Marvel is Killing Its Own Movies

 

 

 

Copyright Marvel

 

 

 

 

Writing about Shang Chi is somewhat difficult because well, it's not the worst movie in the world. In fact, it's so aggressively average that it feels somewhat wrong to have strong feeling about it because there's really nothing in the film to feel strongly about. It feels slightly ridiculous to criticize the movie because it's as substantial as a marshmallow but, I still feel it's important to note why this movie is so drained of substance because ultimately, everyone loses in this approach. 

What it comes down to is that Disney isn't really interested in making movies with their Marvel properties. Everything, from the movies to the TV shows, is there to fulfill their obligations to the brand, to propel the overarching story lines spread across as many pieces of media as possible. This style of story telling isn't all that unusual or unprecedented, the studio system of early Hollywood matches the way Disney cranks these movies out at a production line pace. For something closer to home, spreading story arcs out over as many title, requiring people to buy multiple books just to understand the basic plot, resembles the business model the comic industry used in 90's to fuel a massive sales expansion. Both of these systems made their industries piles of money...until they didn't. For the studio system, the trust busting movement born out of the New Deal destroyed studio monopolies. The resulting creative freedom of the 60's and beyond meant that no one was really clamoring for the return of the five major film studios dictating what the public was allowed to see. 

Likewise, when the comics bubble burst, it nearly drove Marvel into bankruptcy, forcing it to sell of the licensing rights for some of their best selling titles to Fox and Sony aka the studios that produced X-Men and the original Spiderman trilogy. 

It's troubling then to see both companies fall back on business models famous for their failures, but to breakdown why it matters to us as audiences, let's talk about Shang Chi.

Naturally, for any martial arts film, the main thing we're going to judge Shang Chi are its fight scenes. Out of all the fight sequences in the film, the only one with any panache or personality is the bus fight scene in the beginning of the movie. It's a tight, enclosed space, we see Simu Liu's face for a large majority of it (which, kudos to him for that choreography) and the geography of the bus makes for some good interactions as the fight goes on. It's not a great fight scene, but it offers enough action and character beats that it at least qualifies as a scene.

The same cannot be said for the bamboo structure fight outside Xialing's fight club. On paper, the fight sounds great- Shang Chi and company battle his father's minions (and perilous heights) as they work their way down through down closer to street level. It's a very Jackie Chan inspired fight, except executed with a thousandth of the effort. There's a great video by sadly defunct Youtube channel Every Frame a Painting that breaks down what makes Jackie's style so fun to watch. A key component is being able to see every bit of the action in as full a frame as possible meaning, we see the full set and the characters at the same time as they move through the space during the fight. 

In Shang Chi, the exterior of the building is shrouded in darkness, the only close ups come in the hand-to-hand exchanges between the cast. This is a dead giveaway that the physical set was maybe three or four sections of the scaffolding with the rest filled in digitally after the fact.

Honestly, it sucks to make any movie this way, but action scenes in particular get the worse of it. Fight scenes get their zing from their physicality, once you remove that, all their power is gone. The key here is clarity, we need to be able to have a good understanding of the lay of the land and how our characters move through it. By muddling the layout in darkness however, we lose track of where everyone is and, because the only time we actually see them up close is again when the camera cuts in close we can't tell what floor of the scaffolding the characters are on. All this means that there's no sense of rhythm to fight, it's all just a jumble of movement with no climax, it just... stops.

Even so, the movie saves the worst fight scene for last. The duel between Shang Chi and his father Wenwu is one of the most boring things I've ever seen on film. Again, on paper, it should be an excellent scene. Here, finally, is the emotional reckoning between Shang Chi and his father, played out through violence because that is the only communication they share any more. It's here I can somewhat see where people can like the movie, because it allows audiences to trick themselves into believing that the movie is doing more than it is.

I call this "projection storytelling," meaning that the movie has just enough depth that you as an audience member can project deeper emotions into the story than what's actually there.  

The Harry Potter franchise is a prime example of this, as well as everything Marvel has put on Disney+ so far. In this case, it has to do with what should be the stakes of this movie which is the relationship between Shang Chi, his father Wenwu, and his sister Xialing. We find out that a gang out for revenge against Wenwu came to their family for something he did when he was still going down the immortal warlord path. The gang kills Shang Chi's mother Li, which sets Wenwu back on the path of embracing the power of the ten rings, returning to his immortal warlord self.

There's tragedy here, obviously, not only in Li's death, but in Wenwu's reaction. Returning to the ten rings, cuts Wenu off from feeling vulnerable ever again. He's so afraid of ever allowing himself to feel weak that he cuts himself off from being the father his children need in the wake of their loss. It's this choice, not Li's death, that destroys their family, what drives Wenwu's grief throughout the movie, driving him to impossibly desperate, mad choices.

