10 Things I Hate About The Marvel Cinematic Universe
4. Low Stakes Mean Less Compelling Movies
Both Marvel’s anticlimactic antagonists and overdone banter help contribute towards lower stakes. It’s difficult to take the threats portrayed in these films seriously when the villains don’t have clear agendas or intriguing motivations, and even more so when everyone thinks they’re in a Kevin Smith movie.
But then there’s the pseudo-deaths: characters brought back from certain doom, or whose deaths are revealed to have been complicated fakeouts. Sadly, this is a problem inherited from the source material.
For decades, the loss of important protagonists in Marvel and DC comics has been rendered irrelevant to readers. We’ve seen practically every major character die and return to life now, and since we know that nobody really stays dead - no serious changes in comics continuity are ever permanent - any hot water a superhero lands in becomes lukewarm by default.
That tepid disease is spreading to Marvel’s cinematic adaptations. Bucky was dropped off the side of a mountain in World War II and turned up seventy years later as the Winter Soldier. Loki has been declared dead twice now, only to mysteriously turn up alive again.
Phil Coulson was brought back from the dead with a serum derived from a Kree corpse. Nick Fury died, only to be revealed half an hour later to have faked his death. Groot supposedly died saving the Guardians Of The Galaxy, only to return as a dancing sapling by the film’s end credits.
It gets to the point where you don’t seriously believe that a dead character will stay dead… which means that we simply don’t care that much when our heroes are faced with certain doom.
The same attitude prevails when it comes to the villains, but for a different reason. The Red Skull, Ronan, Malekith, Yellowjacket and Ultron all could have survived their various alleged demises… but they were so underwhelming as Big Bads that few people care whether they did or not.
Fundamentally, if we don’t believe that there are real consequences for the heroes and we don’t care what happens to the villains, what reason do we have to be on the edge of our seats?