect, I think, is a positive one.
I have been a massive fan of superheroes for as long as I can remember. I have seen every entry into the MCU in theaters and have read thousands of issues of comic books over my lifetime. Yet as I grow older, and my love of these characters still grows, I find myself agreeing with Scorsese more and more. I noticed how every Marvel film looks the same with a horrific grey color palette and obvious green screens in every scene, the lack of emotional depth or message compared to their comic counterparts, and the overabundance of the releases. These factors play into what I call “The Marvel Problem”, an issue facing the MCU and cinema.
Image Courtesy: MercatorNet
These films are produced so quickly that there is little to no vision or passion behind these projects anymore. Recently, there was a controversy surrounding Marvel regarding how they treat the visual effects artists they hire to work on their films. Numerous accounts from the artists themselves detail multiple last-minute changes to scenes or new ones being added altogether or being given unrealistically fast deadlines to finish visual effects shots and being forced to work long hours because of them.
A prominent example of this is the final fight between the protagonist and antagonist in the 2018 mega-hit Black Panther. In this battle, the thought-dead king of the advanced fictional African country of Wakanda, the titular Black Panther has come back to reclaim his throne from his long-lost cousin, Killmonger, who plans to take over the world and end the oppression faced by Africans all over the world while two tribes of Black Panther and Killmonger loyalists fight above them. Many including myself were put off by how unrealistic and uncanny valley-like the characters who the audience that had been following the whole film suddenly looked in their costumes behind obvious computer-generated backgrounds, falling into the mines of Wakanda as if the laws of physics did not exist.
In an interview with Inverse, a VFX artist who worked on the film Todd Sheridan Perry said “’ The Black Panther/Killmonger fight was always planned and had been through previz, but the tribal battle up above didn't feel big enough. Marvel said they wanted it to be epic like there were hundreds of people fighting.’” The article also went on to detail that “Method Studio, where Perry was working at the time, had been assigned both the vibranium mine fight and the Wakanda plains battle. More resources put towards the latter meant less for the former.” So Marvel decided to hire another VFX studio, DNEG to finish the Black Panther/Killmonger fight. However, the computers at DNEG were programmed differently and they had to essentially work from scratch in a few weeks.
It also doesn’t help that more and more, Marvel is relying on these VFX houses to create rudimentary things like costumes, props, and some backgrounds that would look much better had they been practical but because it’s not their department and they need to finish shooting quickly, it’s all delegated to places like Method or DNEG. It has become rare to watch a Marvel film where the superhero’s costume or the background is entirely practical, and actors suddenly become transported to an obvious green/blue screen in the middle of a conversation. What makes it even more ridiculous is that other projects, some of which are in the same genre and/or made by the same studio, like 2022’s The Batman or Andor on Disney+ are made with a smaller budget but look infinitely better with practical sets and costumes. More recently this year’s Thor: Love and Thunder had an effect of a child speaking to Thor through the magic that received so much ridicule online, that, for its debut on Disney+ the effect was “fixed” and arguably looks worse.
However, while lackluster visuals are a big detractor in the quality of a visual medium like film and TV, the issue that bothers me the most about how Marvel films are made is the writing. Marvel Studios’ writing aims to prioritize humor over everything else and to change things about characters to appeal to the widest possible audience. Some attribute these changes are defended for the sake of variety but with decades of material with different writers/artists to adapt from, that argument doesn’t hold water. The primary offenders of this for me, are the MCU adaptations of Moon Knight and Spider-Man.
Spider-Man is no longer a hero defined by his guilt over letting the man who raised him die, his independence from other heroes, his lone-wolf nature, and his working-class struggles. He is now the incompetent, clumsy successor to the multi-billionaire superhero Tony Stark/Iron Man whom he idolizes, and has all his suits and technology made by him as well. Although in fairness, I will say that last year’s Spider-Man: No Way Home addressed a lot of these problems for me by not mentioning Stark at all, and the film ends with Spider-Man making a tremendous sacrifice to save the universe, ending up poor and alone with a homemade suit.
Image Courtesy: Animated Times
Moon Knight is no longer a vengeful, angry mentally ill street-level superhero who used to be a mercenary struggling to keep all three of his split personalities in check while also questioning whether the Egyptian moon god Khonshu is real or entirely made up. He is now an odd couple duo of the no-nonsense straight-man personality Marc Spector and the goofy, Cockney-accented Steven Grant with the season finale leaning into the “evil alter” stereotype of people with dissociative identity disorder by revealing the normally good guy third personality from the comics, Jake Lockley, to be the more sinister and violent one the show had been hinting at all along. His Jewish faith and heritage, something that plays a large role in why Moon Knight is a hero in the first place and the origin of his disorder, is reduced to an aesthetic choice in one scene at his mother’s funeral and is played by Hispanic, non-Jewish actor Oscar Isaac.
Erasing ethnicities by delegating it to the background and not casting actors of those ethnicities is another worrying trend in not only Marvel but other superhero projects as well. Take DC’s upcoming Black Adam, whose origin is that he was a slave in ancient Egypt who was given superpowers. Now he’s played by the Samoan African American superstar Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in his real-life American accent. Another superhero featured in Black Adam is Atom-Smasher or Albert Rothstein; the Jewish-American grandson of a supervillain who refused to repeat his grandfather’s mistakes and become a superhero now played by the Netflix star Noah Centineo who is of Italian and German descent.
But perhaps the most insulting and sinister instance of this comes in the form of the adaptations of the superheroes Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver in the MCU. In the comics, they are Pietro and Wanda Maximoff, twins born of the Jewish Holocaust survivor super-villain and sometimes anti-hero, Magneto.
These are just a few examples of this happening in an industry that has a long history of erasing those with heritages and ethnicities that are outside of what is considered “desirable” for studio executives to portray. And Marvel’s upcoming Fantastic Four project has me worried as with the Fantastic Four, inevitably comes Doctor Doom, the fictional leader of the Eastern European country Latveria, whose life of oppression and discrimination because of his Romani heritage made him want to take over his country and the world.
Although Marvel isn’t the only studio to prioritize money over quality and white-wash characters, I think that with their position as the biggest franchise in the world, it is their responsibility to set a standard on how media should be produced and to stay authentic to their characters and their heritage as representation matters and with great power, comes great responsibility.
Strike Out,
Writer: Matias Civita
Editor: Racquel Gluckstern
Tallahassee