Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
This summer’s Spider-Man: Homecoming has been one of the summer’s biggest and best films, a bright, youthful, adventurous avenue in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that manages to feel singular while also a part of something bigger. One of the most frequently commented-upon assets that the film boasts is a great villain in Michael Keaton’s Vulture, who heads a gang of weapons dealers that Peter Parker comes upon and tries to stop. Keaton’s great in the role, closing a loop that he began with Batman in 1989 and continued a few years ago with Birdman. But it’s the nature of the Vulture character as presented in Homecoming that speaks to a greater trend in present-day superhero filmmaking.
In the film, the Vulture is Adrian Toomes, a junk salvager working as an independent contractor for the city of New York. In the film’s opening moments, we’re taken back to midtown Manhattan and the immediate aftermath of the Battle of New York, a.k.a. the climax to 2012’s The Avengers. Our central band of superheroes won that battle, but between the alien hovercrafts and giant space snakes and Hulk-smashing that went on, there is wreckage and debris all around Grand Central Station. It’s a tragedy, but it’s also a crucial job for Toomes. So when a government official (played by Tony Award-winner Tyne Daly, of course) shows up and declares the entire disaster site now the purview of the newly-created Department of Damage Control, Toomes’ lucrative contract is now forfeit. Toomes is thwarted, but he manages to sneak away a few pieces of wrecked alien weaponry, and it’s that weaponry that begins him down his road to supervillainy. In other words, the Vulture’s criminal origin story is all about the mishandling of the collateral damage of superhero movies.
It’s an intriguingly meta notion, but it’s not an uncommon one when it comes to superhero movies in 2017. The bigger superhero movies have gotten, the more their creators have begun to reckon with the implications of large-scale destruction in their universes. It only makes sense. In a post-9/11 world, creators and audiences alike can’t keep from lingering on shots of wrecked skyscrapers and civilians fleeing from the kind of superpowered clash-of-titans battles that superheroes engage in on the regular.
In Man of Steel, the 9/11 parallels to Superman’s climactic battle with Zod were too apparent, and critics focused on the disaster-porn aspects of the film as cheap and unconcerned with the collateral damage in Metropolis, particularly since Superman has always been a character who protected the citizens of Metropolis. It’s a criticism that director Zack Snyder seemed to have taken to heart considering what happens in his next DC-universe film, Batman v. Superman. In that film, the entire animus between Bruce Wayne and our Kryptonian friend is that Bruce was a ground-level witness to the destruction in Metropolis and lost employees of his in a tower destroyed by collateral damage. For as muddled and messy and downright dumb as much of Batman v. Superman was, the central idea of an America grappling with how to deal with superheroes whose acts of heroism have destructive and deadly side effects was an intriguing one.
It’s also the very same central idea that appears in Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War, which also features a rift between superheroes — this time Captain America and Iron Man — over whether the collateral damage was too high a price to pay for unfettered superheroics. This all sprang from the events of yet another Marvel film, Age of Ultron, where the fictional city of Sokovia was levitated and then dropped from a high distance. Shit got fucked up. And this was all after that film’s villain, the artificial intelligence known as Ultron, openly mused as to whether the Avengers were making things better or worse with their actions.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe, while still wildly successful, often catches grief for having films that are simply puzzle pieces, slotted into a sequence, each one kicking the can of the master plot — that would be Thanos and his Infinity Stones, for the record — down the road. But I think that short-changes what I’ve found to be a rather intriguing throughline of depicting how superheroes would be received in a real world where politics and national borders and collateral damage all apply. We’ve lived through an entertainment era in the ’80s and ’90s defined by large-scale destruction, and it’s fascinating to watch the Avengers deconstruct themselves over questions of whether their heroics are justified. That these films manage to pose these questions without getting dour is just one virtue that doesn’t tend to get mentioned when critics grouse about superhero fatigue.
Of course, how Marvel’s eye towards collateral damage will play in a film like Avengers: Infinity War remains to be seen. It’s hard to imagine a film this packed to the gills with heroes trying to fell a giant space god who crushes planets will have much time to linger on its own wreckage. But even if it falls to the next Spider-Man movie to remind viewers that there’s a little guy on the ground in this big, scary cinematic universe, it’s been a welcome perspective so far.
