Superheroes Aren't "Realistic"

This should come as a surprise to nobody who has known me for longer than a year, but I love superheroes. I grew up reading comic books, and I've enjoyed most of the superhero movies that have made it into theaters since they practically became their own genre a decade ago. In fact, my last post on this blog was even a review of The Amazing Spider-man. I'm that geek who gets more excited than anybody really should whenever a new superhero movie comes out, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

Despite the fact that we seem to be in a "golden age" of sorts of superhero movies, I can't help but think that there are still some people who just don't get what makes these movies work. I remember when every movie based on a comic book was expected to be a mindless action movie that appealed only to kids and adults who acted like kids. This approach has fallen by the wayside and deemed disrespectful to the source material, but in some respects it seems like people are expecting the complete opposite. Right now, it seems like critics and filmmakers who don't know any better seem to think that the best way to make a superhero movie is to try to make it "gritty" and "realistic." Yes, Christopher Nolan's Batman movies ran with this approach and turned out to be some of the greatest superhero movies of all time, but part of the reason why that approach worked so well is because Batman is (mostly) a gritty and realistic character. It's always been part of his appeal. Batman is a normal guy who just happens to have undergone enough training to hold his own in nightly fights against criminals. Anything he cannot do himself he makes up for with the kind of state-of-the-art crime-fighting equipment that only a billionaire can afford. The idea of Batman has always been that he could exist in the real world, so the Nolan Batman films benefited from a more realistic approach.

The kind of realism of Nolan's Batman trilogy doesn't work so well for other superheroes, however. I was more than a little dismayed when Spider-man was going to get a similar treatment, but I was pleasantly surprised by the results. The Amazing Spider-man was the closest anybody will ever come to a "realistic" take on Spider-man, and it was still about a teenager who gains superpowers from a spider bite and uses them to fight a giant lizard man. It was a smart and believable take on the classic character, but in the end what worked was that the director just ran with the fact that the movie was about a teenager who gains superpowers from a spider bite and fights a giant lizard man. That's not a realistic concept, but it fit the world of the movie.

That's really what makes a superhero movie work: it's set within a world where characters like Spider-man, Batman or Superman can believably exist even if that world isn't our own. Superheroes aren't realistic; they cannot exist in the real world, so they need to be placed in a world where they can exist. I think the most satisfying superhero movies so far have been the movies made by Marvel Studios, and the reason why I believe that is because they exist in their own world with their own rules. Yes, those rules are very close to those of our real world, but they are just different enough to have a billionaire fly around in a robotic suit of armor or a mild-mannered scientist turn into a monster when he gets angry. It's the stuff of pure fantasy, but it fits perfectly in the Marvel Universe. The filmmakers commit to this world and its rules, which is why the colorful heroes that inhabit it never seem silly or out of place like they would in our world. The world is taken seriously, and by the third act of The Avengers (a.k.a. the most satisfying superhero movie ever made) I was able to suspend my disbelief even as the heroes were fighting off an army of aliens led by the Norse god of mischief in New York.

Aside from Nolan's Batman films, superhero movies shouldn't be realistic because superheroes themselves aren't realistic. They cannot and should not exist in the real world, but they can exist in their own world, and it's the commitment to this world that makes superhero movies work. Sadly, with Hollywood being the way it is, I can't help but think we'll bee seeing a lot of really poor attempts at "gritty realism" in movies starring the colorful heroes of my youth.