No More Super-Hero Movies!

A Longtime Comics Fan Pleads: No More Super-Hero Movies!

By Barry Dutter

I thought the Dark Knight would be different. I thought this would be the one where Hollywood finally gets it right.
Instead, the movie was overlong, sloppily plotted and a huge disappointment – just like every other super-hero movie from the past 30 years.
Theoretically, we are in a Golden Age of movies based on comic book characters. Every year sees at least three or four major new releases, with dozens more announced as being on the way.
This past summer alone saw Iron Man, the Hulk, and Batman all duking it out for box office supremacy, with the Spirit, Watchmen and Wolverine on the way. When I was growing up in the 1970s, comic fans were stuck with lame live-action offerings like Shazam! on Saturday mornings and the cheesy Amazing Spider-Man live-action show. We dreamed of seeing our heroes translated to the big screen in blockbuster movies. For most of the 70s and 80s, there were rumors of a big-budget Batman film that would return the hero to his grim and gritty roots.
But the technology did not exist to do live-action super-heroes the right way.
Special effects have now reached the point where any superhero, no matter how powerful, can be portrayed on the big screen. It is now possible to feature dozens, if not hundreds of super-beings in a single movie.
As a comics fan for over 30 years, I should be thrilled. Yet every time I see a movie based on a super-hero comic, I end up disappointed. Inevitably, the filmmakers make changes that tamper with the source material. Inevitably, the stories are lazy, disjointed and uninspired. Inevitably, the characters come across as being not as “real” as they seem in the comics.
Every time a new super-hero movie is announced, I get my hopes up. “Maybe this is the time Hollywood will finally get it right,” I think to myself. And every time, I am let down.
Oh, there have been some near misses along the way. The Spider-Man films probably come closest to capturing the look and the feel of the comics they are based on. But the films are not flawless. The first film comes very close to doing a straight adaptation of the hero’s origin, and then deviates with some new ideas that, as a longtime Spidey-Fan, left me cold.
Instead of getting his powers from a radioactive spider, as he did in the comics, the movie’s Peter Parker receives his bite from a genetic super-spider – one of many, which happens to escape from its cage.
And the movie skips a very important part of the Spidey’s origin – the part where the newly created Spider-Man selfishly tries to become a TV star instead of using his powers responsibly.
The Spidey sequels had equally disturbing changes to the mythos, like Doc Ock inexplicably reverting from bad guy to good at the conclusion of Spider-Man 2, and the Sandman being revealed as the killer of Uncle Ben in Spider-Man 3. It’s enough to make a true Spidey fan want to climb the walls in frustration.
The current superhero movie boom started in 1978 with the release of Superman: The Movie. Most comics fans agree that the first 2/3 of the movie got pretty much everything right (though long-time fans bristled at the depiction of Krypton as a cold, desolate place, instead of the warm and inviting world that was seen in the comics). But the climax of the movie, with Superman using his super-powers to spin the Earth backwards to turn back time, is one of the most hated endings in movie history.
Yes, the Man of Steel did have the power to travel through time in the comics, but it was never portrayed in that Earth-spinning manner before.
Superman 2 stood as the definitive super-hero movie for many years, but it, too, was marred by a climax that was weak, to say the least: Superman uses his “Super-Amnesia Kiss” to make Lois Lane forget his secret identity.
It’s funny how screenwriters can get so much right, but then leave a bad taste in your mouth at the end by throwing in some contrived bit where the hero uses some lame new powers he never had in the comics.
The biggest problem I have with super-hero movies is that inevitably, at some point in the movie, the filmmakers show a lack of respect for the characters. Thus, we get Spidey using his super-powers to deliver pizzas in Spider-Man 2, and the Thing getting pooped on by a pigeon in the first Fantastic Four movie.
1991’s Batman and Robin showed Batman whipping out a credit card with the Bat-symbol on it and saying, “Never leave the cave without it” – surely a low point in campy movie history.
The problem to me is that the screenwriters are constantly trying to add their own contributions to the source material. But I have never seen any change in any super-hero movie that improved on the original.
In the 1989 Batman movie, the Caped Crusader’s continuity was revised so that the Joker was responsible for killing Bruce Wayne’s parents. But did that really make Batman a more interesting character? Or was it just a typical Hollywood contrivance where the origins of the hero and villain must be inextricably linked together?
In the first Spider-Man movie, the decision was made to give Peter Parker “natural” webbing instead of him having to create his own. To me, this had the effect of making Peter Parker seem less intelligent. Part of the charm of the Peter Parker character is that he is so smart that he is able to create his own webbing (and other paraphernalia, like his portable Spidey tracers) after becoming a super-hero. Lose the artificial webbing and you’ve lost an opportunity to show part of what makes Peter Parker unique.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying super-hero movies are a waste of time. Most of them some have entertaining moments. Some of them have fine performances, like Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man or Heath Ledger as the Joker.
But inevitably, the story trips up the movie every time.

Sometimes you get some good fight scenes in a super-hero movie, such as any time the Hulk fights the army in the Hulk films. But often, the fight scenes are the worst parts of the movies. There have been six Batman movies since 1989, and not one of them has had a fight scene as good as the ones from the 1966-68 TV series.
The battle sequences in the Spider-Man movies have so much computer animation, they look like you are watching a video game.
The average comic book is meant to be read in ten minutes or less. As such, it doesn’t need a huge amount of story. But when you take that same comic and try to stretch it out to a two-hour length, you usually wind up with a loud, bloated, plotless mess.
Overall, I think Hollywood does far better when it creates original films that have the same tone as a comic book without ruining fans’ memories of their beloved super-hero comics. In this category I would put such films as Aliens, Total Recall, Robocop, Terminator 2, Army of Darkness, and the better entries in the James Bond and Star Wars series. Each of the films listed above have action, likable (if one-dimensional) characters, and humor.
Every time some hotshot Hollywood director spends $150 million on some over-hyped super-hero movie, all I can think of is, “They could have spent a fraction of that money to make a 22-page comic and it would have been far more entertaining, and it wouldn’t have wasted two hours of my life.”
And every time some A-list superstar signs on to play a super-villain like the Green Goblin, all I can think of is, “Does it really take an Academy-Award winning actor to say, “I’ll get you, Spider-Man?!”
Writer Alan Moore has long been against comic book-inspired movies. He has often railed against what he calls “the fallacious modern notion that making a movie of something somehow validates it,” and I can see his point. Comic books are a viable and powerful medium, on their own. Comics do not need to be validated by Hollywood in order to achieve greatness.
And so my plea to Hollywood is this: please stop making movies based on comic books. Stick to doing what you do best: ruining novels instead!
Because when it comes to super-hero movies, my response is always going to be the same: “The comic book was better.”