The Farewell Tour

We have discussed in the past the topic of the Optimum Interval Before Sequel. My personal feeling is that anything less than about two years is too short, while thirty-six years is definitely too long (though Tom Cruise may disagree with me, of course). It’s been six years since the appearance of James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, which isn’t an inordinate gap, but it’s still hard to shake the feeling that this film has somehow missed its moment. There are good reasons for this, of course: Gunn himself got fired after being twitter-mined and went off to make The Suicide Squad for DC’s movie wing before being rehired to make the film after all, and then there was the awkward business of that pandemic which put a cramp in everyone’s style that probably still hasn’t worked itself completely out.

Even so, Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3  has the definite sense of being one last hurrah and a chance to tie up some loose ends before Marvel move on from this particular set of characters: many of the actors have said they probably won’t be reprising their roles, while Gunn himself is off to mastermind the next phase of the rival DC Comics movie franchise (has no-one at Warner Brothers seen Brightburn…?). It certainly doesn’t seem to have any connection to the current meta-plot which Marvel have been quietly inserting into some of their recent movies.

Not that the previous meta-plot doesn’t have a beearing on the story, of course. The film opens with the Guardians of the Galaxy settling into their new base, a giant severed bonce floating in deep space (which if nothing else allows Gunn to include the line of dialogue ‘Kill everyone in that dead god’s head!’ at one point). But all is not well, as team leader Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) has gone into a bit of a slump after the love of his life (Zoe Saldana painted green) was killed in her adoptive father’s attempt to reshape the universe, and replaced by a younger version from an alternate timeline with no memory of him or any of the others on the team. Discussions amongst his friends on how to get him perked up again are predictably chaotic and unproductive. (Also back as part of the ensemble are Dave Bautista, Pom Klementieff, Karen Gillan and Vin Diesel – playing, as before, a tree.)

A more serious problem rears its head when the team comes under attack by Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), who in the comics is the perfect synthetic life form with mystical powers, but here is a sort of omnipotent golden cosmic doofus. It turns out he’s here for Rocket, the uplifted raccoon, as he is a servant of Rocket’s original creator. This proves to be the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), who has form in the creation and augmentation of new forms of life. But why does the High Evolutionary want the raccoon back after all this time, and how are the team going to track him down?

So, yes, another movie, another well-nigh omnipotent megalomaniac to contend with. The High Evolutionary’s particular schtick is the creation of servants out of lower forms of life (the character’s debt to The Island of Dr Moreau is perhaps acknowledged in the fact the comic version’s real name is Herbert) and some of the new film’s most memorable sequences are the flashbacks to Rocket’s youth as a lab experiment: some of these are grotesque, bordering on the grisly. Nevertheless, as villains go, he feels like someone we’ve seen before perhaps a few times too often.

On the other hand, some things never get tired, and one of them is Gunn’s talent for adding offbeat black comedy to cosmic superhero fantasy. The Guardians’ inability to actually work together very effectively most of the time is a big component of what makes these films such fun, and the action frequently grinds to a halt while the ensemble bicker at great length about how to operate their space-suit radios or what the proper use for a sofa is. This is the sort of thing which has made these films so beloved, even within the Marvel canon. It’s certainly not Gunn’s mastery of plot structure, although to be fair this one does feel like it’s flailing around less than most of his films: nevertheless, neither of Gunn’s scripts has the same robustness as the one he co-wrote with Nicole Perlman for the first in the series.

If you were to come up to me, grab me firmly by the lapels, and shout in my face that this is just another piece of corporate Marvel product which sticks to the same formula as most of the thirty-one Marvel Studios films which have preceded it to the screen, my response would probably be ‘Please let go of my lapels.’ And then, ‘Well, you may have a point.’ Personally, I don’t necessarily have a problem with a film being formulaic, as long as it’s a good formula, and I happen to enjoy the one that Marvel have cooked up – I know they’ve had a bit of a post-pandemic, post-Endgame wobble, but their films are usually still smart, funny, pleasing to look at and generally well-played and well-directed. Admittedly, some of the new characters they drop in are obscure even to someone with an attic full of comics (Sylvester Stallone has a cameo as someone called Starhawk) and only seem to be present to set up future instalments (Will Poulter gives a fun performance as Adam Warlock, but it doesn’t feel like there’s a burning reason for him to be in the film), but this is par for the course, really.

What does make this film a bit distinctive within the canon, apart from all the space weirdness, is the genuine sense of warmth and camaraderie between the main characters. They are fun to spend time with, as well as inevitably bringing back fond memories of some of the previous films they’ve appeared in. The film does have real heart and soul to it – the tone is a bit darker than in previous episodes, as the Guardians begin to contemplate moving on from their somewhat irresponsible lifestyle and figuring out what their different places in the universe are. Guardians 3 gets much closer to being moving and poignant than I would ever have thought possible, which is a sign of real growth in James Gunn as a writer and director. (Maybe those upcoming DC movies really could be something special.) This is a welcome additional facet to what was already a terrifically entertaining popcorn blockbuster.

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A Friend from Another Star

My recollection of going to the cinema as a child was that I usually had to pester my dad into taking me to anything I wanted to see, which basically consisted of films like Flash Gordon, The Black Hole, The Empire Strikes Back, and Spider-Man: The Dragon’s Challenge (which isn’t even a proper film). The only exceptions to this were when we went to see Star Trek: The Motion Picture one rainy afternoon, and another sunny day when – without, I think, giving my sister and I any clue – he took us both to see Richard Donner’s Superman. This can’t have been 1978, when the film was released; she would have been too young – but it can’t have been much later than that, either.

I suspect the reason for this is that my dad just likes Superman. Not in a serious, collect-the-comics kind of way, he just likes the idea of Superman – and, perhaps to a slightly lesser extent, Batman – probably because these are the superheroes who were in circulation when he was a lad. For him, Superman is the only such character who really matters – and maybe he has a point.

Endless TV showings and a couple of slightly iffy sequels may have made us all a bit too over-familiar with the Superman films made by the Salkind family, of which this is the first. It’s back on the big screen for its 45th anniversary (a slightly odd choice), but only about six people turned up to the only showing at the local independent, which was a bit sad, because it really does reward the big screen experience, not to mention your full attention.

The film itself opens by looking back to 1938, and the first Superman comics, in a black-and-white opening sequence which almost suggests this is going to be an exercise in juvenile nostalgia. But then the camera lifts, soaring into the night sky, as the opening phrases of John Williams’ theme burst onto the soundtrack.

And what a theme it is – one of the greatest pieces of music by one of the greatest composers of our day, with that curious double-hook which ensures that if you ask any group of people to sing the Superman theme, half of them will go ‘dah-diddly-dah, dee-dah-dah’ and the other half ‘dat-dah-dah, dah-dit-dah-dah-dahhh’. No wonder that so many other films and TV shows using Superman have stumped up the money to use this theme: there’s a very real sense in which, in live-action terms at least, Superman isn’t Superman unless he’s being soundtracked by John Williams.

