Editorial 8/8/2015- Superhero Origins

Well, guys, we're more than halfway through 2015, and plenty of movies worth talking about have come out. However, I want to talk about the most recent addition to the Non-Avengers Marvel Line-up: the Fantastic 4. Now, I haven't seen it yet, but it evidently sits at around 9% on Rotten Tomatoes- lower than the previous record-holder, "Catwoman." Frankly, I'm not surprised. From the trailer alone, we could see that it was making all the mistakes superhero movies nowadays make, the biggest of which being covering the same origin story we see all Marvel characters go through.
It's not that stories covering a superhero's origin are ultimately bad- in fact, we've seen them do great things. In "Batman Begins", for instance, we see a flawed character studying long years under his own terms to overcome his fear, afterwards becoming the Dark Knight we all know and love. Superman's struggle to find his place is what leads him to the fortress of solitude, where he finds the answers to his questions as well as the will to become Superman. "X-Men: First Class" got this down too, both with the other mutants learning to maintain their powers, and with Professor Xavier learning what it means to be both a hero and someone's enemy. Done right, an origin story can be a fulfilling journey of self-discovery that can teach both the character and the audience about the nature of humanity.
Unfortunately, that's something Hollywood seems to have forgotten nowadays. Instead of development towards the ideal, apparently the initiation is little more than a way for people to get their powers. The powers don't require any change or growth to obtain- they're almost there for the taking. Even worse, we've just seen too many of them. When filmmakers go back to take a more enlightening origin and level it out with what's going on nowadays, we get some seriously worrying issues. Not that much development can happen in an eight-minute trip into outer space to get a radioactive cloud to supercharge your molecules, but the rule still applies.
For example, let's look at two movies- one that did the origin right, and its remake that did it wrong. Yes, while it's OLD by internet standards, I'm talking about Sam Raimi's "Spiderman" and Marc Webb's "the Amazing Spiderman" Please note that this is completely from a storytelling perspective. There is a lot to contrast between the acting, cinematography, and the way the rest of the series works, but we're only focusing on the sequence of events and how the two major ones we'll talk about (i.e., Peter Parker's Spider Bite and Uncle Ben's untimely demise) work towards a more focused story. On that note, let's talk about Toby McGuire.
Now, looking at how Spiderman got his powers in 2002, it, oddly enough, sounds rather mundane coming from a horror-comedy director. He got it on a field-trip, and he was doing what he was supposed to be doing and was where he was supposed to be. One Spider-Bite later, he's got powers and, in fact, trying to use them for good, albeit in an ostentatious wrestling match. When he's unjustly denied his winnings by somebody who was being a genuine jerk, he figures, just once, he doesn't have to do the right thing. He lets a thief escape, and then we follow him through a crisis. He finds his uncle dead in the street, then uses his powers to pursue the culprit, only to find the man he let escape. To non-comic-fans like myself, this was as big a shock for us as it was to him, and it made the resolution all the more impactful.
Fast-forward ten years, and we get an interpretation from a rom-com director, and the lack of innovation (sorry, Marc!) shows. Parker this time is shown as an irreverent hipster whose troubles mostly come from him trying to do the right thing. All the more confusing when he sneaks into a top-secret facility to get his powers. After playing around with his new powers, he arrives home late and gets a proper scolding from Uncle Ben, giving an incredibly awkward rewording of the former film's "With Great Power" speech. Peter then goes on an angry rant about how unfair life is and runs off to buy milk from a local store without any money. Naturally, he is denied his milk and passively lets a thief rob the store. The thief then guns Ben down, and, while he tries to find the killer afterwards, he's never found.
Let's review the two. The former has a good kid get powers by being good, and it hurts him when he tries to be bad. There is a beginning, middle, and end, the story is resolved, and we feel the full impact of the trauma and can see why he wants to be Spiderman in the end. In 2012, however, we have a punk who uses his powers to do punky things (although I still question how embarrassing it is for Flash when Peter's the one who broke the basketball net.) The argument is a mix of non-sequitur and ad-hominim and is, amazingly enough, never completed. The transformation to Spiderman is never solidified, and I'm ultimately confused as to what I'm supposed to get out of it. The point goes to Sam Raimi for better direction, and the idea still stands that people don't know what to do with origin stories anymore.

...Although it's easy to say the action and CGI got better.

So, what can we do about this?
Well, first, we could look deeper into how the leading events should shape a character. The best ones have the mantle of superhero as a reward for good deeds and change, not a way to change. After all, the main idea is that any good man can be special, not that only special people can be good. In the cases of over-the-top superheroes like our good friends the Fantastic Four, we should also embrace the cartoon-ish nature of their genesis. They're all trying to pull the Dark Knight's card of "darker + more realistic = better", but that works for Batman because he's a relatively subtle character. Meanwhile, there's nothing grounded in paradimensional teleportation, so there's no need to make it so. In cases like "Iron Man," it's not the impossible nature of Tony Stark's escape from the ten rings that we care about, but the way it affects his personal nature that makes the story so vivid and immersive, so that's what we should be focusing on.
Another more radical idea would be to just forego the genesis plot altogether. If it's not important to the plot you want to tell, just forget about it, or at least skim over it a la Peter Quill in "Guardians of the Galaxy." It allows for a quicker pace and can give us the story the director really wants to tell. In a rare, non-Marvel/DC example, Pixar's movie "the Incredibles" is a prime example of this. There's no mention of how any of the main characters get their powers; we're brought in more-or-less in the middle of Mr. Incredible's mid-life crisis. The way they got powers doesn't matter to the story, so there's no need. This allocation for pacing led a great deal of critics to compare it to a similar film (the original "Fantastic Four" movie, no less!) and claim it superior over the competition's drab pace and oddly more cartoony nature.
Once upon a time, I thought superhero movies were a beautiful thing, largely because I hadn't seen anything like them before. Now that they've become their own genre, though, it's easy to compare and contrast them to realize what makes them greater or, in this case, lesser than other films out there. Many of us are too comfortable with the Superhero movie formula, and it's impeding a great deal of creativity and power behind their messages. It's about time to reconsider how we make these, and what better place do we have to start than the beginning?

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