This Summer three collosal superhero franchises came to do battle in our cinemas. The Amazing Spiderman, The Avengers and the Dark Knight Rises.
Looking back at the three films it’s interesting that they all took different approaches at making the ludicrous entertaining. Spiderman took the low road, rehashing old action tropes and spouting 3D webgasm over CGI villains. Batman took the high road, introspective, socially philosophical and bleakly realist. And The Avengers went off-road, bouncing along like a teen-comedy, full of smarts and adreneline, and ultimately not going anywhere in particular.
All three films were successful in their own way, but Spiderman was the least of them. Seeing good old Peter Parker get bitten by a spider, discover he can stick to walls, defeat a minor CGI villain, and fool a girl into liking him, all felt a bit tired. A good cast, decent pace, and a tried and tested story arc just weren’t enough to make an impression. The audience came, watched, and went Meh.
The Avengers was a different story altogether. Whedon tore up the superhero handbook and made a movie that was funny. Filled with ridicuous set pieces that were marvolously self-aware, his overtly super-powered stars quipped, leapt and hurled filthy Old English at one another. I laughed out loud as if it was a comedy. Which it was.
But Batman was darker. And better.
It’s better because it achieves the seemingly impossible, to ground a superhero film in the real world, or at least the accentuated place that passes for real in the realm of cinema.
How did Nolan do it? After all, the X-men films tried to ground their worlds in reality, and to tackle real world problems, but they never managed to pull it off. It was all just a bit to silly. Batman achieves it because Nolan makes the reason we really like superheroes the centre of his movies.
Nelson Mandela made famous a line from Marianne Williamson: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” Superheroes represent that fear. They play with the hidden hope that we have the capacity for great bravery, unequaled strength, or unmatched wit – and the fear that one day we might unleash it. M. Night Shamalan plays with this theme throught his 2000 movie Unbreakable, with Bruce Willis spending the whole movie, and it turns out his whole life, struggling to be less than he is. But while Shamalan’s movie was uncharacteristically small, Nolan’s vision is big.
Again and again throughout his films Nolan reminds us that Batman is a symbol – not a superman. He is a call to action, and in The Dark Knight Rises ordinary people respond.
And that for me is why it’s the greatest of the three blockbusters unleashed this Summer. Not only is it a consumate lesson in storytelling (gathering up themes and lending purpose to the two earlier films), but it does not hide behind its feintly ridiculous costumed star. Batman is a symbol for the people of Gotham in the same way that he is a symbol for us, and symbols do not have to be real people.
Nolan has figured out how to make a superhero movie real – you simply make a movie about a real superhero, someone whose real power is to represent our power – and that is genius.
David Millard 