Once the opening credits (slightly mystifying to those uninitiated in the dark arts of contract negotiations: Superman himself is third billed, while most of those listed only contribute cameos) conclude, we find ourselves on the planet Krypton – an austere, crystalline world, with an almost Kubrickian alienness to it. Once a bit of business with three criminals being sentenced is concluded (something that only pays off in the sequel), we are in the company of leading figure Jor-El (Marlon Brando), who is trying to convince his fellow elders that the planet is about to blow up. But no-one listens: perhaps he should have glued himself to something. (The hidebound, almost reactionary nature of Kryptonian society is neatly coded by the fact that nearly everyone has a British accent – amongst the councillors are Harry Andrews and dear old William Russell.) It’s fashionable to mock Brando’s appearance in this film, for which he was paid a stupendous sum and got top billing in exchange for very little screen-time, but I think it’s a very decent turn, verging on the moving in places. He’s certainly central to whole Krypton sequence, which is entirely credible and establishes this movie is not going to be kid’s stuff.

But, inevitably, Krypton blows up, the only survivor being Jor-El’s infant son Kal-El, who is rocketed off to Earth. All this has been happening in the Earth year 1948, apparently, and the tot’s escape craft crashlands in Kansas after a three-year trip. Here we get many vistas of rolling corn and an almost Norman Rockwell sense of benevolent Americana; Glenn Ford contributes his own very effective cameo as the lad’s adoptive father, whose premature death leaves a great impression on him.

Kal-El, who has been given the Earth name of Clark Kent (of course), goes off in search of his destiny and finds it at the north pole, where a handy piece of kit left in the rocket with him instantly builds a cathedral-sized replica of Krypton. He and Brando’s disembodied head go off on a sort of metaphysical trip together for twelve years or so, after which he manages to land a job at a major newspaper despite not appearing to finish High School (presumably Superman’s inviolable principles still permit the odd bit of CV-padding).

Here the tone of the film shifts again, with the same skill and confidence that it has displayed throughout so far. The Salkinds and their writers seem to have figured out how to make a Superman movie that works for a mainstream audience – which doesn’t mean taking the character wholly seriously. One can understand why they apparently spent months in meetings with DC Comics executives discussing ‘the integrity of the character’. Superman himself is never spoofed or mocked in this film, but this next section is essentially written and played as light comedy, which is a brilliant choice. Superman is, in the best possible way, an absurd character, and the film kind of toys with this fact while never losing sight of the fact that he is also a wonderful creation.

So we get to see Clark Kent (Christopher Reeve, of course, of course – in many ways still the only Superman who really matters) arriving in Metropolis to start his new job (Metropolis looks almost exactly like New York City), meet Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) and everyone else, and then soar into action as Superman – rescuing first Lois from a helicopter crash (‘I hope this little incident hasn’t put you off flying,’ deadpans Reeve), then the President from a plane crash, and still finds time to get a cat down out of a tree. It is all so magnificently perfect you want to track down Bryan Singer and Zach Snyder and hit them with bits of wood.

Practically the only misstep the film makes through these opening three movements, to my mind, is the rather unimpressive spoken-word musical item performed by Kidder during her sweepingly romantic flight with the Man of Steel. This is, one suspects, not Leslie Bricusse’s finest hour as a lyricist, and it always makes my teeth itch (not that it doesn’t contain the occasional good line, of course).

But, of course, the film needs to find a moment of real challenge and jeopardy for Superman, and this comes in the final movement of the film, as diabolical genius Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman, really having some fun) sets about a property scam that involves using nuclear missiles to topple half of California into the sea. He also gets his hands on some kryptonite, which only cemented my dad’s belief that Superman, for all his merits, is a flawed creation as you have to keep using kryptonite on him; he has no other weaknesses or limitations. (Which personally I would argue with, but I digress.)

The question, really, is whether the end of Superman lets the movie down – it’s certainly hard to claim it’s one of the strongest parts of the film. Superman stops a flood, prevents a train crash, props up the San Andreas fault from somewhere within the Earth’s crust, and so on, but fails to save Lois’ life. Holding her body in his arms, he screams his loss (a moment strikingly similar to one in the climax of the original Incredible Hulk TV movie, from the previous year), then flies off to…

Well, it’s not entirely clear – either he is flying faster than light and going back in time to change what happened, or somehow rewinding all of history so it never happened in the first place. It’s not entirely a cheat, as in the books Superman was able to travel in time under his own power for quite a while (other weird and obscure powers included having the ability to shoot miniature clones of himself out of his hands and rearrange his own face), and the moment has been foreshadowed throughout the movie, but narratively it begs all sorts of questions, about time paradoxes and more. Beyond that, it may be making an important statement about Superman’s love for Lois, but it’s also clearly implying that Superman is virtually omnipotent and can’t meaningfully be challenged.

Personally, I think the film gets away with it, because two hours of getting virtually everything right means it has generated an enormous reserve of goodwill that a slightly wobbly climax can’t entirely dispel. We live in a world where, obviously, you can barely move for superhero films sometimes, but there is still something special about this one. Perhaps it is because both Superman and the film burst into a world where they are something unique and surprising – the movie is very grounded in reality, apart from the fantasy figure of Superman himself. And yet the film isn’t afraid to treat the Superman story in mythic terms – the story of ‘a perfect man, who came from the sky and did only good’ (and this is before we even get onto the fact that there’s a father somewhere in the heavens who sends his only son to use his miraculous powers to be an example to the human race). It does all of these things and gets them right. It’s tempting to say that this is a template for a different way to do superhero movies, but then it may just be that Superman is special. Whatever the truth, watching this film is a joyous experience even today. DC Comics would kill to make a movie half this good today.

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Captains Anonymous

I have seen it suggested that what Warner Brothers are currently engaged in with their DC Comics superhero movies is the cinematic equivalent of what I believe is called a fire sale: they’re offloading product which they don’t have a great deal of confidence in. I suppose some of these films are lucky to be coming out at all, given that the corporation cheerfully spent $90 million on a Batgirl movie which they then junked as some sort of tax wheeze.

Then again, this sort of thing is not entirely surprising where the DC movie franchise is concerned, for this has felt like a chaotic sort of undertaking for a long time – they have, in short, been all over the place since Joss Whedon and Zach Snyder ended up doing different parallel versions of the Justice League movie and they hired two different actors to play the Joker. The latest development is the hiring of James Gunn, whose previous DC-adjacent projects include The Suicide Squad and Brightburn: rumour has it he will be sacking most of the established actors and resetting the continuity. The whiff of confusion persists even now – no sooner had Henry Cavill come back for his cameo at the end of Black Adam than it was announced his services as Superman would no longer be required.

Where this leaves everyone connected to the Captain Marvel-related corner of the DC franchise I have absolutely no idea (the last time we discussed this topic I explained why there are compelling historical reasons for calling the guy in red and cream with the lightning bolt on his chest Captain Marvel, so there). The new movie here is Shazam! Fury of the Gods, directed as before by David F Sandberg. The first one came out four years ago and dates back to a point when DC actually seemed to have turned a corner and were routinely making non-sucky films – a sequel would usually be an opportunity to go bigger, more confidently. This sort of proves to be the case, though the results are not necessarily positive.

