Denis Villeneuve has become the most recent director to take pot shots at the MCU, deriding it as “copy and paste” moviemaking. I’ve written about the MCU many times before, and have seen every Avengers flick and most of the solo stories in the cinema within a week of it opening. I’m a big fan. But even I can’t deny that the movies feel a little samey, especially in comparison to the broad filmography of a director like Villeneuve.
Remember that movie where the charismatic, quippy hero goes on a redemption arc and saves the day with a tech based suit, fighting off an enemy in an identical suit but with a diametrically opposed ideological viewpoint? That’s Iron Man. And Ant-Man. And Black Panther. And kind of Iron Man 2. Leave aside the tech part and it’s both Captain America: The First Avenger and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Boil it down to the final battle between a similar foe with an opposing viewpoint, and it’s also Captain Marvel, Doctor Strange, Shang-Chi, The Incredible Hulk, and even WandaVision. The characters are different, and the smaller stories change – but the basic beats remain the same. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Feels like it’s starting to break, though.
I think Villeneuve’s statement is slightly less derisive than Scorcese’s, for what it’s worth. Scorcese has made some of the greatest movies of all time – and was in Shark Tale – so he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to cinema. Still, ‘this is a real film but this one is not’ feels like a hollow criticism from a man who derides streaming services and then puts his seven hour long – it felt like it, at least – on Netflix. Any business that has tried to sell the experience over the immediacy has died in the digital age, be that movie rental stores, magazines, grocery shopping, or newspapers in the morning. Going to the cinema has endured, even in the pandemic era, but anybody who tries to define culture as ‘real’ and ‘fake’, where the ‘fake’ is incredibly popular, tends to fail. Villeneuve is not doing that. He is not saying Marvel movies are bad or that you should feel stupid for liking them. He is pointing out a major flaw with the formula, and a flaw that many fans agree with and recognise.
Clearly, Villeneuve is not dismissive of Marvel entirely. Zendaya, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgaard, Dave Bautista, and David Dastmalchian are all MCU alums, and all feature in Dune. Oscar Isaac, another of Dune’s cast, is signed up to join Marvel soon for Moon Knight, and Jason Momoa plays for the other team, starring in DC’s Aquaman as the titular character. There is huge talent involved in making Marvel movies – that’s why the DCEU has largely failed to replicate its success, despite being able to call on the talents of Margot Robbie, Henry Cavill, Ben Affleck, Ezra Miller, Idris Elba, Zack Snyder, Cathay Yan, Patty Jenkins, and James Gunn. But this talent Marvel uses so well relies far too often on a predictable formula.
Of course, it’s working. Why change it, right? We’ve seen some superhero properties try different things and succeed wildly, like The Boys, Kick-Ass, Umbrella Academy, or Invincible. But we’ve also seen Glass, Jupiter’s Legacy, Brightburn, and Super fail to leave much of a cultural mark. People go to a superhero film to see a superhero film – give them something different and they might stop going back.
You might argue it’s getting better. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier feels like Marvel at its most generic, but other stories this year have played around with the formula. WandaVision ends with the classic, tired battle, but for the most part balanced the weird Twilight Zone eeriness and sickly sitcom tropes perfectly, moving through the years to indicate the changes in Wanda’s state of mind. When she had no one to talk to, it became a Modern Family mockumentary. When there were family difficulties, it was a spiky Malcolm in the Middle riff. When everything was apple pie, it was Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore. Black Widow again had the Marvel showdown, but felt like a noirish genre movie. Loki was very clearly its own thing, although it clearly took notes from Doctor Who. Shang-Chi was Marvel meets Wuxia, typified by the excellent bus fight scene.
Still, despite these developments, it’s very easy to slot WandaVision, Black Widow, and Shang-Chi into the typical MCU rhythm. Scott Derrickson will not be helming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, owing to creative differences with Marvel. Sami Raimi is a brilliant replacement, but it still feels as though there’s ‘a Marvel way’. This Marvel way cost us an Edgar Wright Ant-Man. Can you even imagine how great that would have been? Only recently, Kevin Feige was bragging that Chloe Zhao’s Eternals uses natural light over VFX – apparently a revelation for a cinematic universe nearing 30 entries.
The MCU is one of the definitive cultural landmarks of our current zeitgeist, and in a few decades time will be one of the few surviving entries in the cinematic canon. It matters. But parts of it feel cut and paste, and that’s holding Marvel back from growth. You can only change so much when so many of the beats need to line up with what happened in the movie before that, and the movie before that, and the movie before that.
Read Next
About The Author