All of this is there in the movie, thanks largely to an absolutely heroic performance by Tony Leung, but it isn't a plot or a theme the movie is actively exploring. Like I said, we can put the pieces together, but only because the movie leaves them lying around like scattered Legos. 

Which brings us back to the fight. 

This fight should be sad, a solemn affair between a son desperate to have just one genuine emotional connection with the father he loves. Except Wenwu is too far gone, too lost in his own grief and regret, to accept that vulnerability ever again, leaving no other choice but to put him down.

We've seen this done in other media before. Castlevania did it to heartbreaking effect, as did The Last Airbender. To pull it off though, you have to invest the time to build the emotional stakes via the characters relationships to make it work. Marvel refuses to do this kind of work because if their films are solidly about something, they cease to be blank slates for audiences to consume while projecting whatever depth they want onto the finished product. 

Sure, this leads to success at the box office. The movie also has a 92% critic rating and a 98% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Obviously, in the short term, making such paper thin product is a solid business strategy. Except everything turns, eventually, and a media empire built out of sandcastles is bound to be swept away by the changing tides.

Saving Batman

Batman is one of the oldest, most popular superheroes we have. Eight different actors, either in live action or animated films, have portrayed him in theatrical releases over the last 32 years, along with a ridiculous amount of cartoons and video games during that same time period. Naturally, given all the exposure, the Caped Crusader has attracted a fair bit of controversy around him, even to the point where people question if he qualifies as a hero at all. So, along those lines, I want to go over how Batman came to his troubled reputation and how to fix it.

If we're talking about the problems with Batman, we have to talk about Frank Miller. A firebrand creator who cut his teeth with his original work Ronin and his run on Daredevil in the 80's, Miller, along with Alan Moore, brought new potential to comic book storytelling with his iconic work on the 1986 mini-series, The Dark Knight Returns. The comic is about an aged Bruce Wayne coming out of retirement to once again strike terror into the forever superstitious and cowardly criminal element of Gotham City. It's hard to understand now, but the impact of The Dark Knight Returns, and Moore's Watchman,  would change comics forever. They ushered in a whole new era of comic books built around bdarker characters, "mature" story lines, and an overall aesthetic of intimidating grimness that would dominate comics in the 90's before the industry nearly collapsed into bankruptcy.

For Batman specifically, Miller introduced a character more interested in exacting his vengeance over the criminal underworld, a man who would go to any lengths to be the terror of anyone who did harm to real citizens. It doesn't sound all that different on paper, but the way Miller portrays criminals as inhuman scum protected by weak-willed liberals who care more for the monsters than the victims they leave in their marauding wake casts Batman as the strongman who rejects the weakness of society in order to lay down the absolute brutality of law and order. There's a lot of fascist undertones in The Dark Knight Rises, undertones Miller makes explicit in his later Batman works, The Dark Knight Strikes Again, and All-Star Batman. The crown jewel of this trend, however, was Holy Terror. Originally pitched as a Batman series, the plot boils down to a murderous Batman knock-off slaughtering Saturday morning cartoon versions of Islamic terrorists. 

Even so, while Miller's work is influential, no one is more responsible for bringing "Batman is a fascist" to the mainstream than Christopher Nolan. In The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises especially, the Batman of Nolan's work is a rich dude using his vast resources to beat people to a pulp for justice instead of personal gain. 

In his mission to destroy the mob, Batman kidnaps Lau, a Chinese national, from his home in Hong Kong, then delivers Lau to the police for prosecution. To defeat the Joker, he hacks into every cell phone in Gotham City to pin down the Joker's location. 

Both of these would be highly recognizable in 2008 as the tactics of the War on Terror. Dragging the mob's account from Hong Kong back to the States is a pretty clear example of extraordinary rendition, while his hijacking of Gotham's cell network was a direct mirror of the NSA spying on all of our phone conversations and hacking into our emails. Lau's kidnapping is treated as the correct and necessary way to get around Lau's inconvenient legal rights, while the hacking is justified as a temporary, extraordinary measure to defeat an existential threat. The not so subtle implication being that as long as the threat exists well, civil rights are more like civil suggestions, really. 

For The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan's plot involves Bane instigating a barely disguised Occupy Wall Street movement in order to throw Gotham into chaos as cover for his terrorist takeover of the city. Again, with characteristic subtly, the implications of the story are that popular uprisings from the lower classes are inherently criminal because they invert the natural order and are instigated by hostile outside forces looking to destroy their enemy from within. There's also the Dent, which allowed the city to deny parole to any criminal deemed to have acted as part of a larger criminal enterprise. 