As things get underway, Billy Batson (Asher Angel) and his fellow fosterlings are spending their free time as mystically-empowered champions of justice – Billy’s heroic alter ego, who still hasn’t settled on a name for himself (suggestion: Captain Marvel), is played by Zachary Levi. They mean well, but still end up causing a significant amount of property damage, which naturally impacts on their popularity. The movie’s moral premise is also rather bluntly introduced at this point – Billy has abandonment issues, and is reluctant to give his family the freedom to be heroic in their own ways.

Soon enough they have bigger problems, as three ancient goddesses rock up looking to steal their divine powers and revive the ancient realm of the immortals. These are Hespera (Helen Mirren, 77, long skirt, fairly evil), Kalypso (Lucy Liu, 54, quite short skirt, extremely evil), and Anthea (Rachel Zegler, 21, very short skirt, only marginally evil). A big chunk of Philadelphia is soon sealed inside a magic dome, the family members start having their powers nicked, and there’s even a wooden dragon on the prowl…

And, you know, it’s a functional movie inasmuch as they spend the CGI budget wisely and it occasionally has some good jokes in it and ruptures your ear-drums quite effectively. Even so, you’re always aware you’re not exactly seeing anything groundbreakingly new, and what is here isn’t quite good or charming enough to make you overlook the fact it’s just a slab of corporate product. Unlike the original movie or Black Adam (its closest cousin), it’s a pretty big and unwieldy beast – there are a total of six major and assistant heroes, most of whom are played by two actors (Grace Caroline Currey plays both Mary Marvel and her human incarnation, presumably because both characters fill the hot young female supporting character niche), three villains, the foster parents and the Wizard (Djimon Hounsou) to be wrangled, so it’s not surprising the plot feels a bit discursive in places. Nor is it really surprising that the moral premise of the movie gets largely forgotten about, but the relative lack of screen time for Asher Angel as Billy Batson is quite unexpected – although this helps keep the jarring difference between Angel’s quite down to earth performance and Levi’s extremely broad comic turn less noticable. Jack Dylan Grazer, who plays Billy’s friend Freddy, is really in the film much more (which of course means that Adam Brody, who plays his alter ego Captain Marvel Junior, also doesn’t get much screen time).

Doing quite well in terms of prominence is Helen Mirren, who isn’t the kind of person you would expect to appear in this kind of film (then again, you could say the same about the Fast and Furious series, and she seems very happily ensconced there – there’s even an in-joke about this). Nearly thirty years ago many people were rather surprised when Nigel Hawthorne turned up in the Stallone headbanger Demolition Man; the explanation was that Hawthorne really wanted to lead the movie version of The Madness of George III, but would only be allowed to do so if he had some kind of proven track record in big Hollywood movies. Is there some fabulously good part that Mirren is gunning for which would explain her appearance in what’s really quite lowbrow fare? I’m not sure, but to be fair to her, Mirren slams various other performers through reinforced concrete with considerable aplomb.

I will be honest and admit I found myself wondering, partway through Fury of the Gods, if I was actually suffering from the fabled superhero movie fatigue. I think it’s more likely that this is just not a particularly interesting movie – it feels very much like the sort of thing that Marvel were doing five or six years ago, though maybe not quite as good – there is action, spectacle, knowing humour, some slightly contrived references to other films in the franchise, and a big cameo at one point, along with the now-obligatory mid- and post-credits scenes setting up future episodes. It’s a proven formula, but by now it feels a bit old-fashioned. And will any of the things this is setting up ever actually happen? I’m not sure anyone knows for sure at this point. The Shazam! films are amiably goofy enough, I suppose, but if this series does fall victim to the Great DC Reset I’m not sure anyone will really be that upset.

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Journey to the Centre of the Core of the Warlord that Time Forgot

We are living in a world in which the release of a film like Ant-Man 3 (which is what Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania effectively is) qualifies as a fairly significant cinematic event. Personally I’m fine with that, though I know a lot of people who will grumble about it. Even so, the Ant-Man films are one of the prime examples of a phenomenon where the success of the Marvel meta-franchise allows the studio to raise the profile of their more obscure characters, rather than using a well-known property to attract people to the franchise.

Many of Marvel’s recent movies have been examples of this effect – who would have expected films about Shang-Chi, the Eternals, or Black Widow, even a few years ago? You could certainly argue this is all just a demonstration of the same peculiar alchemy which, until the pandemic at least, made the studio the unquestionably dominant force in popular cinema. But it is a fact that the seven films that Marvel have put out since 2021 have often wobbled in a way which would once have been unthinkable. The company seems to have been aware of this, announcing details of crowd-pleasing future projects much sooner than expected, presumably in an attempt to steady the ship. So: Ant-Man 3, directed (as before) by Peyton Reed. How steady are things looking?

Not much time at all seems to have passed for Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and his extended family since last we saw them (at Iron Man’s wake, if memory serves), which certainly feels like an attempt at a soft reset. Scott seems happy to rest on his laurels (to be fair, he did save half the universe), but his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton, this time) still wants to set the world to rights and do new and exciting things. To this end she has built a gadget to assist in exploring the quantum realm, the subatomic continuum where Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer), the wife of original Ant-Man Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), was stranded for decades.

Needless to say, it doesn’t quite go to plan and Scott, Cassie, Hank, Janet, Scott’s girlfriend (not to mention Hank and Janet’s daughter) Hope (Evangeline Lilly), and quite possibly Uncle Tom Cobley and all, find themselves forcibly shrunk and transported back to the quantum realm. This is a weird place full of weird people, weird animals and weird things. Just getting everyone back together and safely returning to San Francisco would be (if you’ll permit it) a tall order.

However, it turns out that Janet hasn’t been completely candid about everything that happened while she was trapped at subatomic size. During this sojourn, she made the acquaintance of another unwilling exile to the realm of the teeny-weeny: a man named Kang (Jonathan Majors), whose origins are somewhat obscure. Suffice to say that Kang is now in charge of the quantum realm and not especially pleased with Janet. Kang and his minions are turning the place upside down in search of the visitors, and ominous things may well happen if they find them…

This feels a bit like the kind of film Marvel do quite often: one which nonchalantly introduces a whole raft of new characters,  concepts and locations, many of which eventually turn out to be unexpectedly significant. Doing this in an Ant-Man film is admittedly a rather odd choice, though – the previous two were both cheerfully low-stakes entries, sprinkled in between some of the bigger, more heavy-duty films in the franchise. Then again, this is a rather odd Ant-Man film, at least compared to the previous two, which may explain the rather tepid response it has received from legitimate critics and the Marvel fanbase.

In a lot of ways this reminded me of one of those old Amicus movies from the 1970s, with Paul Rudd filling in for Doug McClure – usually based on an Edgar Rice Burroughs story, they were invariably about explorers stumbling into strange new worlds and contending with their outlandish inhabitants. This is all very much like that, albeit with fewer rubber monster suits and (inevitably) rather more self-mocking humour. The quantum realm is realised on a single note of sustained, extreme weirdness, as I suggested – there are some well-achieved moments of outright surrealism, but on the hand the ability to grow or shrink loses a lot of its visual impact when there aren’t any normal-sized objects around to give a point of reference. Also, much of the supporting cast from the previous films haven’t come back, which I believe has also not gone down well with the faithful (personally I didn’t miss them that much).

