On the commentary track for this year's top-grossing film, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, co-director Joe Russo says, during a climactic final scene, "You know, this third act is a fait accompli in a way. It's a superhero movie."
"I suspect he will win," screenwriter Steve McFeely replies. And indeed, the enormous terrifying drones threatening to obliterate millions of innocent people fall from the sky before raining death from the sky. Captain America wins, though it would perhaps be inaccurate, given the current state of the country, to say that truth, justice, and the American way eventually prevail.
As the summer movie season splutters weakly to its inevitable conclusion, there has been much inevitable hand-wringing over the season's poor performance: grosses were down 15% from last year, and for the first time in thirteen years, no film crossed $300 million at the domestic box office. What might be done to improve numbers in the future, executives wonder? More female-led pictures (sorry, Marvel), more comedies or at least a lighter approach to traditionally serious fare (sorry, Zach Snyder), movies that are just… better. Contrary to popular belief, audiences do, in fact, like good movies. (They also like Transformers, but you can't have everything.)
Most of all, Hollywood would do well to consider making a few movies where something is actually at stake for the main characters. In 1977, in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, the first movie of its kind, which along with Jaws would spawn Summer Movie Season for decades to come, a funny thing happens. When Darth Vader threatens to blow up Princess Leia's home planet, he actually does it. Boom. There it goes. Admittedly, the entire plot hasn't rested on saving that particular planet, and the trauma the wholesale destruction of her home would surely wreak on Leia's psychology is never really sufficiently depicted or addressed. But nevertheless, the second-most cosmically terrible thing imaginable—short of destroying the entire universe—actually comes to pass. This is how we know Darth Vader is a truly evil person—or maybe not even an evil person, but an evil entity. Maybe we aren't thinking about this specific incident when he is later redeemed, but it crucially shapes our conception of him from the beginning of the franchise. It is a gutsy move. People have taken a lot of things from Star Wars over the year, but that, unfortunately, has not been one of them.
This summer's Guardians of the Galaxy, released thirty-seven years after A New Hope, is nominally a Star Wars tribute, or maybe a sort-of send-up. (It even features a soundtrack of roughly contemporary hit songs, none of which would ever have been found in a Star Wars movie.) It is doofier than those earlier films, and more colorful, and considerably less urgent.
Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace, the most boring movie villain to grace screens in some time) wants to destroy a nearby planet for Reasons that I forgot while I was watching the movie, if I ever properly knew them. It is difficult to keep track of his motivations since he mostly does a lot of shouting. He subsequently gets embroiled in the evil plot of a different evil villain (Thanos, played—sort of—by Josh Brolin), and consequently both of them are on the hunt for the same universe-destroying stone, which we know is dangerous because it glows purple and explodes an abused young woman who is foolish enough to touch it. Apparently if Ronan touches the stone to the ground of the Planet He Wants to Destroy for Important Reasons of Villainy, all life on that planet will be destroyed forever. Naturally, Our Heroes (Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, et al) have to stop him before he gets away with this.
It is a superhero movie. We suspect they will win.
We especially suspect they will win because Marvel greenlit a sequel to the movie at San Diego Comic-Con the week before the movie opened.
One of the characters, furthermore, "dies" in the climactic conclusion of the movie. We also suspect he is not dead. This is a correct assumption to make. Superheroes win—action heroes, broadly speaking, win, but superheroes in particular—and they do not die. This summer also saw the release of the symbolically prescient The Edge of Tomorrow, in which Tom Cruise dies again and again and again, revived time after time after time. That film was generally agreed to be a clever and original entry into the summer's blockbuster fare, but still: death these days is a figment of the imagination.
Has everyone by now forgotten the conclusion of The Dark Knight Rises, in which Batman sacrifices himself by flying a nuclear bomb out over the ocean to save Gotham City—and then somehow winds up in Italy with Catwoman? Not to mention Tony Stark flying another nuclear bomb up to space only to fall back to earth just in time to avoid becoming space junk himself (The Avengers), Agent Coulson somehow not getting killed by a large scimitar to his chest after all (The Avengers), Captain America sacrificing himself to prevent WMDs from hitting major cities across America and then not actually dying but instead waking up seventy years later (Captain America: The First Avenger), Nick Fury getting shot in the gut and flat-lining on the operating table only to later return, just about good as new (Captain America: The Winter Soldier), or Bucky Barnes coming back from the dead to haunt his old best friend (Captain America: The Winter Soldier).
In fact, in these films it seems that women are, by and large, the only ones likely to find themselves in serious physical peril. Peril is, of course, the default state for women everywhere: it is such a natural facet of our existence that many of us forget that it is something we are always experiencing. But we are. And the culture is here to helpfully remind us of that fact on a near-constant basis: why, after, develop a complex story arc for a female character when you can simply show her being raped instead? Or, alternatively, kill her off to make a man sad: this summer's The Amazing Spider-Man 2 did actually kill off a major character who was not a villain, but that was Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker's girlfriend. Just about the entire collected oeuvre of Christopher Nolan features plotlines of this nature, from Memento to Inception to The Dark Knight.
