November 12, 2022 9:11 am
Marvel films are largely soulless and researchless toy films, especially from a visual point of view, in a broad sense, from directing to photography. They are aesthetically uninteresting, first of all because they often don’t have a real director, that is, a talent that dominates over others. They are the opposite of the Warner productions, which also attract an adult audience, with the various cycles dedicated to the characters of Batman, Joker and so on (we dwelt at length on the beautiful The Batman by Matt Reeves). The reason for this choice is a mystery, because it partly goes against commercial logic and deprives Marvel productions of a substantial part of viewers.
This is also the case with Black Panther. Wakanda forevernow in the hall, directed and co-written by Ryan Coogler, like the previous one Black Panther of 2018. To be sure, it’s one of the best of recent Marvel movies. All in all it is enjoyable, there is no lack of good script ideas or brief moments of suggestion. There is, however, the staging, the vision. Yet the opportunities would not be lacking. For example, when the character of Namor the Sub-mariner (played by Tenoch Huerta) emerges alone from the water, in the night, in front of the queen of Wakanda, there is nothing really ever seen emerging from the surface of the water, nothing. that you really worry or that you refer to the deepest unconscious to bring out something equally profound. There is no wonder, even if it were also for the fascination of darkness. As, for example, Jordan Peele manages to do extraordinarily in his splendid Nopea film that arouses intense fascination, where the staging is always the bearer of a powerful vision and profound meanings.
Review in the room Avatar (2009) – to prepare for the release of Avatar 2. The Way of Water, on December 14th – gives the measure of how a highly spectacular film can be made, with politically strong sides, even if didactic: in James’s masterpiece Cameron of digitally drawn beings become poetry – if not entities – and what is didactic takes on the flavor of an archaic parable. It is as if Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki had made a film in digital rather than animation. Behind the infantilism of the apparent toy-film, there is the absolute and primal truth of childhood. Avatar it is a profoundly spiritual and symbolic tale, still very powerful today. And this is because there is an author, with his interiority, who bends the special effects to his will, instead of being dominated by the instrument (which is one of the themes that pervade Cameron’s cinematography), an author who magically transfigures kitsch into art.
Returning to Black Panther and to Marvel films, even the political ideas conveyed, often unconventional and inclusive (sometimes perhaps to the point of excess), are largely didactic. When well aggregated, they create interesting reversals or upheavals regarding gender or racial equality, sometimes with tasty gimmicks. But even in this case there is no shortage of defects. There is a tendency to turn important issues into a small catalog of the various themes or sub-themes, assembled by geometers of the politically correct. More specifically, this system sometimes makes characters less effective.
Namor, a mythical and ambivalent figure of Marvel comics productions, apart from being the leader of the people of the sea and the little wings on his feet, has nothing to do with the original Atlantean being, with a tapered face and long-limbed body, mysterious, disturbing and with a great hieratic force. In this film he is a descendant of the ancient Maya. It’s perfectly fine to have him become an ancestor of US Hispanics, as well as being a great marketing choice. But having chosen an actor with a stocky body and a common face (characteristics very different from comics) is perplexing. Here too the suggestion lacks power.
However, the main problem is the absence of staging and aesthetic force in the photographic construction – with substantially uniform colors and interchangeable with other films -, an aesthetic that heralds homologation to the nth degree. It’s a big problem of all Marvel movies. And, if we think of the highly experimental visual heritage of the great Marvel designers of the sixties and seventies, it seems like a mess. Above all it appears incomprehensible. Artists such as Steve Ditko, Jim Steranko and, of course, the brilliant Jack Kirby have explicitly worked on experimentation, pop, conceptual or abstraction (in the latter aspect Kirby’s achievements still leave you speechless today). And this to name just the three most emblematic designers. Something worthy of these authors, or of the great narratives of the masters of the graphic novel, paradoxically we find it in the Warner productions, which holds the license of the characters of DC Comics, the historical publisher of Batman, Joker and Superman. In Black Panther we find none of this.
Another magnificent example from the world of comics is the release of the Italian edition of Fantastic four: full circle, a story by Alex Ross, master of the pictorial superhero comics, beautiful first of all for the extraordinary graphic staging, without forgetting the excellent ideas in the script. Because great ideas make sense in graphical visualization, they are not a mere illustration of a story.
It was nice to find all the spider-men from the previous Marvel movies in the last one Spider-Man: no way home, an idea that amuses anyone with a minimum of playful sense and love for the character. But, within the Trojan horse of fun, Hollywood blockbusters contain less and less the soldiers of interiority and art. More and more toy films are being made, vehicles of the galloping infantilism of an entire society, whose tastes are homologated instead of diversifying. If you think about how much art, how many authors the Hollywood of the great classical period has churned out, we immediately find the answer to the question of what damages cinema. While paradoxically making it cash.
More ambition on the part of those who produce and conceive the films, together with a more mature and demanding audience, are the only possible solution. Also because with the Black Panther saga there is material to make cinema masterpieces.