Superhero Cinema

There have been so many superhero films this decade, sometimes a trip to Blockbusters can seem like a foray into a comic-book shop. X-Men. Batman: The Dark Knight. Superman Returns. The Hulk. Hellboy. Ghost Rider. Punisher. The list is only getting longer, with the hotly-tipped Watchmen on its way soon and films based on Wolverine and the Avengers set to appear in the not-too-distant future.

Looking over this ongoing surge of the last few years, it’s clear that there’s been an evolution of sorts in the adventures of these costumed crusaders.  The fantastic big-screen worlds of Batman, Spiderman et al are now darker and smack of realism: they’re beginning to run parallel to our own.

Let’s take Batman, an old hand at your local Odeon. But at the end of last year’s The Dark Knight, our hero (Christian Bale) is chased by the very police he’s been helping throughout the film. Lest we forget, he’s a vigilante, an outlaw. Suddenly we’re reminded that things don’t end happily ever after.

In Iron Man, the title character’s alter-ego, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), initially designs weapons of war. Driven by money and seemingly unaffected by the human implications of his acts, he’s a one-man epitome of the evils of the careless capitalist.
Of course, the film follows his metamorphosis to hero, but Stark’s early depiction has ‘21st-century concerns’ written all over it.

This twist in the tone of many superhero films seems a reaction to the expectation of audiences for increased realism. We want parallels between the comic-book world being re-created on the silver screen and what’s happening on the evening news.

In the past, the Batman films of the 90s, for example, featured the likes of Jim Carrey playing the cartoonish villain The Riddler. They gave us a self-contained world, which while dark in its way, was distinct from ours. Nowadays, the troubled state of the world appears to demand troubled heroes in bleaker settings.

2007’s third installment in the Spiderman series showed this trend in action. Spiderman (Tobey Maguire), once the geeky physics student of the first two films, is infected by an alien capable of taking over the bodies of others. The result? A meaner, more arrogant Spiderman. It’s no coincidence that the film-makers chose now to adapt the comic-book story where our Spidey gets a sinister, jet-black costume, courtesy of the alien, either.

But I’d argue that as much as anti-heroes have become popular and superhero films are darker in outlook and denouement, there’s also a flip side to all this. These films are still about superheroes.
Often, they’re as much about their alter-egos, the ordinary folk who take up the mantle of responsibility and go out and try and do some good. And people have a deep-rooted interest in this notion, shown by the popularity of superhero cinema as much as by the way we love to hear about have-a-go heroes in the Sunday papers.

This desire to find heroes in the everyday has no doubt become more pronounced in current climes. It extended to the US elections last year, with some supporters elevating Barack Obama to a near-superhero status, a saviour come to deliver us from our woes.
With the public ready to place a politician into this mythological role, it’s no surprise that they want their cinematic saviours depicted in realistic ways, too.

As the worlds of cinema’s masked heroes continue to resemble our own, you have to wonder just what’s in store for the genre. Will we see more anti-heroes? Or will superheroes themselves become more human, like in last year’s Hancock, in which Will Smith played a character with great power, but with just as many flaws. In short, Hancock featured a far more ‘human’ character than many caped crusader flicks we’ve seen.
Whatever happens, it will be exciting to follow this strand of cinematic evolution to its end. 

Watchmen is scheduled for release on March 6th, 2009.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine is scheduled for release on May 1st, 2009.