The Functional Storytelling Universe
I don’t like the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
This is a stance that often gets me groans when I bring it up in real life. I find the franchise to be too focused on staid filmmaking, unwilling to break a well worked mould, and steadfast in its belief that the stranger elements of the Marvel comics universe need to be apologised for with bland writing and direction. What’s more, my personal favourite entries into the series, Iron Man 3 and Avengers: Age of Ultron, aren’t exactly the most beloved films for the die hards.
But this newsletter isn’t about me. It’s not about you. It’s not even about us. It’s about the millions upon millions of people around the world who are enraptured by this franchise. The people devastated by the thought that supporting characters in Black Panther could have been wiped out by Thanos. It’s about the people in my screening of Captain Marvel who were over the moon to see Agent Coulson, a man who spent most of his previous three films standing in the background (I’m assuming there weren’t too many Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. fans in the house that night). For all my complaints, these movies are resonating with people in a way that most of pop culture does not. And it’s not through accident or happenstance, the MCU is practically built to connect with large audiences shockingly well.
Marvel’s approach is sometimes seen as a return to an “Old Hollywood” style of filmmaking, specifically in the way the producer (in this case Kevin Feige), rather than the director, is the person ultimately behind the wheel. What’s not always discussed is the way it in some ways feels like a return to a more classical form of storytelling. You’d be hard pressed to find too many memorable shots in most Marvel films. Outside of Alan Silvestri’s main theme for The Avengers, the series suffers from a lack of notable music. This can feel like a waste when adapting a medium so aesthetically imaginative as comic books, but the franchise recognises that, despite the stereotype of moviegoers wanting empty CGI spectacle, what audiences care about the most are the basic story beats. Right at the core of these films is an emphasis, first and foremost, on straightforward narrative. And it’s rarely complex fare. Take The Avengers for example. The movie begins with the Earth in grave danger, and the best superheroes in the world are brought together to help save humanity. Initially, the heroes are reluctant to work together, but in the end they put their differences aside to team up, show that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and save the day. That’s it. It’s as uncomplicated a 3 act structure as you’ll find, with the team following the Hero’s Journey to a tee. It doesn’t require more to it than that because the foundations are well in place. When they have those wonderful little character moments in the third act, it feels so satisfying because of the sturdy storytelling that got us there.
Granted, the Hollywood blockbuster was never the central site of aesthetically challenging filmmaking, but the MCU seems to be taking a further step away from formalism. In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Hollywood directors looked to ideas from European art cinema to create a new kind of mainstream Hollywood movie*. An aesthetically and narratively more challenging kind of film took hold against the more functional (though by no means lesser) approach of previous decades. Even as the blockbuster model took hold towards the end of the decade, American cinema still embraced aspects of the New Hollywood in a more commercial flavour. To take a very mainstream example, the blockbusters of Christopher Nolan certainly owe a lot to this era, and even Steven Spielberg’s work often draws on techniques from the era when his career began. Feige and Marvel, though, really seem to be rejecting many of the advances made in the past 50 years of Hollywood altogether. They’re taking us back to straightforward, conventional stories about easy to root for heroes told in ways that put function and character before form. We’ve gone full circle.
*Yes, this is a massive oversimplification, but that’s a conversation for another day.
And it’s the characters that, in the end, keep people coming back to the movies. Again, usually they’re pretty straightforward and blunt people. Steve Rogers’ core personality trait is that he’s a good man who always wants to do the right thing, even as it becomes increasingly hard to figure out what “the right thing” is. Peter Quill is struggling to be a grown up in a world where he was never shown how to be an adult in his youth. It’s rarely more complicated than this. And that’s entirely how it’s supposed to be. These are straight down the line archetypal stories, told relatively well. The Avengers (the point where the franchise truly became one story) blew up the box office in 2012 because people found themselves liking these characters, not from the aforementioned simple plot. Thor: Ragnarok was able to make great use out of referencing the moment in Avengers where Hulk throws Loki around because it was a character beat the audience loved. Everyone remembered that scene, whereas almost no one remembers the plot mechanics of Loki’s plan to invade Earth.
In some ways, the MCU has learned from its mistakes here. 2013’s Thor: The Dark World, one of the franchise’s least memorable entries, made the mistake of ignoring the character emphasis. The film thought it was upping the stakes even further by putting the fate of the entire universe at stake. What it forgot to do was tie this deeply into the journeys of the characters. The result is a film that just kind of exists without ever involving the audience in the story. This was not a mistake made twice. Since then, just about every entry into the series has taken time to make sure the emphasis is on easy to follow character journeys above all else. Avengers: Infinity War ends with a universe-scale crisis, yes, but what affects the audience is watching the specific people they know and love crumble into dust. Half the life in the universe disappearing is just a statistic. Seeing Peter Parker tell Tony Stark that he doesn’t feel so good is a tragedy.