Alongside all the weirdness and silliness, the notable thing about this film is the much-trailed arrival of Jonathan Majors as Kang – although, as the initiated will be aware, Majors made his Marvel debut as a sort-of version of this character from a parallel universe on MousePlus a couple of years ago. Kang is apparently going to be the arch-villain over the course of the next two or three years’ worth of movies, and it does seem a bit odd to unleash him in a film like this one. Nevertheless, Majors has real presence and paces his performance well, doing a proper slow burn from soft-spoken technocrat to roaring megalomaniac.

The mystery of Kang and his associates is an engaging one and is part of why I’m inclined to cut this film some slack even though there are bits of it which don’t make a great deal of sense and the tone is rather uncertain. It’s fun in a way that most of the Marvel films since Endgame haven’t been – simply because the presence of Kang highlights the fact that we’re back in an ongoing narrative where the films link up with one another, rather than bouncing from one mostly-unconnected standalone to another. Staying for the post-credits bit and then trying to figure out what it means is one of the joys of this series, if you’re a fan; so is trying to work out where all of this is heading. These very real pleasures are present here, after an extended absence, and having them back makes a big difference.

This film has been made with the usual attention to detail and polish, the ensemble cast are on form, and the script has some decent jokes – it’s probably destined not to be anyone’s favourite Marvel film, but I don’t any reason to condemn it as a failure in the way some voices have. In some respects Quantumania may be their most satisfying film in a couple of years, and it certainly promises that some interesting movies are coming down the track. The mighty Marvel machine still seems to be very much in business.

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Majesty and Mortality

When superheroes look death in the face, it usually doesn’t go that well for the fellow with the scythe – but different circumstances obviously apply when it comes to Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. The first Black Panther film was phenomenally successful both commercially and critically, even having a significant influence on the zeitgeist – which would have made a sequel a sure thing even without the ten-year plan that Marvel Studios usually have in place for their properties and characters. However, the untimely death of Chadwick Boseman, who played Black Panther in the first film and various other Marvel projects, inevitably presented the studio with problems as far as continuing this thread of the franchise is concerned. Quietly forgetting about the character wasn’t really an option, and it would obviously have been profoundly insensitive to recast such a prominent figure.

So the option they’ve gone for is to address Boseman’s death by writing it into the movie – the sequel opens with the Black Panther dying off-screen of a disease which is somehow connected to the destruction of the herb from which he derives some of his abilities (this happened towards the end of the last film, though I’d forgotten about it). His sister Shuri, who was the techno-whiz last time around, is left traumatised by her inability to save him. The dowager queen (Angela Bassett) takes up the throne once more, but with the herb destroyed it seems that the nation of Wakanda, despite its wealth and advanced technology, will be without its traditional protector from now on.

Time passes and it indeed seems that some other major powers are testing Wakanda’s defences with the ultimate aim of acquiring its reserves of the super-metal vibranium for themselves – but the US has also acquired a vibranium detector, which it has used to locate a new deposit on the Atlantic seabed. However, the mining expedition is attacked and wiped out by a new faction – the warriors of an underwater civilisation named Talokan (presumably because Tlalocan was deemed too difficult for audiences to pronounce and using the name Atlantis is awkward given it’s already in Aquaman).

Anyway, the Atlanteans (which is basically what they are) are no more keen on being bothered by the US and other major surface powers than the Wakandans, whom they hold responsible for this mess. The underwater kingdom delivers an ultimatum to Wakanda: locate and hand over the inventor of the vibranium detector, or face the wrath of Atlantis and its god-king, Namor…

It’s true that the way in which the central conflict of this movie – Wakanda vs Atlantis! – is orchestrated is a little bit contrived, and takes a while to arrive (the movie lasts a very substantial 160 minutes or so), but they work hard to justify it, and the irony involved – the Wakandans and Atlanteans have more reasons to be allies than enemies – does chime with the themes of the movie, which include the exploitation and control of weaker nations by strong ones. To be honest, though, the movie is much more about grief than anything else – it’s shaped around the absence of Boseman and the Black Panther, as it had to be, and this gives it a sombreness not often found in Marvel movies. The film is about Wakanda, his family, and the franchise as a whole finding a way to respect his memory while still moving on. And it does this very well.

Everything else is, on some level, secondary, but the procedural plot about tracking down the inventor, initial skirmishes with the Atlanteans, and so on, is executed as slickly and effectively as in any film from this franchise. There’s a slightly unusual structure where it almost feels as if the role of main character is being passed around between members of the cast – Letitia Wright, Angela Bassett, Lupita Nyong’o, and Danai Gurira all seem to be leading the film at different points in the story, although it begins and ends with Wright, who steps up very impressively. Martin Freeman also comes back, though he doesn’t get a great deal to do.

The film’s most interesting innovation is the introduction of Namor the Sub-Mariner (Tenoch Huerta Mejia), a character dating back to the 1930s – predating the existence of Marvel Comics as an entity, in fact. Going in I was a little dubious about this Mesoamerican-inflected take on the character – but in every single respect that really matters they get Namor absolutely right: he is a dangerous, unpredictable figure, not easily reducible to either hero or villain, but still somehow noble and a force to be reckoned with. Only the use of his catchphrase feels a little contrived and improbable; hopefully Marvel have got Huerta under contract to reprise the character in future projects.

Superheroes never really die, of course, and there is a sort of narrative inevitability about the way in which the conventions of this story eventually reassert themselves – the initial suggestion that the role of Black Panther has become an anachronism that Wakanda no longer needs turns out, of course, not to be the case, and the acceptance of loss goes hand in hand with the acceptance of this new role. It really is handled very gracefully and sensitively while still respecting the conventions of the story, and once this is resolved the film proceeds to a final act which is as genuinely thrilling and spectacular as anything else Marvel have done – the way in which Wakanda Forever negotiates what must have been an incredibly awkward set of requirements is at least as impressive as everything the first film achieved.

I think it is fair to say that Marvel’s film output has experienced an unusual number of wobbles since the pandemic, occasioning much commentary from the many followers of the franchise (the fact that some films set for release as far out as 2026 have already been announced has been interpreted as an attempt to steady the boat by demonstrating the studio does know what it’s doing). It’s not that the actual films have all been terrible, just that there’s been less of a sense of the series actually going anywhere. That’s still the case to some extent, but this is still clearly the work of a company which is capable of combining serious themes with entertainment of the highest quality.

