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What is your favorite superhero/capeshit movie?
I'll nominate a few, because it's hard to choose one.
The Incredibles is a superhero movie and I think works particularly well because it's animated and has so many comedy elements. Unlike most modern superhero films, it doesn't take itself that seriously, and is a better film for it. Superheroes are, at their core, rather silly and childish, and embracing that works. It's the difference between The Incredibles and every Fantastic Four movie - the former isn't pretending to not be silly. Anyway, it is amazing. I am fond of Megamind for similar reasons, though it's a less polished and ultimately less successful film than The Incredibles. Still, when I watch a superhero film, it's because I want to have fun, and these films provide.
On the very other end of the spectrum, The Dark Knight is still amazing. Batman Begins is actually quite solid too. However, I don't think I'm going to nominate them as my favourite because they don't fit the genre. The Dark Knight is a dark, gritty crime drama that just happens to have Batman in it. It's not realistic - on the contrary, it's more of a psychodrama about nihilism and chaos - but it's not fundamentally about superheroes either.
I will also mention Iron Man (2008), which is probably the best film to star the character. It's from back when the MCU wasn't a thing, Robert Downey Jr. wasn't famous, and the character of Iron Man was still an obscure B- or C-lister that no one outside of comics fans recognised. If you knew Iron Man at all, it was probably in the context of him being a total asshole in Civil War (the comic). The film singlehandedly brought him into the public eye and made people love him again. Anyway, what I think the original Iron Man has going for it is that it's just un-self-conscious? It has none of the burdens of being a Marvel film. It's just a film. But it's a film that has such enthusiasm for its subject matter, and such infectious joy? The whole film is a love letter to engineering and creativity. Tony's first flight is a sequence of pure joy. It's also from back when the Iron Man armour was genuinely cool, and part of that for me is that the armour in the first film clanks and whirrs and sounds like a machine. It's not this nanomachine nonsense that may as well be magic, as it is in the latest films. It is metal and gears. Lastly, I want to say that unlike a lot of later MCU films, it has a bunch of really good shots in it? The Jericho test at the start or the tank scene have these really well-composed, memorable shots. But do you remember any similar shots from the sequels? Lastly, Black Sabbath. It's just great.
Can't argue with that. Many superhero movies I've seen I didn't really care for. But with few allusions The Incredibles manage to conjure up a mythical retro mindspace where all that golden-to-silver age superheroes existed and enmeshes it with some great James Bond villain tropes. Also, a great movie.
I will nominate The Mask of Zorro as a runner-up for similar but not same reasons. (Cape, mask, heroics --- of course its capeshit, but it comes with swords, horses and 19th century California/Mexico landscapes, which makes it better). Not a perfect movie, but I had genuine fun watching it. Many darker movies are objectively notable (the Dark Knight trilogy, Watchmen, Joker) but not really fun.
I notice this with the MCU as well - the best films are the ones that embrace the transparently juvenile nature of the whole endeavour. As a rule, the more childish the film, the better it is.
Iron Man (2008) is basically a fourteen year old boy's fantasy. Tony Stark is rich, awesome, lives in a palace with a bunch of luxury cars, he has a private jet that transforms into a strip club with his own private pole-dancers, and so on. Stark's superpower is engineering, one of the most 'boy' careers around. He goes to all the fanciest parties and has sex with hot women. He makes cool toys and flies around and doesn't do what anyone else tells him. The film is a profoundly adolescent one, and even though the emotional arc of the character is growing up and becoming less of an utter man-child, he still does all the cool man-child stuff.
Likewise if you look at the other most successful MCU films. Guardians of the Galaxy is again a teenage boy's fantasy about being a cool guy. The Avengers is a Joss Whedon film and Whedon's greatest strength has been his inner teenager. The Avengers is about a clubhouse of four awesome dudes who hang out and quip wittily and do really cool stuff together. The most popular Thor film was Ragnarok, the one that dropped all the attempts to be serious or really evoke a heroic epic, and instead just went for adolescent comedy combined with awesome violence. Early on the MCU tried to give each character's cinematic sub-series a unique tone - Iron Man was all about technology and creativity, Captain America had these wistful, serious films about war and intrigue, and Thor was meant to be high fantasy with a Shakespearean edge from the comics, hence Kenneth Branagh. But that didn't take off that well with the superhero film audience, and while, say, this has no place in the serious quasi-Shakespearean fantasy epic, it is undoubtedly something that makes teenage boys cheer. The MCU always does better when it leans into the childishness.
I'd argue that the DC films' biggest problem was trying to take themselves too seriously. Charitably they were trying to differentiate themselves from Marvel, and they were probably chasing the successes of The Dark Knight and Watchmen, but... well, Watchmen was a deconstruction, and as I said, The Dark Knight isn't even really a superhero movie. When DC tried to do a serious, dark Superman it didn't work out. I've not seen Wonder Woman, but Aquaman was the best of the DC films I saw, and I do not think it was a coincidence that Aquaman was the most openly silly.
In fact, I'll go beyond just saying that superhero films do better when they embrace their own childishness. They do better when they realise that superheroes are kind of inherently comedic.
None of these films are straight comedies - not even Guardians of the Galaxy or Thor: Ragnarok. But they all have a lot of comedy elements. It works because, well, superhero comics are funny. They work much better if you embrace that.
That doesn't mean I want Superman or Captain America to gurn and mug at the camera. Superman and Cap are very sincere characters, whose simple goodness and wholesome patriotism are part of their appeal. But that doesn't mean you can't acknowledge the silliness or have comic scenes. The best Superman film is probably still Superman (1978), and it gets plenty of comedy mileage from the contrast between Superman and Clark.
Anyway, The Incredibles was a comedy, and I think that just being a straight comedy works better for superheroes than trying to cut the comedy entirely. Superheroes become miserable when they take themselves too seriously.
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