Superhero Movie Pet Peeves

Kind of odd you see Stark eat a few times in the first Iron Man(can't remember if you do in the 2nd), considering he's one of the ones who shouldn't really be all that hungry. Unless he's still in the "beer munchies" stage of his alcoholism.

 

I'm rather sick of origin stories that take up the majority(or whole first act) of a movie when it's unneeded. I hope to hell they condense the one in the next Superman to something like the Ross paintings from the opening credits to Spidey 2. We all know Superman.

Tony's cramming bread down to get ready for the next binge.

 

My genre pet peeve is the final battle in act three where the hero and villain just stand there and let the special effects do the fighting. Fantastic Four and the X-Men franchises stand out as particularly appalling offenders. I'll allow it in the Heisei era Godzilla movies, where subsequent suit redesigns got progressively heavier until the actor literally couldn't move around. I expect a superhero to smack a ho.

Speaking of when they eat... when do they poop?

Well...I think there's been a few scenes of superheroes chowing down.  Bruce Wayne drinks some kinda wheat-grass smoothie looking thing in Batman Begins, and can be presumed to eat pretty darn well thanks to Alfred's cooking.

 

Thor chows down on a box of pop tarts (and by the look of things a mega-omelette and some pancakes to boot).

 

Tony drinks a bunch of nasty-looking shakes to stave off his poisoning in IM2.

 

But really...I think it's safe to assume they eat off-screen.  Very few superheroes are presented on-screen as having lives so full of superheroing that they couldn't be getting three square off-screen.

 

 

I think that depends on the superhero in question.  If we're watching Magneto vs. Cyclops, I have no problem accepting a big FX battle.  Not all superheroes rely on fisticuffs.

 

In one of the viral videos for The Dark Knight, we see Bruce having some food. Think it was something oriental because he was holding chopsticks.

 

Superman II, Supes dines Lois in the Fortress, then Jor-El watches...

With past super hero films, lets take Spider-Man for example. I would like to see the hero beat up on normal criminals for a bit. Those scenes are always shown in a montage in order to get us to the battle against the main bad guy. To see Spider-Man take on those bank/jewelry robbers would have been fun. Superman:The Movie did a good job with this.


Stark ate Burger King, not McDonalds. After seeing Thor for a third time nothing really jumps out at me.

Stark also had some East Coast pizza delivered by Jeff Bridges.

 

Spidey does beat up on some would-be MJapists...

Oh yeah, I kind of forgot about that scene..I just wanted more.

I once saw a superhero movie where the superhero ate food.

I know this is going to be more apparent in the coming marvel films, but I'm getting tired of the 'grounded, realistic superheros'. Thor notwithstanding, I want me some goddamn Cosmic shit going on. I want Thanos, Infinity Gems, the Beyonder. Some truly epic level shit.

 

 

I want stars in my eyes. And not the high payed ones.

Origin story's are probably the worst. That can waste half of the first movie sometimes. Also maybe the plan to make more than one film right off the bat makes the first one thin at times. Foreshadowing things we'll never see etc.

The villain's motives are usually terrible. Worst offenders: Fantastic Four 1, Spidey 3, X-Men3.

 

 

 

 

 

Strongly disagree. Since the origin scenes were some of the best moments in regards to Batman Begins, Spider-Man, Superman and Iron Man. 

Thor might have opened the door to some of this, but I doubt we'll ever get full-scale Infinity Gauntlet style stuff going on.  Aside from budgetary concerns, it's really hard to "wow" people with FX anymore.  CGI has become so ubiquitous that it generally only becomes notable when it's bad or lacking in some way.  That, and Galactus in FF2 aside, I'm not sure how audiences would respond to the idea of all these various "REALLY Godlike/Nigh-Omnipotent entities" that start to crop up all over the Marvel U.

 

Yeah, I should have said with major exceptions. I think though that with various iterations of characters  not very many years apart that it needs to be reigned in. I guess I just like for them to get to it. Well placed flashbacks can serve that function.
 