People like to say that people go to the movies as a distraction, a form of escapism: Greg Foster, CEO of Imax Entertainment, said of the disappointing season, "Action pictures that have a twinkle in their eye and a little mischief are the ones people are gravitating toward. Partially because of all the tragedies in the world right now, they want escape." In a way that's certainly true, but there is little use in entertainment that doesn't make its audience feel things viscerally, and it's worth noting that the current top-grosser of the year (likely to be eked out, admittedly, by Guardians) was a movie not without humor but characterized primarily by grim considerations of governments past and present and by deep psychological torment. Captain America was not exactly gritty social realism, but it was not without substance. And sometimes the world's ills make the national audience more inclined to feel favorably about darker films, not the opposite. The Dark Knight, released in the summer of 2008, is a testament to this fact.
But what does it mean for the cinematic landscape to be without peril? On television, women are still raped and murdered in depressingly disproportionate numbers (ahem, True Detective and basically every other crime show ever to be on air), but whatever the substantial flaws of, say, Game of Thrones in this area, there's no denying that the show's mortality rate is high across the board. Even The Good Wife, not a program known for this sort of thing, killed off a character to great effect this year. But on the big screen, when it comes to big entertainment—discounting, of course, horror, in which danger and violence are so manufactured and processed that they become some other product entirely—fear is gone. Everybody must stick to the formula. And the formula is that the heroes defeat the villains, and the world is saved, and if there are consequences they are manageable and positive. And always, always, there will be sequels.
I wonder if this had anything to do with the Weinstein Company's obvious antipathy toward Snowpiercer, which was released into hardly any theaters and then performed robustly on VOD. Harvey Weinstein reportedly tried to get director Bong Joon-Ho to cut a substantial portion of the film, and to reshoot an emotionally crucial final scene; Bong refused. After seemingly endless negotiations, the film was sidelined, as is often the case with the Weinsteins—but the simple fact of the matter is that it is not a particularly esoteric or inaccessible piece of work, though it is visually distinct, intelligent, and moving. It has well-directed action scenes, morbid humor, an engaging and straightforward plot, and a cast of popular movie stars led by Captain America himself. It should have been a hit.
But a lot of people die, in Snowpiercer, and not just—or even primarily—women. It is full of peril.
This is not unexpected. It is the sort of film where a lot of people die. You are expecting them to be picked off one by one as Curtis (Chris Evans) and the rest of his crew make their way from the proletariat back of the train up to the outrageously luxurious front cars, closer and closer to the engine and the mysterious man running the whole show. This is, indeed, what happens. It is upsetting when they die—some deaths hurt more than others—but it is not exactly surprising. In a weird way it is satisfying, in the way that a puzzle is satisfying, or maybe a mystery novel: maybe you don't know exactly how the story will end, but you know how it is going to get there.
People loved Snowpiercer. People evangelized for it on the internet, and if those VOD numbers are to be trusted, people liked it at home, too. And people liked Captain America, in which peril was minimal—"I suspect he will win"—but which managed about as much personal peril as possible within the strict confines of the genre. The context of the above quote is important. The scene at hand is the final confrontation between Captain America—Steve Rogers—and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), lately fashioned into the brainwashed killing machine called the Winter Soldier, but previously Steve's best friend from childhood. "The expectation is that he will win," Russo continues. "But the real story is will he win Bucky, will he save his friend, will his friend kill him, will he have to kill his friend? The tragedy of that moment was the most important thing to us as directors in the third act. That's the real climax of the act."
Steve is not going to die, because Chris Evans has three movies left in his Marvel contract, and the sequel to The Avengers is coming out next spring, but he has something real at stake. Some version of his life—the life nobody else remembers, from before he got frozen and then woken up again—is at stake. He has so much at stake that he stops fighting for it. Bucky really lays into him, after he stops fighting back, and it is not the spectacular explosions of those terrifying, enormous drones that stays with you after you leave the theater, but the sight of Sebastian Stan punching Chris Evans so hard it looks like he might actually break his face, and then suddenly stopping himself. This violence is personal both in context and in literal action, and the critical pause may not save the entire world, but it saves the deepest core of Steve's character from annihilation. Stories, in the end, are not about the entire world: they are about people.
Like all previous generations throughout history, we live in perilous times. Not just women: everybody. And our peril is personal. The world may end, but it will not end with a stone being touched to the ground and evaporating all life in an instant. In the meantime, friends will fight and lovers will break up and people will die. Hollywood could do with some decent comedies, and it could certainly do with more films headlined by women. But it could also do with movies that aren't about the end of the world. Because unlike Darth Vader, nobody is ever going to have the nerve to pull the trigger.
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