The Patreon Letters - 14th March, 2020 (Patreon)

Hello, and welcome to the latest greatest Patreon letter! If you remember our announcement from a few weeks back, Jackson asked everyone if they would be okay with us moving the Patreon letters to a biweekly schedule. Nobody said no, and in fact many people expressed heartfelt concern for our well-being, so we're definitely going to do that. Ideally these would come out on weekends opposite VoIP Life every month, which means I'm already a week late, but we're still figuring it out so as long as both of us put something out every month I'll consider it a big success.

Recently me and Jackson settled in to watch Snyder/Whedon co-directed superhero team up blockbuster Justice League, a movie that exists in this strange intersection of transient and monolithic. It wasn't very good, obviously, but the ways in which it wasn't very good are I think instructive of a general trend in blockbuster movie making that has seeped like a mold throughout the entire culture of film. In fact, it might be more instructive than your average Marvel movie because it adapts much of the framework of those movies but without the inertia of characters that people have invested in over a dozen plus films. 

We start with scope. Justice League is a movie that follows on beloved and coherent film Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which is in itself a sequel to beloved and coherent film Man of Steel. It pulls from Wonder Woman but only in that for ten minutes you're asked to remember there's an island of women before a CG man shows up and kicks the shit out of them. It's also a sequel to Aquaman, a movie that doesn't come out for another year after this one. Yes, really. 

Also, it was originally the first part of a two movie series, but they decided halfway through production that wasn't actually what they were going to do and instead it had to be a stand alone film. 

To describe Justice League as serving too many masters would be understatement. Of course, you could look at The Avengers, which is a movie that's a sequel to Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Captain America, Thor, and a Hulk movie made by a different company that was itself a fake sequel to a prior Hulk movie that was made by a third company that doesn't even count. You need a flow chart just to figure it out, but thankfully because the films are so ubiquitous the average person knows someone who has internalized all this and doesn't even question it. Warner Bros was not so lucky as to get people willing to internalize the release slate around Justice League, so it seems outrageous. And really, that Aquaman thing is just unreasonable, even for modern franchise movie-making.

Given that this is the sequel to three characters and the se-prequel to one and on top of that the origin story of two more (Flash and Cyborg), it might be forgiven if every character gets just a little bit of time to do stuff before they have to get subsumed by the plot. I mean, again, The Avengers did it. But because nobody knows who the hell Cyborg is they have to spend a lot of time building him up and because Aquaman has a movie nobody is sure about coming out they need to give him a big introduction to tell you that Aquaman is cool, even though nobody going to the movies in 2017 remembers all the Seanbaby jokes about how Aquaman sucks. 

We must also grapple with scale: because this movie has to cap off an aborted phase one of a franchise that barely got started, it has to assemble its version of the infinity gems (three cubes that are named after but otherwise unrelated to things from some comics I won't bore you with). It does this through three separate lord of the rings style war sequences, of the Atlantians and the Amazons and plain old humans all fighting big troop fights against a big flat matte painting of a field with a slightly different color. 

This of course all happens over the course of a few minutes and never really comes up again, because this is a movie about a half dozen superheroes and not actual armies. The thing the movie cannot solve for, however, is that movies about huge magical armies clashing under elaborate skyboxes is extremely cool in a way that superhero cg fights cannot be because we see four of them a year and have for over a decade now. They just aren't special anymore.

Because of that, you have to create stakes. There's this concept in screenwriting called Save the Cat where to signify that a character is a good guy you need to have them save a cat in peril. It's supposed to happen in the third act but the idea of save the cat has permeated screenwriting as a way to provide human stakes in increasingly inhuman fantastic situations that our characters find themselves in. Which is why, two thirds of the way into Justice League, we are introduced to a single destitute Russian family where the last act takes place and puts them in peril as a bunch of explosions and instant terraforming happens. The part that's exceptionally shameless about this is it's the most perfunctory version of the same save the cat MacGuffin from Avengers: Age of Ultron where it was an entire fake poor eastern European city that was being menaced by the same machinations, which required actual heroics to navigate and not (and I'm not making this up) Flash pushing a truck down a dirt road to safety. It's a metaphor. 

On top of this, there is the problem of Superman. I mentioned above that this was originally two movies and the biggest part of that is that it has to handle Superman being dead in the last one of these. Which means we have Batman losing hope, Lois Lane dealing with being sad, Martha Kent getting her home foreclosed upon, and the whole eventual plan to resurrect him leading to the third act where he fights everyone a little bit. It's one of those things that clearly was shoehorned into an already overloaded script, meant to be the big reveal in the second part that doesn't exist, and because of that Superman is on screen less than ten minutes in a movie that he's theoretically supposed to be headlining. Half that time is him fighting the other heroes, the other half is him just showing up and winning, because he's Superman. 

Instead of balancing the powers of everyone in a reasonable way the action scenes are all huge fights which means that Batman struggles to take out one person while Wonder Woman and Superman are clearing entire armies worth of the same goons. The only way interfacing with the enemies can go is these brawls because they don't want anything other than the three magic boxes which will let them rule the world and that's it. There's no discussion, there's no plan, there's punch 'em until they can stop the boxes. I'm reminded of Avengers: Endgame, a movie that in theory caps off like twenty films but involves everyone standing in a row and beating up a villain who doesn't even know who they are because they used time travel to erase themes and instead make a movie about how good it is to not think and have a big battle instead. 

And then after all this mess, we finally get the thing we were ostensibly sold on: Superman's back, the Justice League all gets along and has their powers, and in a post credits sequence Lex Luthor is brought back and is assembling a group (a Legion, if you will) of villains (people who are into Doom, if you will) and starting with Deathstroke, who is a sick as hell mercenary who's like what if Batman was all about guns and swords possible. This was supposed to be the tease of Ben Affleck's Batman film, which has since been cancelled just as production was about to be underway. It's likely that movie wouldn't have been great, but the tag on the end exists as a promise of giving you the movie you want, a movie where the heroes are doing hero stuff and fighting some villains who oppose them in ways that even if they aren't interesting actually involve the two sides being aware of each other. This should be the simplest ask, and yet! Again, remembering Thanos just getting murdered only to come back as his past self who doesn't know anyone and then getting triumphantly murdered again once all the emotional stakes have been removed.

This is the constant refrain of these movies, the thing I'm always struck by: the promise of the end of every movie, or the fun parts of the first act where the hero is just doing hero stuff, always gets subsumed under the demands of plot and franchise building and setting up spinoff characters and paying off ideas from a movie ago that lingered. There will never be the Avengers movie about Thor just hanging out being funny, there will never be the actual DC movie about Superman and the Flash racing. These things exist to be alluded to, promises of fun adventures we'll never see, because nobody knows how to write anything that isn't a world destroyer and the heroes fighting each other because there are no stakes to the villains.

I don't know where the treadmill ends, because people still seem to like it, but I consistently can't help but think of superhero movies as a constant trailer for a movie that will always be down the road, billions of dollars funneled into promise with no payoff. I suppose it's very easy to keep resetting and retelling origins and the part where two good guys meet and fight for a little bit before getting over it, and harder to get into wanting things and getting them and settling storylines for good. I just know that looking into this style of film feels like looking into an abyss, wondering where the bottom is and knowing we will only find out calamitously when the whole culture of cinema for this generation collapses.