 

Besides budgetary issues, having everything get all cosmic means shrinking our heroes to a degree.  This is something the comics, even with a more malleable baseline of reality to work with, struggled with, and was one of my problems with the final season of Lost.  Once all is revealed to be part of the machinations of higher beings, the story runs the risk of becoming about those "real" players by default, and you start needing to justify all the time you've spent on the pawns.  And that's to say nothing of how difficult it will be to find some way for Hawkeye or even Captain America to really contribute in a fight against Thanos.  Marvel's great innovation was to make its heroes more life-sized, and the eagerness to throw that aside for the sake of "bigger" spectacle confuses me.

 

But not as much as being hung up on watching superheroes eat.  All movies avoid dining scenes when they can; they're continuity nightmares and uncomfortable for actors.  Having some great yen to see Spiderman down a chalupa strikes me as the tip of a very bizarre psychological iceberg.

Totally this.  Too much time on origin stories.  Taking up too much of a film's running time.  Especially bad with sequels or remakes regurgitating similar material.

 

The problem is not so much with origins, as Batman Begins, Iron Man and Spiderman all have strong sequences built out of that material, as it is with the need to slap a "proper" superhero villain/battle onto the end.  The result is that a lot of origins end up with a third act that feels arbitrary and disjointed from the first two. 

 

It seems like every studio wants an origin movie to start their franchise (more entries=more money, after all).  But no one really seems comfortable releasing a movie that is just an origin, so we keep getting an hour and change of origin with a lackluster mini-movie tacked on the end. 

 

I don't know.  There's nothing wrong with acknowledging that an origin has already been done by another film, and done well.  We don't need to see Bruce's and Clark's origin again simply because there's a reboot.  We know that story already.  Move on and show us something new.

 

We don't "need" another Batman or Superman movie at all, in a strict sense.  I'm just saying there's nothing inherently wrong with doing an origin story; the problem lies more with how it can lead to half-assing the actual climax.  But I'm not terribly passionate about the subject right now.  Batman's franchise is long past this point, I have no interest in Superman or Green Lantern anyway, and Captain America's origin is actually the place I'm most interested in seeing the character.   I guess the Spiderman reboot could bore me, but I haven't started giving it any thought yet.

Or take the Spider-Man 2 route and convey all the necessary information in a stylish montage that overlays the opening credits.  Both Superman and Batman's first origin stories were less than two pages long, after all.

 

 

Fine by me.  I was worried that the Green Lantern film was going to spend too much time on Hal's origin, but it looks like it throws in enough other cosmic stuff to balance it out.  I hope.

 

Still holding out for my Aquaman film.
 

 

I wasn't a big fan of Thor, but I did appreciate that Jane wasn't kidnapped and used as bait to lure in our hero.  Pretty much every superhero movie does it.  Gotta have the women standing to the side screaming.  Mary Jane Watson is the most helpless excuse for a woman since Olive Oyl.  Jane sees a giant robot, moves people to safety, and then gets the fuck out of the way.  

 

This isn't a superhero movie-exclusive pet peeve, but still.

Yeah and whats crazy about that one is that they did it 3 FUCKING TIMES. I love those first two to death and im a big Raimi fan who in my opinion made a cool female hero flick in The Quick and the Dead. However didn't anyone pull him aside and go "hey Sam it's the second flick and Mary Jane is kidnapped by the main villain AGAIN?". From what I understand in the 3rd film it was originally supposed to be Bryce Dallas Howard hanging up there at the end. But nope yet again theres old Mary Jane a danglin. I used to sort of get annoyed at Kirsten Dunst complaining about the wire shit but looking back that is kind of all she did.

I agree; Pepper coming to Tony's rescue in Iron Man was a welcome inversion of the trope. 

 

More like a Quarter-Pounder!

 

The tricky thing about bringing these superheroes to the screen is that it almost ALWAYS has to be personal.  Personal enough to be worth telling the story on the big screen instead of coming across like a 'monster-of-the-week' TV episode.  When the personal stakes work, it's great.  I love it.  But once you start getting into sequels, it starts to feel like, "Jeez... does Spidey always have to be personally connected to his villains?"

 

This connects to what Harley was saying about the Jane character in Thor.  Normally, having a lead romantic interest be so uninvolved in a film's climax would feel wrong.  But these movies often have so little to offer the love-interest (other than being a love-interest) that the only recourse is to make them the damsel-in-distress.  As such, having Jane more realistically help in any way she can and 'get the fuck out of the way' feels refreshing (as undramatic as it is).  

