How Movies Change Superheroes

Different mediums have different demands, artistically and in expectation. As a result, you should always expect the same story to to be told differently in two different mediums. It’s natural and proper, because a story should always be told at its best in whatever form it takes. I don’t think that’s what’s been happening with superhero movies, at least as far as the “superhero” part goes. In most superhero movies, the expectations people bring into storytelling when making movies ends up taking precedence over the conventions of the genre and the ideals of the archetype. While I don’t think this is a conscious or deliberate act to make a statement about superheroes, because of the predominance of film in our culture and the popular conversation, it ends up being such a statement, and it’s not doing superheroes any favors.

To be clear, I have a pretty specific idea of what a superhero is, and it’s one I think most people agree with. The ideal of heroism is large and flexible, and often we rightly call people heroes for performing incredible, self-sacrificial acts to help others, doing the best they can to help as many people as possible. We also recognize that we’re all human and have limited options, meaning sometimes people performing heroic acts do things we would otherwise consider bad and wrong, because there was no other option to save those who needed saving. It’s the basic principle behind killing in self-defense: Killing is never good or “right,” yet it’s never wrong to protect your life and/or the lives of others, so we make an allowance for it in that circumstance. Superheroes are called “super” because they can do more than we can, they can make choices we can’t to truly live up to all the high ideals we have as a society while helping those in need. That’s why superheroes don’t kill, because they have the option of not killing someone dangerous that you or I would not have. Part of that is the powers, of course; in a fictional setting, fictional abilities can be employed to allow for choices and actions otherwise impossible. The other part is the belief in doing what’s right and having the strength of will to reach for it, no matter what. That is the core of what makes a superhero. That’s not to say I expect all superheroes to behave in the same way, to see all the same things as right and wrong, to do all of that easily, or that I think real life heroes aren’t as good. I just think the idea of a person who always does the right thing and can actually do what we say we should do, but don’t, is a really good idea. I’ve never heard a good argument in favor of throwing in the towel and doing what’s easiest or most personally satisfying. Maybe the only place to see that is in a story, but if we don’t tell that story, no one would ever try in real life, right?

That’s where superhero movies run into problems. While there are some exceptions, the typical superhero movie these days is defined not by larger than life figures standing up for the best of humanity, but by powerful people who act mostly as a result of very personal stakes with little regard for the consequences of their actions. I don’t think I can name a single Marvel Studios movie where the hero got in the fight simply because they could and it was the right thing to do. Even in the first Captain America, where Steve Rogers joins the military out of a sense of national duty, they included an element of HYDRA sabotage to make his enmity with them personal. That trend is not the result of faithful adaptation; a few examples can be found in the comics, which are not always perfect, but the fact that every single plot revolves around the villain specifically going after the hero or otherwise having some very personal connection to the hero is a result of moviemaking convenience.

A movie runs, what, an average of two to three hours these days. That’s not a lot of time to set up and explore a narrative. One of the most reliable tricks in scriptwriting to make the most of that time is to make things personal. If the bad guy is directly threatening to the good guy, if the antagonist is directly tied to the protagonist, then the motivation and stakes are all very clear and easy to read, requiring no further work. That’s why every action movie hero is out for revenge to some degree. That trick has been deployed in superhero movies just about every single time. It’s quick, easy, and in my opinion completely misses the point. I get that superhero movies are action movies, and you want audiences to understand why the hero is doing what they’re doing, but the solution isn’t to make everything personal. It just makes superheroes selfish and short-sighted. What’s wrong with someone getting powers and then fighting a bad guy because otherwise people get hurt? Instead of playing on the audience’s sense of sympathy with the hero, the movies could and should play on their sense of empathy for others, their sense of moral obligation to their fellow human. We all make different choices and go to different lengths for each other, but I know most people would help someone in need, if they knew it was within their power. Superheroes should inspire us to make that choice, to go that extra mile, just because we can and we think we should.

This problem affects how the heroes fight, as well. Obviously, a fight between people with superpowers is going to be big and potentially messy, especially when one of those people doesn’t care about their impact on others and/or is actively hostile towards the world at large. But if you read superhero comics, you notice that most of the time, the superheroes go out of their way to avoid rampant property destruction and even save people from the destruction caused by the villain. That latter part you still see sometimes in movies, but by comparison, a movie superhero is several times more likely to throw someone’s car at a villain as a mere distraction or throw someone through a building or otherwise cause random destruction that isn’t necessary. This is done in service of spectacle, of scale, as a convention of movies. In order to know how big the fight is, movies show a lot of stuff being destroyed. If that was limited to the villain, to show what they’re capable of and willing to do, then that would be fine; you expect the villain to be that way. But if it’s the “hero,” too? They have the power and responsibility thing, they should know not to lay waste to the city as they try to save it. I just watched Captain America: Civil War, and a good example is Scarlet Witch throwing cars at Iron Man at the start of the airport fight. She can just telekinesis his armor apart, bolt for bolt, or generally focus her power on the suit and beat him in under ten seconds; there’s absolutely no need to damage a parking structure and, more importantly, total over a dozen people’s only mode of transportation that they spent tens of thousands of dollars on each, most likely on credit. Most superhero movie fight scenes are made of that stuff. All they have to do is show what at least one person is able to do with some large display, and then when the other person can keep up, you know they’re fighting at that level of power. The villain shows up and blows up a building with ease; once you see that, you know what the hero is capable of when they beat them, so you don’t need to see the hero also blow up a building. It’s become such a staple of superhero movies that it’s usually among the first points brought up in why superheroes are bad, and superheroes in comics have to address the issue in their books when, in those same books, they don’t cause that level of destruction.

