Around the time Joaquin Phoenix dabbed red, white and blue clown makeup over his face in the movie “Joker” — the film’s attempt, perhaps, to say something bleakly profound about America’s brokenness — we reached the peak of a metamorphosis that superhero movies had been undergoing for a while. They had luxuriated in moral ambiguity. They had, like the comics they drew from, reimagined iconic characters as battered, disillusioned misanthropes. Zack Snyder was given three films to explore his bruising, truculent take on the DC Comics canon, turning even Superman into a frigid, unapproachable figure. Marvel, which had tried moving away from the “gritty” and “dark” by leaning into quippy, rat-a-tat dialogue, still found one of its most successful characters in Deadpool, a mordant mutant with a barren conscience and an ear for nihilistic internet-speak. Then came “Joker”: a film about a destitute loner who receives psychiatric care from an icily bureaucratic state and eventually evolves into a kind of homicidal, populist incel, all presented as though viewers secretly craved the explosion of antisocial violence he would carry out.
Well, that whole multibillion-dollar era is supposedly over. This summer’s main superhero blockbusters, “Superman” and “The Fantastic Four: First Steps,” spent months signaling that they would depart from cynicism and claustrophobic despair. The time had come to embrace hopefulness and vitality.
In “Fantastic Four,” that shift is accomplished via rose-tinted nostalgia — not just for the retro-futuristic world of old comics but for a time of greater cultural consensus. The heroes in this movie are beloved by their city, cherished and cheered in an impossibly earnest tableau. Dissent, trolling and cultural jaundice remain undiscovered languages. The only existential threat comes from intergalactic “space gods.” The married heroes Reed Richards and Sue Storm are pointedly different from the wounded, wisecracking protagonists of the past decade: They come off more like sober, sensible graduate students, dutifully carrying out their heroic responsibilities without the intrusion of sarcasm or personal demons.
This is, in many ways, exactly the kind of reverential approach that superhero films spent much of this century rejecting. You can almost see the thought balloons hovering above the filmmakers: Were the old-timey crusaders ever so wrong? These are superheroes, not the tortured leads of A24 dramas; was it wrong to make them aspirational, idealized? In the original “Superman” comics, which debuted a year before Germany invaded Poland and set off World War II, the eponymous hero stood for courage, righteousness and a kind of moral rectitude that didn’t wilt simply because circumstances made it unfavorable. Early superheroes risked their own welfare for a greater good that, at times, only they could see. They earned a moral authority that ennobled them and evoked enduring ideas about what constitutes an admirable person — a hero.
But there is a difference between idealizing your heroes and romanticizing the entire world they inhabit. This distinction may have been lost on the creators behind “Fantastic Four.” In the film’s genial vision of 1960s Manhattan, children and adults alike look on our champions with the old-fashioned veneration Americans once felt toward Cold War-era astronauts (the heroes’ chosen profession, incidentally, before they were transformed by cosmic radiation). Richards and company live in a quaint simulacrum of America that is, from our vantage point in 2025, nearly as fantastical as the purple space titan they fight.
He confronts a complex, hostile world, and — rather than brooding, raging or quipping — he does the right thing.
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The post Wholesome, Noble Superheroes Are Back. (A Wholesome, Noble World Is Not.) appeared first on New York Times.
