I think I’m done with superheroes.

Abhisek Patnaik
Jul 30, 2017 · 3 min read

Peer pressure, is exactly what made me watch wonder woman yesterday. Ratings seemed to be decent, the movie buffs in my circle recommended it… you know how it goes.


How do you know if you liked a movie?
Here’s how it works for me. It’s a game. Trying to beat the plot and predicting characters’ decisions. Staying ahead of the movie. A truly well made film holds your attention, not allowing you to think ahead. Every frame is like observing a painting. Blink, and you miss the finer nuances. It’s almost like being hypnotised; you can’t think ahead.

Yesterday, I was disappointed.

The movie was the anti-thesis of what one would expect from a fantasy: imagination. It lacked imagination. Different characters added to the same formula.

Formula=World ending+Never seen before villain+Powerless mortals+Lots of garam masala

*Enter superhero*

Superheroes play Gods(sometimes literally). Wouldn’t it be boring if the world became all right with the flick of a wand? I mean, the audience is not that stupid, right?

So, we bake the superhero’s character with a dash of human-ness (read: insecurity). There’s always an existential crisis in the hero’s life. Moral dilemmas, emotional wounds, low self-esteem, powers-yet-to-develop, love conflicts are some of the trending insecurities, that get added to the recipe of the relatable superhero.

Objectively, most of these movies are about core human emotion that get wrapped with fantasy. The takeaway is quite simple.

Film Name: Wonder Woman
Moral of the story: Love beats all superpowers

Simple, right? But also boring.

This is when it begins.

The escalation.

In a regular hero movie, the hero (with his limited powers) is linked to a couple of characters in the plot.

I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.
-The angriest dad in Hollywood.

However, with great power comes great responsibility. A superhero saving a couple of lives, is lame and inefficient. Therefore, it’s always the world, or a couple of galaxies at least.

Then there is the same stuff. Buildings falling, explosions, cars crash, laser beams, pointless gun fire, flying things, slow motion, ultra slow motion, funny lines thrown here and there, dramatic tunnel bursting type music etcetera.

There is a lot of death and destruction, shown very nonchalantly. All the collapsing buildings have people in them. The exploding car probably had a baby on board. There’s a sea of people, dying and panicking. But that’s not important cause your superhero is having a boner.

It’s like reducing death and destruction into statistics, that nobody gives a fuck about. The audience passively ignores the death in the background to watch the hero beat the villain(who suddenly starts shitting in his pants)with the special powers activated by the human-ness.

Now that’s what I call meta-insensitivity.

I agree that such movies exist in the tricky creative intersection of fantasy and reality, but I think we are just running out of ideas. We have reached a point when we are running out of escalations to justify the glory of our heroes. Hiding poor storytelling behind the curtains of visual effects and 3D glasses. Cheap thrills.

Ironically, such films are bleeding creativity.

As the audience it is important for us to also see things differently. To be active viewers who demand a compelling story and not be a passive audience which gets wooed by visual effects and chiseled bodies.

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