And of course, there’s the “no killing” rule that movie superheroes don’t seem to have heard of. It’s a very simple policy that is pretty fundamental to superheroic crimefighting that, quite frankly, shouldn’t need defending. Killing is wrong, and if we can stop a dangerous person without killing them, we’re supposed to do so. Like I said, in real life, we humans don’t always have that option, but no circumstance is meant to make killing morally right or good, only forgivable. But superheroes are not real life. They have the power to make choices we can’t. In most superhero movies, the heroes see that option and then do the wrong thing anyway. If you think there’s just no way to avoid killing the bad guy, then you’re either not very imaginative, watching a poorly-written movie, or a movie deliberately written to force such a death. How many people has Iron Man killed over the course of those movies? How easy do you think it should be for Tony Stark to make an entire armory of nonlethal countermeasures so that he never has to kill anyone? Sam Wilson first appeared using a military-issued wingsuit and operated as a soldier with its capabilities; by the time he reappears in Civil War as an Avenger with a new wingsuit that clearly has several upgrades, he still relies on automatic weapons instead of any number of nonlethal weapons he could have been equipped with. I’m having some trouble finding a third to complete this rhetorical device, but that’s partly because so many Marvel Studios movies put their characters in the middle of literal wars, where they are soldiers instead of superheroes, which is a much-abused excuse and plain lazy writing. The whole point of being a superhero is that there’s always another way, and it would be great if the most influential superhero movie studio run by one of two giant superhero comics publishers actually believed that. I know it would be great because the Spider-Man movies were two of the best they ever made, and at no point did Spider-Man wantonly murder anyone or even consider killing Vulture or Mysterio. Clearly, they’re capable of making that movie, and they simply haven’t been, for the most part.

That’s without getting into people who think it’s right to kill supervillains, or that it’s somehow too easy or too simple to have someone do the right thing because they know it’s right. I mean, look at Jessica Jones, one of Netflix’s gritty, dark superhero shows. She spent the entire first season beating herself up as a monster and a freak who destroys everyone around her, and all the while resisted the urge to use her powers to hurt or kill people, including Kilgrave; the fact that she wanted to hurt anyone, a natural human emotion, was what fueled her dark, brooding persona. When she finally did kill him, she lamented her failure as proof that she’s as bad as she made herself out to be. It’s incredibly strong because it shows a person suffering from her own inability to be as good as she thinks she should be, which makes for compelling drama and very human storytelling. Daredevil has a similar track, with his entire character, both on screen and on the page, centered on his struggles with the morality of his actions, of his violence. He has gone back and forth on the use of lethal force, and every turn is used to further develop this moral arc. It’s compelling and narratively complex in a way that, “Kill them because they’re bad and it’s easier,” simply isn’t and can’t be. It also places the idea of how easy or hard it is to kill someone in the right context. It may require more work to defeat someone without killing them, but killing someone is incredibly difficult and, for anyone with a human soul and conscience, should never be the easy choice, or one that you make when you don’t have to. It’s not good that the average movie superhero can kill dozens of enemies without blinking, because that means they’re sociopaths.

This is connected to and distinct from the issue of how superheroes in movies tend to be less powerful than their comic book counterparts. Marvel Studios movies have been getting better about embracing the fantastic and the scale of power their characters possess, and I enjoy that. Historically, though, most superheroes go through some level of depowering when they get on screen. A good example is Luke Cage. In the comics, he can lift twenty-five tons, while in his Netflix show, he can maybe bench press a truck. Superman is notably powerful in the comics, to the point that there’s an ongoing and often bogged down debate over how strong he is; if you only knew the movie versions, you’d never think his strength was too outlandish. I think the reason this tends to happen is because of how people suspend their disbelief. When you see something drawn on a page, you have an easier time accepting it as part of the fictional world, because it is obviously not depicting reality. When you see something in live-action film, with real actors being made to look so superhumanly powerful, you have a harder time accepting it. Or at least, that’s the thought process, that some people won’t believe someone can actually be that strong, even if the entire premise of the character is that they are. Like I noted earlier, Marvel Studios seems to be getting better about this, but it’s still pretty apparent that movie Thor and movie Captain Marvel would get their butts handed to them by comics Thor and comics Captain Marvel. And as discussed before, when you have less power, you have fewer choices. If the heroes are less likely to have the power to live by their high moral standards, then they’re more likely to do something below those standards.

It all comes down to what people see as “realistic” on the screen. When depicting superpowers, an inherently unrealistic thing, there’s a tendency to downplay them or lampshade how crazy it is to be “realistic.” When depicting superheroes fighting villains, there’s a tendency to increase the lethality of the hero’s force because of what creators think audiences find “realistic.” And it’s really silly. Superheroes aren’t real, and are an inherently idealistic concept. They are meant to be used in idealistic ways. That’s without getting into the fact that “realists” in this argument are just people who have confused how they see the world with how the world actually works and then use it as an excuse to exercise brutality; idealists at least acknowledge that they’re trying to change the world. Beyond that, their superhuman abilities give superheroes a much wider range of options and choices than what anyone could expect of a normal person, which means what is or isn’t “realistic” for them to do is entirely different. That’s why, even in the comics, the most violent and lethal characters tend to be people with very low-level powers or no powers at all, while the most caring and sensitive heroes tend to be the most powerful. Their experiences are entirely different because of a difference in ability. Having the most powerful, well-trained, and professional heroes in your fictional world not acknowledge their own ability is bad writing, and it leads to bad superheroing.