 

Always with the 'boys with toys...'

 

I remember being annoyed with Tomorrow Never Dies when after spending most of the movie having Michelle Yeoh show herself to be a superior agent to Bond in almost every way, she's stuck being the damsel in distress by the end.  

 

I'm tired of the 'not telling the love interest my secret identity in order to protect her' conceit. It doesn't work. The love interest ends up in danger regardless. Except, as Harley pointed out, in THOR.

The origins I hate are the ones involving some crappy child actor (hired because he shares a passing resemblance to the main actor) taking up a large chunk of screen time ala Daredevil, Ghost Rider, and Ang's Hulk. No one minds the origins in Spider-Man, Iron Man, and Batman Begins, because (with the exception of 10 minutes in Batman Begins) the origin involved the main actors in Maguire, Downey, and Bale. Those are who I came to see, and that's who I want to see. Green Lantern will be lucky because it will be all Reynolds all the time. Captain America was smart by putting Chris Evan's head on someone else's body (or however they did it). Give me the big guns you hired, cause that's who I want to see.

You'd think by the third one, she'd have taken a self-defense class or bought a taser or something.  I know she's up against people stronger than her, but seeing her at least attempt to fight back would have been nice.  If you're gonna knowingly sign up to be a superhero's girl, knowing that you're gonna be a constant target of 'nappings, you better get your ass in an octagon and get goddamn ready!  As it is, she's more of a pain in the ass for the hero than a viable and important person in his life.  You gotta know that Peter was thinking "AGAIN with this bitch?!" by the time Venom snags her.

 

The bit in the first one where she's strolling down a dark street in NYC in the middle of the fucking night in a rainstorm like it ain't no thang always makes me scowl.  I mean, you've GOT to be kidding me.

 

Spider-man 3 is the one that immediately comes to mind when I think of terrible background players.  

 

EDIT:  The previous 2 films had this problem too, but it still felt like it fit in with Raimi's sensibilities.  The ones in 3 were just distractingly bad.  The one that particularly stood out was the female news reporter with the accent.  I read that she committed suicide.

Edited by mcnooj82 - 5/16/11 at 7:50pm

Mt Pet Peeve: so many of these films (Spiderman!) not only waste time with the hero's origin, they waste even more time with the Supervillian's origin. I don't care how Norman Osborn came to wear a Green Goblin costume: I don't care that his Bat Glider was a military prototype ('cause we gotta keep in Realz for da kidz!)

 

Also in Popeye they have an extended Eating-At-Dinner scene, but if you pay attention you'll realize there is actually no food at all on the table! Fact.

 

I was pretty pissed at the time of the famous "Spider-Man must remove his mask when fighting the bad guy" thing.

 

I also found it funny that Rachel Dawes held her own in Begins, but was the damsel in distress in TDK.

Rachel was damseled in Begins, but it wasn't specifically to piss Batman off.  She was drugged by the baddie, Batty saved her, and then scared the shit out of her by screaming in her face while she was on the sauce.  "RAAAACHUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUL!"

Count me in on hating it when every villain a hero faces has to have a personal connection to him. I don't necessarily have a problem with it in origin tales, but it gets really annoying when it is continued in the sequels. The chief example of this would be Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy. The Green Goblin is his best friend's father. I have no problem with that. It is supposed to be that way. Even making Doctor Octavius his idol was tolerable because it was done in an interesting way. Retconning Sandman as the person who killed Uncle Ben took it too far though. That and making every villain a victim of a science experiment gone bad. One can only imagine the same thing would have happened with The Vulture in the unmade fourth film and it obviously would have been done for The Lizard if Raimi actually ever got around to using the character. On a side note, I do find it a bit hilarious that Raimi's Spidey flicks line up so well with the Superman films...........................and to a fault, considering the similarities between Supes OOO and Spidey 3. One can only hope that if he had made Spider-Man IV, that it would not have fit Superman IV.

