The Whole Marvel ‘Avengers’ Franchise Is Deeply Indebted To M Night Shyamalan. Yes, Really.
One of the world's biggest franchises owes a lot of its success to one of cinema's worst directors.
Get out your wallets, gang, Avengers: Age Of Ultron has arrived. According to the BBC, it’ll be no wonder if your ticket price sees the film Hulk-smash its way through the revenue records set by its predecessor, cementing Marvel Studios as top dogs in Hollywood business. Director Joss Whedon and production team knew all too well the expectations set for Age Of Ultron and they’ve more than delivered the goods. Without the need to lobby you into buying into any of its characters, they’ve pulled out all the stops and created a CGI-frenzied romp.
In fact, Marvel Studios executive Victoria Alonso once claimed Age Of Ultron would contain about 3,000 VFX shots, more than any other Marvel film to date. By some feat of creativity (or, more probably, several truckloads of cash in budget), they’ve crafted a mammoth compendium of everything comic books. It’s overflowing with bigger battle sequences counterbalanced by wittier exchanges, more complex inter-super-personal relationships and bigger stakes. Quite simply, the new Avengers is more. A hell of a lot more.
The current climate in entertainment not only facilitates more of everything, it requires it. Audiences want more spectacle at the movies, more character, more effects – more everything. Most importantly, they actually want more Marvel. Lots of it. So says Robert Downey Jr. in a piece by Mark Savage for the BBC: “Right now, it seems like its limitless, which should be disconcerting, it’s become bigger than the people or the filmmakers. There is a calling for this type of entertainment right now.” Age Of Ultron and the soon-to-be-released Ant-Man will mark the end of Marvel’s eerily-named “Phase Two,” and the studio is already in the process of releasing 9 more films in the coming years.
The culmination is a two-part, presumably multi-billion dollar extravaganza titled Avengers: Infinity War, to be released in 2019. According to Savage, Marvel are predicted to net more than the wildly successful Harry Potter, Star Wars and Lord Of The Rings franchises at the box-office. Clearly, we live in the Golden Age of comic book films, the pinnacle of public interest in superheroes. Capitalising on this newfound time of plenty, Marvel are playing hard and fast, churning out as much content as possible, hoping our attention spans won’t wane anytime soon.
Marvel’s Dark Age
It wasn’t so long ago that our attention spans did wane, a time when Marvel wasn’t the box-office powerhouse it is today. In fact, it was only 15 years ago that “Marvel had just escaped bankruptcy,” says Savage. Despite enjoying huge sales in the early ‘90s, Marvel soon faced an exodus of writers and artists “amid the pressure to pump out more titles,” says Adam Bryant in a piece for the New York Times. Marvel eventually filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1997, a painful move brought on by plummeting sales and a whole mess of corporate stonewalling and skulduggery. This was a time long before X-Men or Spider-Man made their big screen debuts and rescued the flailing franchise.
In Hollywood, superhero movies in general were proving to be disasters in and of themselves. The productions were so micro-managed and overblown, the films ended up being soul-suckingly terrible. We simply didn’t want any more of them. Perhaps the lowest point in this dark period was the premiere of Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin, a movie so derided, it single-handedly dealt a devastating blow to the public interest in any future comic movie endeavours. The general reaction to the phrase “based on a comic” around this time was a reflexive cringe, a Pavlovian response instilled in us by those unforgettable Bat-nipples.
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Never Fear, Shyamalan’s Here!
Eventually succumbing to the cries of critics everywhere, studios would eventually become interested in a more grounded approach to the superhero. Long before Christopher Nolan would jump-start the scene with Batman Begins, M Night Shyamalan took a shot at reviving public interest. Armed with his signature dour aesthetic and surprise twist endings, the writer/director found himself creating a superhero film that would adopt a tone most comic book movies would emulate in the years that followed. Rather than revelling in high-concept mayhem, he utilised a grounded approach and a focus on the everyday reality of being Super. Basically, he domesticated the classic comic exploration of good and evil. The end result is 2000’s Unbreakable: 100 minutes of an enfeebled Samuel L. Jackson verbally harassing a hesitant Bruce Willis into accepting his superhuman status.
The emphasis is on connecting the viewer to the human qualities of a superhero, nothing more. It’s a potent reminder of just how far superheroes have come in 15 years. That’s not to say Unbreakable has had much or any effect on current cinema, but it’s particularly telling that comic movies don’t need to ground superheroes in realism to connect with an audience anymore. We’re more than willing to invest in a franchise in which a Norse god, a gamma-irradiated scientist, a mad billionaire, a genetically-modified soldier and a couple of super spies would band together to fight a sentient android hell-bent on mass extinction.
In retrospect, you can see the framework of Unbreakable under Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, in the emphasis on character development, the muted colours and the cynical approach to the concept of superpowers. Where Marvel movies tend to layer simple shades of good and evil onto its myriad characters while maintaining a light and bubbly tone, Shyamalan took the entire concept seriously. Unbreakable’s superhero arc is one of self-doubt and realisation, a double-edged blade of understanding his superhuman status while wholeheartedly fearing it.
Willis’ David Dunn doesn’t simply accept his powers on a whim. He first has to conquer his inner demons and embrace the fact that he doesn’t belong to the world around him. It’s only Elijah Price’s (Jackson) continual insistence of the existence of superheroes that breaks Dunn down. While Shyamalan might have used this dynamic to probe the nature of self-acceptance and faith, he cleverly intertwined it with an eloquent closing statement in the case for the comic book film. Standing on the edge of comic movie desolation, Unbreakable was his reminder that perhaps society shouldn’t give up on superheroes just yet.
Shyamalan turned out to be quite the prophet. Unbreakable is a relic from an unrecognisable time. It exhibits the struggle superhero movies faced in the late ‘90s; locked into the constant need to establish and fastidiously maintain that coveted suspension of disbelief. It’s mind-boggling to think that, some 15 years later, our disbelief is in almost perpetual suspension, even before we settle down in the cinema. Hell, we’re engaging with and buying into the fantasy elements of a comic book universe as soon as we see “Marvel Studios” in the trailer. Not once did we really care why the raccoon was able to speak or fire a weapon in Guardians of the Galaxy, nor how the Bruce Banner/Hulk relationship actually works.
We’re now far beyond Elijah Price’s brave new world of superhero acceptance. The concept of “super” has become so mundane that the once extraordinary “superhero” doesn’t hold the same weight it did only 15 years ago. Sadly enough, the same can be said for the phrase, “From the writer/director of The Sixth Sense.”
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Sean is a freelance writer based in Melbourne with an unhealthy addiction to movies. He tweets irregularly from @ssebast90.