The emphasis on keeping these character arcs and plots simple has been broken a couple of times and audiences were somewhat disgruntled. Iron Man 3, my favourite of these films, is deliberately constructed to conceal a twist. It’s not a stakes-raising twist, though, which people tend to love, but a deflating one. In revealing that The Mandarin was simply an actor, a figurehead, a joke, the film brilliantly upends expectations over how straightforward superhero movie narratives work. What it also did, though, was told the most passionate audience members that their investment in this story was for naught. They’d been (artfully) lied to, and this rubbed them the wrong way. The MCU is not a place for subversion. Something not too dissimilar was found in Avengers: Age of Ultron, Joss Whedon’s sequel to The Avengers that earned rather more division. Unlike its very focused predecessor, Ultron is spilling over with ideas, trying to give all its core players complex emotional arcs, craft an entirely new villain, emphasise that the Avengers are truly adrift and much more. It fails in a lot of these senses, struggling to find a throughline anything like as resonant as the first film’s story of the heroes coming together, even as I find myself admiring the ambition in the messiness. But that’s not why people watch these movies. The franchise wants to follow in the tradition of archetypal heroes following classical stories, and if you deviate from that, no matter how well you do it, you’ve broken a promise to the audience.
And for better or worse, popcorn movies will always be on some level about giving the audience what they want. Of course, you need to cause them some strife at times (see: the end of Infinity War), but going too far outside the conventional narrative box is something of a risk. The Marvel Cinematic Universe plays it absolutely by the book on this front, and that proves to be its most frustrating feature: an unwillingness to experiment or imagine outside of very strict filmmaking and narrative conventions. But this isn’t out of fear or laziness. Feige et al get that what matters in these stories is archetypal characters, told well. We’re following a journey with these people. It’s not the most original journey, but it’s one that continues to resonate.
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And since you read all that, here’s my very heterodox ranking of the franchise:
Iron Man 3: along with brilliantly subverting what we expect from these stories, it’s also the best at simply committing to the genre it wants to be in without feeling like any less of a superhero movie
Avengers: Age of Ultron: it has all kinds of problems, but this is a film that tries to say everything, and I can never hate that.
Thor: Ragnarok: it’s just a really good time.
The Avengers: no one remembers how much of a slog this is in parts of the first half. It doesn’t matter because the second half is so much fun.
Black Panther: the most complete feeling world building they’ve done in any of these.
Iron Man: it’s so off the cuff. It has no idea why it needs to have Jeff Bridges turn into the Iron Monger except that these movies are supposed to have big fights at the end. The more improvisational stuff between Downey and Paltrow makes it worth it.
Captain America: The First Avenger: Joe Johnston broke into Hollywood as part of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones crew. He’s not as good at recreating the kind of ‘30s/40s pulp genre stories that inspired those films as Spielberg and Lucas, but he’s still quite good at it.
Captain Marvel: Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson give this one a bit more charisma and star power than we normally get here.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: it feels like more of an ensemble piece than the first, which helps, but still wants to have its cake and eat it.
Guardians of the Galaxy: this and the sequel are the MCU’s official “weird” entries, but its crowded in the kind of jokes that signal to the audience, “look, we know this seems kind of weird, so don’t worry about it, we’ll hold your hand all the way through”.
Spider-Man: Homecoming: fun when it’s about teenagers going through high school troubles. Less fun when it has to be a blockbuster.
Avengers: Infinity War: making an entire blockbuster as a part one, a set up, an endless series of loosely connected threads that exist just to raise the stakes feels awfully vulgar, but it’s never boring.
Thor: Kenneth Branagh was a strange choice for this. He’s reasonably effective with some of the smaller character moments, but there aren’t too many of them, and the rest of it feels very bland.
Captain America: Civil War: A lot of important stuff happens in this one. I’m still not sure that it’s grounded in any kind of real motivation for Steve or Tony to get to the point of civil war in the first place.
Iron Man 2: a lot of scenes happen here. Many of them are just setting up other stuff for later down the line. None of it coheres. It’s occasionally interesting.
Doctor Strange: the concerning racial optics here drag down what is otherwise a very middle of the road entry.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier: for this film to work, it has to sell exactly one scene: the moment where Steve finds out that the Winter Soldier is Bucky. That should be a devastating moment for the audience and a life changing event for Steve. As it is, the film is so snowed under with other plot mechanics that they just fly right past it. All we are left with is a “political thriller” without any politics.
The Incredible Hulk: I’ll be honest, I remember virtually nothing about this one.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: this barely feels like it happened. It’s like a cloud of a film.
Ant-Man: see above.
Thor: The Dark World: a lot of CGI. Not a lot of human emotion.