 

One series I haven't taken issue with in terms of "personal connection" yet is Iron Man. Again, it made sense to use Stane as the villain in the first one, as it makes it a whole lot easier to introduce a villain that the hero already knows when dealing with an origin tale. As for the second one, while the botched it in the writing, I did like the whole "living in the shadow of your parent's successes & mistakes" motif they had going on Stark and Vanko. It was a good idea that ended up being half-baked by shoving too much else into the flick. As much as I liked Sam Rockwell as Justin Hammer, his inclusion and the constant bombardment of Avengers set-ups (Widow, the new element, random references, etc.) really ate up a lot of the running time. Stark's only conflicts should have been with a Ten Rings-backed Whiplash and his legal issues with the US Government.....................paving the way for a more epic Armor Wars-themed third installment. As stoked as I am that The Avengers hits screens next year, they really should have made three Iron Man movies before doing the team-up film. Oh well......

 

Another superhero pet peeve? Bad third installments. If you can craft a decent (or even good) second film, is it REALLY that hard to make a solid third one? Superman III, Blade: Trinity, X-Men: The Last Stand, and Spider-Man III are all disappointments. Hell, Superman IV: The Quest For Peace and X-Men Origins: Wolverine are even worse. Is it really that hard to take the time to craft a good story? I really hope that The Dark Knight Rises and Iron Man III can break the curse.

 

Another one? Shooting your wad all it once by jam-packing villains into a film. It can work if you do it like Batman Begins by having a big baddie (Ra's Al Ghul) and a lesser one (Scarecrow) that acts more as a henchman. Or you can have the heavy (Kingpin) hire a freelancer to take the hero down (Bullseye). Hell, even having a new villain alongside a return one in a supporting role works (ala General Zod & Lex Luthor). Using popular villains as third act fodder is a BIG no-no (Bane, Venom, Deadpool, Phoenix, etc.). The only instance in which the latter has actually worked was The Dark Knight and that is only because Harvey Dent's fall from grace was a main plot point. If they had managed to pull off something similar with Eddie Brock in Spider-Man III (minus the death), there would be a whole lot less complaints from the fans. Shortchanging popular characters is a sure-fire way to piss off fans and you are also shooting yourself in the foot when it comes to figuring out a villain for the next film. Want to toss in a few extra villains for third act fodder? No problem. Just make sure you pick second and third tier villains. The main audience might not recognize them, but if you choose wisely you can end up with a few that look great on film..........................in which case they won't care because they are watching something cool.

 

Bringing us back to Spider-Man III, an easy thing to do would have been to have two prisoners escape and get mixed up in the experiment. One becomes Sandman.............the other Scorpion or Rhino or someone else. They wreck havoc together and end up being hired by Harry to help him take out Spidey. In the end, Harry changes his mind and there is a huge battle between the four at the construction site. You still get multiple villains for toys and fans get to see a couple of rogues that they thought they might never see in action because they weren't popular enough. Meanwhile, you can slowly weave Eddie Brock into the plot so that he is already introduced before you make him the villain in the next film. Or whatever.

 

Pet Peeve #4 - Making up villains because you are too lazy to comb through back issues to find one that already exists.  I absolutely LOVE the fact that Nolan used mobsters from the comics in his Batman films, instead of just making up his own.  Hell, this really applies to any characters.  Why make up a love interest, reporter, politician, cop, friends, etc. when there are likely countless examples to chose from within the source material.  Chances are you are adapting something that has been in constant print for decades, so there is bound to be any type of character that you can think of just waiting to be used.  It's lazy and insulting to not only the fans, but to the creators.  Hell, you don't even have to read through the issues yourself!  Just call up DC or Marvel.  I'm sure you can find someone on the staff who would be more than willing to help you find a character in the material that fits your needs.

Here comes some more rambling.......

 

One positive that I really have to give Raimi when it comes to his Spidey villains are motive.  None of them have some crazy super weapon that they want to unleash on humanity.  The Goblins and Venom wanted revenge.  Doc Ock and Sandman needed money.  Pure and simple.  Not all of their arcs might have been executed in the best way, but at least the motivation makes sense.