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An Eternity of Rock

Quail with me now as a long-forgotten presence threatens to stir back into life, controversial, morally ambiguous, ominous, at a time when most had assumed it was gone forever. I refer not to Jaume Collet-Serra’s Black Adam, although if you squint all the above applies to that as well, but the whole DC Extended Universe project (of which it is the latest manifestation). Any sane person could be forgiven for experiencing profound confusion over the status of this particular project, which got off to a reasonable start, stumbled badly very early on, and eventually seemed to run out of steam before splintering into a whole range of apparently unconnected films and sub-franchises operating independently (for example, it looks rather like DC currently have got three different actors under contract to play the Joker in different films).

One of the Marvel mega-franchise’s great strengths is its consistency and the fact it all pretty much hangs together, creatively and story-wise. The strange thing about DC’s project is that the more unravelled it’s become, with weird side-projects sprouting off at weird angles, the higher the quality of the individual films has tended to be. There is not, you would have thought, any pressing reason for them to keep trying to lash things back together.

And yet here comes Black Adam, which no less a luminary than genial Dwayne Johnson himself has said marks the beginning of ‘a new Phase One’ for the DC franchise. (Normally if anyone started trading in tautologies like ‘a new Phase One’ I’d pick them up on it fairly stringently, but genial Dwayne is much bigger than me.) The reason for Johnson’s interest is fairly obvious given he both produces and stars in the new movie.

It mostly takes place in the Middle-Eastern nation of Kahndaq, which is realised in vague, somewhat cliched terms they can only get away with because it’s fictional (the Superhero Movie Atlas is bulging with places like this, which may give us an insight into the degree of engagement with world affairs and politics of either the superhero movie audience or the typical superhero movie producer). As the movie opens the place is under the control of a cartel of faceless baddies, some of whom are searching for a Plot Device of Ultimate Power which will allow them to summon up the inhabitants of hell itself. Seeking to stop them are plucky archaeologist Adriana (Sarah Shahi) and her teenage son Amon (Bodhi Sabongui), but there are a lot of well-resourced bad guys on their trail. Luckily, it transpires that the ancient ruin containing the Plot Device is also the resting place of the ancient champion of Kahndaq, a five-thousand-year-old superhuman with some rather unreconstructed ideas about justice and punishment.

This, of course, is genial Dwayne’s gig, and soon enough he is laying waste to legions of bad guys (though his own moral alignment is also open to question) while struggling to get used to modern inventions like doors, mirrors, sarcasm and catchphrases. Such rampant use of the special effects budget attracts the attention of outsiders, however, and a superhero team known as the Justice Society of America is packed off to wrangle Dwayne and keep him under control. Leading the charge is Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), backed up by Dr Fate (Pierce Brosnan), Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), and Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo). Will Black Adam prove to be a force for good or evil in the ensuing conflict, and what part will the Plot Device of Ultimate Evil play?

Another thing about the Marvel project is that it is, to a significant degree, not star driven – people become famous from doing Marvel films, they’re not in these films because they were particularly well-known beforehand. Black Adam is an unusual example of a modern superhero movie which really is a star vehicle, to the point where it’s hard to imagine it being made without Dwayne Johnson’s involvement. Genial Dwayne, in his role as salesman for the movie, may talk about this being the fulfilment of an ambition, and of reading Black Adam comics as a child, but until only about twenty years ago this was an extremely obscure character, a long-term but rarely-seen villain in the rogues’ gallery of the original version of Captain Marvel (the character showcased in Shazam! a few years ago). In a sense this does give the film a bit of breathing space to operate in, not available to a new incarnation of Batman or Superman, even if the references to the Shazam! mythology are still prominent.

On the other hand, the film also does that thing common to a lot of DC projects where new characters and elements of worldbuilding are shovelled in with what feels like desperate speed. In some ways it makes sense to feature the JSA in a Black Adam movie, as the character was rehabilitated in the JSA’s comic, but it also means including a bunch of second- and third-string superheroes who have to be introduced and somehow fleshed out. To be fair, the film does a decent job of this, albeit mainly by leaning heavily on familiar tropes from this kind of movie and going for broad-brush characterisation.

Possibly as a result of this, Black Adam manages to square the circle of being both very familiar as a superhero movie but also as a Dwayne Johnson vehicle – as my old friend and mentor Sagacious Dave put it on the way out of seeing Hobbs and Shaw, his films tend to be very congruent. You’re not going to get many surprises or much in the way of experimental film-making from a Dwayne Johnson project, but on the other hand you’re likely going to get a slickly-packaged and at least passably entertaining piece of product to consume. Black Adam ticks all the boxes required of it in exactly this way.

It even manages to raise some questions that come startlingly close to deconstructing elements of the whole superhero genre, particularly as it relates to international affairs and world problems – who exactly has put these people in their position of authority? Why, for example, don’t we ever see the equivalent of the Avengers or Superman swooping in to topple Putin or other totalitarian leaders? One is reminded of the comments of Alan Moore, amongst others, of the intrinsically fascist subtext to virtually every superhero story ever created. The film doesn’t actually find any answers, but the simple fact it seems aware of the question makes it stand out from the crowd.

Genial Dwayne’s performance is also – dare one say it – quite impressive. I’m not suggesting this is the sudden revelation of a performer whose next movie could conceivably be a piece by Ibsen or Beckett, but neither is it exactly another retread of Dwayne’s usual gently comedy-inflected schtick. Elements of humour do eventually creep in, but Johnson plays Adam completely straight and borderline-unsympathetic for an impressively long time. He certainly carries the movie with aplomb, the only other person really showing up on the acting radar being Pierce Brosnan, who appears to be having some fun with his role (either that or he’s just not bothering any more). It’s not a great movie – the pacing in particular seems a bit suspect – but it does what you expect, and it’s always very watchable. The various sequels which are set up by the end of this film seem, for once, like genuinely interesting propositions rather than just exercises in brand extension. Johnson may be in this costume for a while, if Black Adam does prove to be the saviour of the DC movie series.

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Hammered Beyond Belief

One of those words that we currently don’t have but really could have done with for several decades now is the name for that thing when – you know, when someone comes along and does something unusual and unexpected and it turns out to be rather successful and much acclaimed. So then they naturally leap to a slightly erroneous conclusion and do the same thing all over again as a follow-up, only much moreso, and this time the end result is just a bit too much to cope with. In the Bond franchise I would direct you to Moonraker, which has the fantasy and comedy elements of The Spy Who Loved Me dialled up to 11, and probably also SPECTRE, which likewise takes the distinctive things about Skyfall – the general glumness of tone and attempts at psychological complexity – and concentrates on them to the point where they start getting in the way of the fun of the movie.

I’m tempted to call one of these an exequel – a sort of portmanteau of excess and sequel, and you heard it here first, folks – and it’s a word which may well come up in our imminent discussion of the well-nigh-inescapable Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder. This is, as you have doubtless guessed, the latest Marvel Studios production – 29th of that ilk, should you be keeping count – and the fourth in the particular strand following the doings of Norse god Thor (Chris Hemsworth). (For the purposes of this movie’s plot the original clarification that Thor is not actually a divine being but a representative of a supremely advanced alien culture is quietly forgotten about.)

