Reaction Heroes

This morning I watched a video about the LA Comic Con, and there was a brief shot of a Sideshow Collectibles statue from Star Wars that I hadn’t seen before. It has Yoda straight-up stabbing a Clone Trooper with his light saber while standing on his chest.

I don’t remember the actual scene; apparently, he’s actually retrieving his light saber after throwing it into the guy’s chest? In any case, even as a man who spends at least 10 minutes a day thinking about the Galactic Empire, I didn’t recall Yoda ever fighting anybody other than the most super-powerful bad guys. It was jarring to see this specific image chosen as the one cool and iconic enough to make a statue out of, since it’s the entire franchise’s main spokesman for The Light Side of The Force depicted skewering a man being controlled by a computer chip in his head.

And sure, I am familiar with the whole Defense vs Offense loophole in The Force. I’m not here to re-litigate any possible war crimes that might have happened so long ago and so far away. For that matter, I’m also aware that even movies directed primarily at kids can’t stay satisfying if the good guys do nothing besides just slicing up robots.

I’m more interested in the optics of the whole thing. More specifically, why the prequels — and why action movies in general — keep turning up the dial on spectacle but are unable to make any of it feel like it has real stakes or consequences. You guys like Yoda, right? And you like seeing magical space samurai flipping around and stabbing dudes with laser swords, right? Well, buckle up, kids!

Anybody who had the misfortune of reading this blog during the summer is well aware of how I got blind-sided by Superman, and spent a lot of time and a lot of words trying to figure out exactly why it came seemingly out of nowhere and hit me so hard. It is so straightforward in its tone and its themes that it explicitly tells you what it’s all about, multiple times. So why did so much of the movie’s message resonate with me as if I’d unlocked its many ambiguous, multi-layered puzzle boxes?

I think it’s simply because it took so many iconic comic-book-super-hero images, which are so clear and so easy-to-read that they’re even corny, and it insisted on inserting them into scenes where a less “yes, throw it all in!” director than James Gunn might’ve shown more restraint. Superman saves a squirrel in the middle of a battle! Superman uses his body to shield an actual girl scout! Superman holds up a giant monster until he’s able to get a tiny dog to safety! Superman holds up a falling building to allow a panicked woman to drive to safety!

Any one of these would be so obvious that it wouldn’t register as more than “hey, that’s cute, charming, and clever.” That was my initial read of the movie: this is a movie that truly gets the appeal of comic books. And it’s definitely not new; it’s part of the inherent corniness of Superman. Even the Richard Donner Superman included a scene where he rescues a girl’s cat from a tree.

But that was its own scene; I still believe that the 1978 Superman had an ever-present need to signal the audience that everyone was in on the joke. There are the parts that are affectionate nods to the nostalgia of kids’ comic books, and there are the parts that are intended to read like a bona fide grown-up — or at least family-oriented — action movie of the late 1970s. James Gunn’s version refuses to make that distinction. Everything is blended together, corny and cool, all at the same time. And the moments of unashamed corniness are relentless, like Lex Luthor shouting “1A! 1A! 1A!”

And the net effect of all of that, at least on me, is that the slug-fests do double duty as character development. That’s also why the extended battle between Superman and Ultraman at the end feels like such a slog, and is still my least favorite part of the movie. It doesn’t do anything besides offer possible redemption for the Engineer, which I don’t care about, and sell the idea that Superman is more than just his power set, which is something they could’ve gotten across in much shorter time.

I even make an exception for the scene where Mister Terrific is wrecking dudes in a detainment camp, because it both establishes how cool he is and also shows Lois witnessing first-hand the kind of thing that Clark does regularly, instead of just watching it from within the offices of the Daily Planet. And also the song is catchy.

But the larger net effect is that it makes the spectacle have stakes again. One of the most baffling things about the first time I saw the new Superman was why I felt such anxiety seeing the buildings of Metropolis falling over like dominoes while the city was threatened by an inter-dimensional rift or whatever. This is exactly the kind of meaningless spectacle-of-destruction that’s so common to 21st century movies that it’s completely boring. Scenes of buildings getting destroyed and car chases are the moments when my eyes glaze over and I just let the VFX people have their fun for a few minutes, waiting until the movie goes back to showing me something I care about. But here, I was genuinely concerned to see so much damage being done to a fictional city that we hadn’t even gotten that familiar with yet.

And it’s simply because the movie’s shown us repeatedly that Superman spends as much time protecting the city as he does punching bad guys. I got invested in it just because my hero was invested in it.

So going back to that Yoda statue, my immediate thought was that it was a weird image to focus on such a powerful hero killing some faceless soldier. The idea that the quicker and easier path isn’t the most powerful one is kind of his whole deal. It’s more interesting when the work is harder for the heroes because they can’t just win, they need to win the right way. The stakes are higher, and the scenes are more interesting. (Even beyond the obvious fact that there’s no mortal threat to Yoda not just because he’s super-powerful, but because this is a prequel to movies where we saw him very not dead).

I love big, loud action movies, so obviously I’m not opposed to spectacle for its own sake, and I’m not opposed to giving characters plot armor. But I so frequently hear other action movie fans insist that it’s practical effects vs CGI that makes all the difference, and the reasons so many blockbusters feel so empty is because it’s all green screens and not “real.” I think that the problem is deeper than that. An audience can still get engaged and invested in VFX-heavy spectacle as long as we’re given a reason to care about it.