I saw the summer blockbuster Hancock recently. The core premise was interesting – a superhero who is also an incredibly unpleasant person. I won’t give anything away, but overall it was fun.
What struck me is that super-heroes congregate in places like LA and New York – but these are perhaps not the places that need their services the most. A neat realistic superhero movie might send our hero to Darfur or some other long-suffering locale. It would not necessarily have a happy ending. The janjaweed wouldn’t last long against a superhero (or a Western military), but many of the underlying problems would remain. The superhero could perhaps engineer a canal to improve the economic situation. But soon would become mired in an incredibly complex situation with endless insoluble problems. Imagine a super-hero forced to fly back and forth to ferry food for example or get spare parts for machines that break down.
The point would not be to advocate for an issue, but to demonstrate the complexity of most problems and what taking them on will truly entail. (Sort of the lessons we are learning in Iraq…)
If any producers are interested – call my people…
I’m not holding my breath.
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Actually, Iron Man had just such a sequence where he takes down a den of terrorists…twice.
In the comics those acts are done, The avengers, X-men, Civil War, JLA/JL etc. Even the cartoons can get it right, but movies are naturally a confined and restricted representational space. Simpler Stories “archetypal” make more money -Hey but i hold out hope for the avengers movie
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