Magic Marmalade 21st Nov 2023
| | Rated 10/10The best superhero movie ever made.
...Bar none.
This is how you do it, and this is what superheroes and their movies are supposed to do for their audience:
Evoke the basic feeling of the truly wonderous, within the everyday, in such a way as to allow the viewer to feel that such things are within the bounds of the possible, and so inspire them at the deepest level.
Mmmmmm... Night's genius in this regard is to realise that in order to do this, you've got to pull this kind of movie, and the characters down, out of the clouds, allow the physics of it to be close enough to reality that the audience is willing to stetch their suspension of disbelief out to meet you half way. And then, strip away the fantastical, convoluted, plots that plague more recent cinema superheroes, as well as the primary coloured spandex costumery...
Show us the man...
...The man burdened with extraordinary circumstance, and how he struggles to make sense of it, and already you have the essence of the movie - the drama, the plot, and the wider story taken care of, in a way that allows the audience to sympathise, empathise, even with his exceptional abilities.
Being so lean, and focused, and with the story, along with cinematography, score, performances and direction conspiring to make the everyday grandiose, epic, and significant, while at the same time being the most intimate, personal portrayal, we can believe in the dash of the extraordinary in that everyday as we really want to, until the finale, where we are given that moment of relief of the tension created in the drama in a thoroughly transcendent, euphoric release.
Because it is this very feeling that you evoke in the audience is why they go to the cinema to see superhero movies, and when they work, the feeling that the film-makers tap into successfully, and when they don't, because they have gotten too far away from it, and concentrated too much on the superficial - the dazzle, the CGI, the excessive plotting and knots they tie themselves in to desperately try to sell the ever more unbelievable physics, and fantastical nature of what is shown.
Stripped down to bare wood, this is the purest portrayal of a superhero you will ever see, an ordinary man who is struggling to reconcile himself to the fact he might not be so ordinary after all.
And it's got all the feeling.
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