C.J. Cherryh on comic book movies

From Facebook:

<<World's tired-est, weariest comic book plot: 1) set up a '' misunderstanding in the team over some fairly trivial issue. Then 2) we let superpower (a) duke it out with superpower (b) and break up a lot of furniture or civic property, which never seems to cost anyone money. Then a bad guy shows up... More SFX. A few platitudes. We all pull together. Right.

When this turns up as the be-all and end-all of a tv offering or a movie, I ask myself...why am I watching this? It's not >>

Cherryh once wrote a Superman novel, LOIS AND CLARK (no relation to the later TV series of the same name).

--Brantley

In fairness this is more marvel plots.

Read a lot of classic comics from the 70-80s and it is amazing how many of the stories are two super beings fighting-Hulk vs Sub Mariner, Captian america vs spiderman, etc-sometimes with them teaming up at the end to take on villian, as often times not. You also get into the werid "Who doesn't like who". For example until about 10 years ago i want to say the Xmen where friendlish neutral to Doctor Doom. Marvel Comics: for something that prides it self on one universe for 70 years, doesn't really make a lot of sence.

Really as a plot this has only been done in one movie- The Avengers-and that was a group(okay arguably X Men origins: Wolverine but lets not talk about that).

What you get in a lot of superhero movies is superhero shows up in act 1 fights a threat he thinks is the bad guy in act 2, in act 3 it turns out the bad guy is someone else. This is getting tired- you see it in things like the batman movies, green lantner iron man movies-relaly its a device to figure out why the hero and the villian can't fight until the last 10 minutes.

However i don't think this is necessairly bad. All superhero movies tend to be stories about power. What are you going to do with it, and who has it. Movies that do it well- say the iron man movies with the legitimately intresting Tony Stark Character, and the Dark Knight with its legtimeatly intresting joker character- find ways of taking comics and making them breath in real life. Movies that do it badly-like say the Green Lantern movie, don't.

Now you can say explorations of power are juvenile-and that not wrong- but there are intresting things to do with that. There can be fatigue there have been 50 in the last 10 or so years -but as been said supheros are modern version of western movies-and they made 1000s of them. Some of which are terrible.Some of which are quite good. I am not sure we are going to get the supehrero version of Micheal Mann, or High Noon-but we might.