When we last saw Thor (and I hope you will indulge me in the ‘we’, given I know that there are people reading this who would more happily donate a major organ without anaesthetic than watch a Kevin Feige production), he was flying off into space with the Guardians of the Galaxy to try and find himself, following the deaths of pretty much his entire family and the destruction of his home realm. The new movie finds him still with them, along with his rock-like sidekick Korg (Waititi again).

However, a series of distress calls reveals that the galaxy is experiencing a sort of theological crisis, as somebody is hunting down and slaughtering the gods of every civilisation, leaving chaos and turmoil in their wake. (This turns out to be Christian Bale, playing a character called ‘Gorr the God Butcher’ whose name is certainly descriptive.) Thor leaves the Guardians to sort out the galaxy (off-screen) and heads back to his people’s enclave on Earth, which he has learned is next on the God Butcher’s hit list. However, a surprise awaits him here, as also helping in the defence of New Asgard is another hammer-wielding red-cloaked warrior – one who turns out to be his ex Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), who now wields his old weapon Mjolnir and likes to go by the name of Mighty Thor. Can the two ex-lovers put their complicated baggage to one side, figure out just exactly what Gorr is up to, and find a way of stopping him?

Well, on one level this plays as another Marvel movie in the usual style – and if you look at it from a certain angle, the storyline is distinctly reminiscent of the one in the very last movie they released, in that the antagonist initially seems to be an alarming, horrific figure on a metaphysical quest, who eventually proves to be not entirely unsympathetic. And, you know, it’s a Marvel Studios production, so it’s breezily entertaining and colourful and the pace never drags; there may be the odd reference that goes soaring over the heads (or perhaps beneath the contempt) of any normal people who have wandered into the cinema by mistake, but that’s par for the course by now. You’re certainly never in any doubt as to what’s going on or who the bad guy really is.

On the other hand, partway through the film – during the bit where Russell Crowe comes on in a skirt and plays Zeus the King of the Gods with the same accent Harry Enfield used to employ as Stavros the kebab-shop man – I found myself compelled to lean over to my companion and say ‘This is the silliest film I have ever seen.’ That may not strictly be true, but it has a sort of pugnaciously daft quality; it’s not afraid to be stupid and often seems to be challenging the audience to actually complain about this. Waititi has talked about feeling the need to challenge himself and stay creatively invested in the project, and this seems to be code for including, amongst other things, more tongue-in-cheek cameos, screaming goats, semi-gratuitous male nudity, out-and-out surrealism, needily jealous sentient weapons, nostalgic hair metal, and much more – all played entirely for laughs. This is as openly a comedy film as anything else Marvel have ever released, and why I would suggest it is basically doing all the things that Ragnarok did, only even more extremely.

You might therefore think that it is an extremely dubious decision for Waititi to include some of the story elements he has gone for – a dead child prominently features in the plot, while another character is suffering from terminal cancer. This would usually be a very bad fit for a wacky comedic fantasy, but the slightly baffling thing is that Waititi somehow manages to get away with it – it doesn’t quite have the turn-on-a-dime quality that some Paul Verhoeven films, for instance, possess, but neither does it feel particularly choppy in terms of its tone. Much of the credit for this should probably go to the performers, who deliver deftly-pitched turns. The star attraction this time around is Christian Bale, who consistently comes up with surprising and engaging line-readings and never quite plays the God Butcher in the obvious way one might expect.

Still, the film is so self-conscious and arch that it never quite coheres into an entirely satisfying and involving story the way that Ragnarok or the other top-tier Marvel movies do. It may also be just a generational thing, but I found the film’s politics to be a bit too on-the-nose and laboured in places; turning Jane Foster into a Thor-equivalent, for instance, is a reasonable enough idea (although exactly what’s going on here is really skated over, to be honest), but quite why she’s so insistent on actually being called Mighty Thor is a bit baffling (beyond the fact that it’s a comics reference). She’s gained equivalent powers to Thor, she hasn’t actually stolen his identity.

The Marvel franchise may well have reached the point where one’s fond memories of the collective successes of all the previous films flow together and ensure that each individual new film can’t quite live up to expectations – or at least, makes doing that much more difficult (we’re back in Bond franchise territory again). Nevertheless, I would be lying if I said that there wasn’t a huge amount that I really enjoyed about Love and Thunder, and very little that I found outright objectionable. But if the trajectory of this series continues along the same lines, the next sequel will probably take place on ice, in Welsh, performed in semaphore.

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Strange Report

Smaller studios and mid-budget mainstream films scatter and run for cover as the dominant force in popular cinema makes its presence felt once more: yes, Marvel return with Sam Raimi’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, a somewhat baroque title which nevertheless is certainly appropriate for the film. That said, there are a number of factors which may combine to have some viewers expecting things which aren’t quite there in the movie: given the striking level of ambition some other Marvel productions have shown, perhaps this is only to be expected.

Benedict Cumberbatch is back in leading-man mode as surgeon-turned-sorcerer Stephen Strange, who is generally acclaimed for his role in saving the universe a few movies back but still not entirely happy in his personal life (as is practically obligatory for a Marvel character). The doc is also afflicted by bad dreams, specifically one about a young woman being pursued by malevolent supernatural forces while being aided by a slightly different version of him.

Well, the girl from the dream crashes a wedding reception Strange is at, pursued by a big gribbly demon, and naturally he saves the day and rescues her (with a little help from Wong (Benedict Wong), whom these movies have done an impressive job of making into much more than just a sidekick). She turns out to be America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), a unique individual in that there is only one iteration of her in the entirety of the multiverse of parallel worlds, and she has the gift of being able to travel between the different worlds almost at will. Naturally this makes her a person of interest, especially to a powerful and ruthless supernatural being who wants to kill America and steal her power.

Well, Strange and his various allies (in addition to Wong, he goes to the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) for help) aren’t going to stand for that sort of thing, but needless to say they find themselves hard-pressed and Strange and America have to flee through a series of other parallel worlds, some of them jarringly odd, others rather familiar. But can they find a way of saving America’s life and defeating their adversary for good?

As noted here passim over the last decade or so, it’s quite rare for Marvel to turn out a movie which is not a solidly constructed and imaginative piece of entertainment – crowd-pleasers are what they do, and anyone who usually enjoys a Marvel film is likely going to enjoy this one too. Expectations are probably higher than usual for this one, partly because it’s directed by Sam Raimi (who has previously made some of the best Marvel superhero films ever), but also because it’s following on the heels of Spider-Man: No Way Home, another film with Cumberbatch which was deeply involved in matters multiversal.

Well, there are elements of Multiverse of Madness which certainly seem to be informed by Raimi’s CV as a director, but rather further back than his Spider-Man trilogy: there’s much more of a horror movie vibe to this film than anything else Marvel have done on the big screen recently. Some moments in the film are unexpectedly grisly and macabre, although I wouldn’t describe it as actually being any more scary than most mainstream films.