Both of these ideas, that mass uprising of the poor against the rich elite and that criminal elements deserve no rights or protections, are both elements of fascist thought which didn't go unnoticed at the time or since. 

What then could be done to make Batman a more palatable hero, one that can credibly be considered as someone committed to his mission to end crime in e saxvery aspect of his life?

Put simply, to be a hero, Bruce Wayne cannot be a billionaire. 

Now, Batman's wealth as always been a part of his character, which isn't all that unusual. The Scarlet Pimpernel and Zorro are both dashing, clever, super combatants at night who hide their prowess by pretending to be cowardly playboys by day. Given the longevity of the character, it's natural that writers would need to scale up Batman's wealth in order to keep him in the upper echelon of society. 

You could get away with making Bruce Wayne a billionaire back in the 80's and even well into the 90's because the idea of a multi-billionaire was so outrageous that it just blended into the fantasy of the world as a whole. Now that the real world is infested with billionaires however, the idea that Bruce Wayne can be a heroic figure with that level of obscene wealth is an illusion that can't be maintained. 

The problem comes down to the fact that being a billionaire is a crime. Not a crime in the mundane "what you're doing is against the law" definition, but in the broader "your existence depends on inflicting massive amounts of harm on as many people as possible," kind of way. 

Being a billionaire means you engage in wage theft, union busting, monopoly practices, stock manipulation, wage suppression, off shoring, and tax evasion, both of the straight up illegal variety as well its dressed up cousin tax avoidance, which is all the same tactics of tax evasion but legal because you bribed the government into rewriting the tax code to allow your shenanigans. Oh, right, you also need to inherit a fortune from your parents or borrow millions of dollars from them in start up cash.

Point is, billionaires are created not by their innovation, but by warping the political and economic systems of the world do that they reap every possible benefit while dumping as much of their losses on the public as possible. This parasitic social model leaves everyone not in the top 1% and above scrambling to maintain an increasingly expensive standard of living from an economy that doles out forever diminishing means to pay for it. 

Given all that, it is almost impossible to take Batman seriously as a hero in the pursuit of justice while he ignores all the systemic abuses that allows his wealth to exist in the first place. If he's a multi-millionaire, he still can afford to do a lot of what he does already, but it won't trigger the feelings of off-panel exploitation like his billions do. 

Another problem solved by knocking Bruce Wayne out of the billionaire's club is that it creates the space for him to be outgunned. The thing that makes a hero the most heroic is that they're at a disadvantage, they're always outnumbered, they're always up against stronger, better equipped enemies, or enemies who have the resources to buy protection from whatever government is around. When your main character is one of the richest men on the planet, these difficulties - and the tension they bring with them - aren't relevant anymore. So putting Batman in a position where he has to be a detective and figure out just how he's going to bring down the mob or corrupt business men he's after when he's completely outclassed is a good thing.

What's funny is that, when talking about overpowered superheros, the go to is always Superman. Sure, he's a flying brick, but underneath all that power is a kid from Kansas who just wants to do good in the world. He's powerful, yes, but in the mythic, modern day Heracles way. Batman, though, has power that translates too the world in very real, very material ways. We recognize his capabilities more viscerally because we live in the consequences of that power every single day.

 There are no analogs of the good billionaire in the real world. All of them thrive on the predatory practices that built their wealth and all of them actively fight to protect their position. 

If Batman stays a billionaire, he isn't a man on a doomed quest to save every child from the pain he experienced. There's a capital R Romantic element to that mission because it's about a men who is throwing everything he has against a world he ultimately cannot change. 

But, if he's a billionaire, he can. Bruce Wayne could spend years divesting his fortune to make Gotham into the kind of place that doesn't need Batman. Hell, he could buy whatever politician he wanted to change the tax codes so that they could properly assess and collect on the tax bill generated by his wealth so that the government would have the resources to build the social programs they need to eliminate crime. 

If Bruce Wayne is a billionaire, he actively decides not to do this. He chooses to maintain a social system that creates the poverty which gives birth to the crime levels he needs to justify his existence. This unspoken choice resonates through every action Batmam makes, turning him into the living embodiment of a system which beats people down into generations of the deprivation and desperation of poverty. 

It's fitting that this controversy surrounds a fictional character more than any real life figure. We have to relate to Batman directly without the interference of a captured media culture terrified of angering their billionaire owners. Because of that, because we can see the immense, world changing power that wealth creates but ultimately, is only used to further one man's personal quirks, it crystallizes for us one simple, elegant truth: A man can be a hero, or a billionaire, but he can never be both.