Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: Marvel’s prospective summer tentpole Iron Man 3 has us thinking back on more unusual superhero movies.
Super (2010)
The rise of Comic-Con has given birth to an unprecedented surge in superhero movies, slavishly tailored to flatter the egos and stoke the libidos of 14-year-old boys and their adult emotional equivalents. But while the po-faced seriousness of Zack Snyder’s Watchmen and the Dark Knight movies may be an advance from the days when every article about comics started with the words “Bam! Pow!”, they’re still products of a time when comics were struggling to be taken seriously. The midnight hues and over-the-top violence made Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns a superhero book—sorry, graphic novel—adults could read without feeling ashamed. But now that grittiness is the law of the land, the idea of setting costumed crusaders in a realistic milieu has become just another adolescent fantasy.
James Gunn, who is currently directing the big-screen version of Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy, gets comics in a way few directors this side of Sam Raimi and Joss Whedon do. He loves the allure of spandexed, slogan-spouting crime fighters, and of moral combats that play out on an intergalactic stage. And he understands, at heart, that this stuff is kind of ridiculous, which only makes him love it more.