The multiversal element of the film is likely to be one of the things that may throw and possibly disappoint especially ardent viewers: following the cameo-stuffed pleasures of No Way Home, there has been a lot of excitable on-line chatter about just who could be turning up in this film. It’s tricky to talk about this without risking spoilers, obviously, but expectation management might not be a bad idea here – the closest thing the film has to a big gosh-wow moment won’t really come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to the publicity for it. The rest of its surprises are clever, but you really need to be a devotee to get all the references and jokes, to the point where a Disney+ subscription is almost obligatory. This is certainly the case with a major element of the film’s plot, which is arguably lacking in the dear old objective correlative if you haven’t seen the applicable streaming series.

This is possibly a problem for the film, as it makes a big deal out of seeing alt-universe versions of familiar characters, certainly at the expense of other possible ways of exploring the multiverse concept. Strange is repeatedly asked if he’s really happy, and you might expect the film to explore the possibility of a world which has a Strange-iteration who genuinely is content. There’s dramatic potential here, obviously, but the idea is never really gone into – a typhoon of CGI and fan-friendly death-matches are what the script plumps for.

Long-term viewers might also be inclined to raise an eyebrow at how a character who was originally presented as powerful but not exceptional has, over the course of their last few appearances, become a virtually unstoppable force of reality-warping cosmic power, but that’s what the script here requires, I guess: in the same way, while the comics version of Doctor Strange is so nebulously omnipotent he’s often sidelined, treated as a plot device more than a character, the movie character is much more fallible and limited much of the time. He spends a lot of this film looking worried and running away – but, as I say, it’s all about the requirements of the story.

Nevertheless, the movie has a charm and energy of its own, especially in its weirder moments. This is what you hire Sam Raimi for, after all. What’s perhaps a little unexpected and quite pleasing is the fact that – for all its metaphysical extravagance – the impulse driving the plot is firmly rooted in recognisable human emotions and drives. This gives the actors something they can really work with – and while Cumberbatch is as good value as ever at the centre of the film, what’s really eyecatching is a very impressive performance by Elizabeth Olsen, almost certainly the best she’s given in a Marvel movie. The various ghoulies and spectres the film summons up are very insignificant compared to the moment of genuine emotional anguish at the heart of the story. It’s this which holds the film together and keeps it satisfying even when some of its peripheral pleasures threaten to become rather unravelled.

This even extends to the ending of the film, which comes close to being a less-than-fully-satisfying cliffhanger (maybe even more than one). If this latest phase of Marvel films is heading in a particular direction, what that direction is is by no means clear yet. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is a mid-table entry for this franchise (perhaps just a little higher than average), but I don’t imagine the huge audiences Marvel movies routinely attract will be disappointed by it.

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The What Man?

When a film opens with a bunch of characters arriving at a place called the Hill of Death, you can be quite sure that one of two things is on the cards: a film with a potentially smug sense of its own ridiculousness, or something which is going to be painfully on the nose from start to finish. When the main character, a sickly-looking Jared Leto, is told ‘Maybe you should see a doctor!’ and responds ‘I am one,’ any hope that we may be in for Option One quickly fades.

For yes, this is Daniel Espinosa’s Morbius, here to tide over anyone who objects to having to wait four-and-a-half months between proper Marvel comic-book movies. Leto is playing Morbius, whom we quickly learn is a polymathic genius afflicted with a genetic disorder causing agglutination of the blood cells (or something like that, anyway). We even see him getting a Nobel prize for his work on artificial blood. It is also established, without a great deal of subtlety, that he is largely motivated in his studies by his desire to save his best friend (Matt Smith), and that the pair of them have been mentored by the doctor who’s been looking after them since childhood (Jared Harris – this is a good movie if you drew ‘Jared’ in the name sweepstakes).

Well, this being a Marvel movie (even an ‘in association with’ Marvel movie), Morbius’s plan is to pop off to the Hill of Death and capture a load of vampire bats, which in the world of this movie are apparently savage, pack-hunting apex predators, not the mostly-harmless and actually quite altruistic little creatures you and I share a biosphere with. He then decides to inject his own body with vampire bat DNA in the hope it will cure him. What could possibly go wrong?

I mean, it’s not the dumbest superhero origin story in history, but still. Even the fact that the human tests have to take place in secret, on a freighter in international waters, does not lead the brilliant brain of Morbius to clock that this is a bad idea. On the other hand, this does enable a bit of early mayhem as we are invited to assume the freighter crew are all despicable bad guys whom Morbius, now afflicted with the curse of blood-lust (not to mention the curse of being followed around by intrusive CGI swirls), can off with a clear conscience.

Yes, Morbius now has superhuman speed and strength and some of the powers of a bat, though IP law means the film tiptoes very carefully around what the obvious code-name for him would be. He has bigger issues than plagiarism to worry about, however, as the synthetic blood he is using to keep his hunger at bay is losing its efficacy, while his best friend has got his hands on the serum too, and quite fancies all the superpowers and CGI too…

So, just to recap, Morbius has speed and strength and can (somehow) fly, and he has sonar, which soon develops into full-blown super-hearing. I imagine that for most of the film the main thing his super-hearing is picking up is the sound of Sony frantically grabbing at every Marvel character they still have the rights to and shoe-horning them into this film.

For the uninitiated: Marvel Studios (the makers of the ‘official’, and generally pretty good Marvel films) have managed to reclaim the rights to most of their characters, in some cases by simply buying the companies that had previously held them. However, Sony have managed to hang onto the Spider-Man characters, and Spider-Man’s appearances in MCU films have been the result of finicky horse-trading between the two companies. Hence the two Venom films with Tom Hardy, and now this vehicle for Morbius, a character declared by one website to be no less than the nineteenth-best Spider-Man villain.

Needless to say, they crowbar a reference to Venom into this movie, from which I suppose we are invited to assume that this is set in the same world as they are. There is also some multiversal madness with a late showing by Michael Keaton, well-known for playing another kind of bat man, but here reprising his role as the Vulture from an MCU movie a few years back. It all feels rather contrived and put me much in mind of Amazing Spider-Man 2, which seemed so obsessed with setting up spin-offs and cross-overs it almost forgot about the movie in hand. It is clear that linking to the massively popular MCU films is very important to Sony’s plans, but also that they’re quite prepared to abandon sense and logic in order to do so.

It’s not like Morbius doesn’t have its own problems, not least that he isn’t an especially interesting character to begin with. He laments his fate and broods on rooftops a lot, and frankly it’s been done before, a lot. He gets the line ‘Don’t make me hungry, you won’t like me when I’m hungry,’ which made me laugh if only for its sheer impudence, but apart from that this is a fairly earnest film populated by dull characters who never do or say anything unexpected, saddled with borderline-inept storytelling: great chunks of exposition are handled by more on-the-nose voice-overs.

The biggest problem is that the film’s script serves its structure, rather than vice versa. Stuff happens for no real reason other than to progress the very thin plot – the disposable mercenaries on the freighter is one example of this, Matt Smith’s character deciding to go all in on being evil is another. Police check the surveillance cameras in a car park, but apparently not the ones in a hospital. Even the structure itself is not that great – it vaguely reminded me of Josh Trank’s reviled Fantastic Four movie, in that watching it I had the odd sense of having missed a big chunk of the story – it seems to have part of the second act missing. Suddenly we were in the final battle of the film and I was genuinely wrong-footed, but not entirely ungrateful.