 

Also, I am still completely baffled that no one has used the James Bond template.  How hard is it to give us a pre-credits action sequence with Spider-Man taking down Shocker or Mysterio?  Every single one of these superheroes has B and C-grade rogues who aren't really worthy of an entire film's screentime but would make for a fantastic opening action sequence where the hero takes them down and turns them over to the authorities.  The only film that has really come close to this is Nolan's The Dark Knight, where we see Batman finally catching Scarecrow again...........but even that isn't reaching the full potential of such sequences.

I agree with everything you said, Plissken.

I also hate how so many villains are over the top Joker-types. It seems like everyone saw how Jack Nicholson did it in Batman, and seems like they can just act CRRRRAAAAZZZZYYYY and the costume will do the rest. All the Burton/Schumacher Batman's have a Joker type, Bullseye, Jigsaw, Blackheart,Nick fucking Nolte, Venom........the only time it's worked has been Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin, and that's cause the Goblin is plain nuts period. I much prefer the Magneto, Obadiah Stane, and the way Nolan has handled his Bat villains.......hell, even Ledger's Joker is dialed down a notch, and comes across more an evil, menacing bastard than a complete loon.

delete

Have you seen the Green Lantern trailer?  Yeah, epic cosmic shit in there.

 

oops, double post.

I thought the Hulk reboot did this well.  A little flashback in the beginning, and away we go.  It even borrowed a little from the Ang Lee Hulk and a little more from the old Lou Ferigno TV show, and still managed to be understandable without spending 45 minutes explaining the minutia of Gamma Ray exposure.

This one ^. And the now-cliche Part 2 internal conflict..."I must give up being a hero so I can have a normal life"!

 

Yeah, I can do without the internal conflict bits, though to be fair in most of the films where that conflict is presented, it's coming straight out of the source material (Spider-Man and X-Men most notably), and in some cases (The Hulk, The Thing in Fantastic Four) pretty well-justified.

 

The "Keeping the secret from the love interest" thing has indeed gotten kind of stale, but again...that's straight outta the source.  Though as noted Thor did a decent enough job of it, and it looks like Captain America's token love interest is capable of holding her own and in on the secret ID from the get-go.

Yet both movies made their origins better than the source material ever did. Again, the first halves of Batman Begins, Superman, Spider-Man and Iron Man are the best of the genre. Period. The worst origins are the ones that are rushed through (ie. Fantastic Four, Hulk). Either do them right or don't do them at all. 

 

Make the origins as good as you like, that doesn't change the fact that a lot of us are bored as hell by origin stories now, and for many of these characters the origin stories are so well-known across popular culture that including them is unnecessary.  Oh, and those "great" origins were still from the source material.  I'm was only referring to the earliest depictions of both characters' origins.  They were obviously greatly expanded upon in the decades since.

 

Bear in mind most of us are talking about re-hashing origin stories we've already seen in countless forms across various forms of media.  If you don't know Superman was launched from the exploding planet Krypton and raised by humans on Earth...you're some kind of luddite with virtually no contact with the outside world, and probably werent going to go see the new movie anyway...ergo, there shouldn't be any need to show an origin in any but the most perfunctory manner in the upcoming Superman movie or the inevitable eventual Batman reboot.  But they'll probably do it anyway.

 

What I'm talking about is the cinematic equivalent of the little text-box that used to be on the title pages of every superhero comic out there...that little one or two sentence paragraph that sums up the character/team as succinctly as possible.  It should be all we need for superhero movies concerning characters we've already seen going forward.

 

So if I'm gathering this all together correctly, what people are really looking for is a superhero movie that skips over how the hero got his powers and offers no insight into who he was beforehand.   It should instead focus entirely on the present, in which he should not demonstrate any doubt or regret at spending all his free time risking his life for the sake of anonymous, uncompensated philanthropy, nor should his love interest, with whom he has a 100% open and supportive relationship, in large part because she never has any contact with his heroics or the exclusively 2nd or 3rd tier rogues he fights, whose origins remain similarly unexplored, are not particularly bombastic or charismatic in their insanity, and with whom he has no personal issues beyond their generic villainy.   Also the extras should be SAG-certified, and at least 25 minutes of the runtime should be devoted to our fearless do-gooder mixing protein shakes.

 

Hope you're taking notes, Warner Bros.  Thar be gold in these hills.

Really?