It probably sounds masochistic of me to say this, but sometimes it’s nice when a really bad superhero movie comes along, because it surely makes one appreciate how solidly entertaining the Marvel films usually are just that little bit more. This has a silly story, thin characters that even a good cast can’t do much with, too much intrusively garish CGI, and a general refusal to acknowledge its own daftness. Morbius is definitely not of the first rank, and is comfortably quite as bad as the last couple of X-Men movies. The degree to which it succeeds or fails should tell us something interesting about quite how far the magic touch of the Marvel marque extends.

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Sympathy for Mister Vengeance

It sometimes feels like people have been talking about ‘the return of cinema’ virtually since the moment that cinema sort-of went away, nearly two years ago. One film after another has been touted as the harbinger for the return of business as usual at the box office – first Tenet, then Black Widow (along with a few others at the start of last summer), James Bond, and finally the most recent Spider-Man. You would have thought the massive take of No Way Home would have put an end to this kind of chatter, but no: apparently the fact Covid restrictions were still in place when it came out means that $1.6 billion-and-counting somehow doesn’t qualify as ‘business as usual’ – and so the baton has been passed on again, this time to Matt Reeves’ The Batman. (We have discussed in the past the rather cute phenomenon where the addition of a definite article apparently elevates a film about someone dressing up as a bat to punch crooks to the status of Serious Drama With Gravitas.)

You know me, I’m never ever cynical, but someone who was might offer the thought that most of the people declaring The Batman to be the First True Post-Pandemic Hit are those with a vested interest in seeing it be a hit of any kind. Certainly this is a big, expensive, rather unwieldy movie, which I’m slightly surprised to see getting a release this early in the year – presumably Warners are wary about putting it up against the Dr Strange sequel, which is likely to dominate the early-summer landscape, although this would be a surprising sign of a lack of confidence given it is, after all, a Batman film.

But, you might ask, what’s another Batman film in a release schedule which already includes outings for Morbius the Living Vampire, Dr Strange, the Flash, Thor, Aquaman, Black Adam and many more? A reasonable question, and a Batman film is, self-evidently, a superhero movie on some level. But I’d argue there’s also a sense in which Batman transcends the superhero genre. People have been making films about Batman for longer than any other costumed hero; the 1989 Tim Burton film practically invented the modern superhero movie template.

When you add in the various TV series and spin-off movies – and DC and Warners’ willingness to exploit this particular property with absurd thoroughness has deservedly been the subject of satire, even in their own projects – you reach a situation which is almost unique. Your average person in the street with minimal knowledge of the lore of even one of the big-name Marvel characters will still likely know the name of Batman’s butler, be able to identify many of his regular opponents, and not need to have things like the Batmobile and the Batcave explained to them. In short, Batman and his world have acquired an almost folkloric status as something complete and resonant in and of themselves; they have become archetypal, something which even extends to comparatively minor characters like the crime boss Falcone (played by Tom Wilkinson in Christopher Nolan’s first Batman movie and John Turturro in the new one).

The great advantage this gives to film-makers is that they have a lot more creative latitude to work with – they don’t have to bother introducing all these characters every time, and because there have been so many different iterations already, they don’t have to worry about creating some kind of mythical ‘definitive’ version of the comics character. The Batman mythos is uniquely open to being adapted to suit the creative vision of anyone working within it.

So what is Matt Reeves’ take on the material? He establishes quite quickly that Batman has only been doing his thing for a couple of years, as you’d expect given the casting of the youthful-looking Robert Pattinson in the role. (Given he routinely goes around introducing himself by growling ‘I am vengeance’, it’s not surprising several characters start calling him Mr Vengeance instead of Batman.) There’s a nice sequence demonstrating that Batman really is intent on a reign of terror against Gotham City’s criminal element, then we’re off into the plot proper: in the middle of an election campaign, Gotham’s mayor is gruesomely murdered by someone who enjoys leaving fiendishly tricky puzzles at the crime scene; Batman and his ally Jim Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) follow the trail, but find themselves uncovering a conspiracy hinting at festering corruption at the heart of the city’s establishment. But what does the killer really want – and what’s a good name for a villain obsessed with riddles, anyway…?

Reeves’ version of Gotham City inclines a bit more towards Nolan’s than Burton’s; it’s certainly light years away from anything in the Joel Schumacher films. The vibe is very much one of Watchmen meeting Seven – the main point of distinction, really, between this and the Nolan trilogy is the pervasive sense of stygian gloom and incipient horror that’s constantly in the air.

This is certainly the bleakest and most nihilistic movie ever to engage in high-profile cross-promotion with a Japanese subcompact crossover SUV and a brand of cream-filled sandwich cookie (you can imagine Matt Reeves groaning and sinking his face into his hands when he heard about this). In many ways the film takes rather an easy and obvious option in this department, presenting Gotham (and by extension the world) as a relentlessly horrible, nightmarish place, where society is riddled with corruption from top to bottom, and Batman himself is engaged on a futile (and perhaps counterproductive) crusade driven more by an urge to violence than any higher motive. There is occasionally the odd grace note of hope, of course.

To work in this kind of setting, the Batman characters are all dialled down to their most naturalistic settings, in the process losing most of the gaudy whimsicality which is surely what made them so memorable – a fat-suited Colin Farrell is unrecognisable as the Penguin, which has a certain symmetry to it as this version of the character is virtually unrecognisable as the top-hatted and umbrella-wielding villain most people will be familiar with. Something similar goes on with Zoe Kravitz’s love-interest burglar, who is a Woman With Cats, but not permitted to be anything more outlandish. Paul Dano is effective enough as the Riddler, but also essentially unrecognisable – he’s a combination of splenetic InCel and online conspiracy-monger.

Despite all this, the film often bears a surprising resemblance to previous Batman movies – if we’re serious about our thesis that Batman films are their own separate subgenre, then these moments of repetition would be the conventions of the form. The suggestion that Batman has more in common with the villain than he would perhaps be comfortable with gets articulated again, although quite subtly for most of the movie; more prosaically, the unveiling of the new Batmobile is held back until the second act, acting as the prelude to a big action sequence. In the end Gotham City itself – or at least a big chunk of it – faces an existential threat.

It’s a polished, well-mounted and effective movie, that tells a complex tale well, with some strong performances – but I can’t help feeling that the very archetypal quality that enables it to function also keeps it from really being distinctive. The Nolan movies worked so well in part because they were so startlingly different from what had come before them – this film feels more like Batman-as-usual, albeit done to a high standard, and with lashings of extra gloom and oppressiveness. (Michael Giacchino’s score is effective, but his Batman theme is about one modulation away from turning into Darth Vader’s, which I’m sure wasn’t the intention.)

Nevertheless, this is towards the top of the pile of recent DC Comics movies – which means that, the modern world being as it is, two sequels and various TV spin-offs are already in the works. Clearly Warner Brothers are convinced that you can never have too much Batman. I’m not so sure – but a visit to Gotham City now and then has its own special pleasures, many of which The Batman successfully provides.

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