“The trouble with movies
as a business is that it's an art, and the trouble with movies as art is that
it's a business.” Wise words from Charlton Heston and for a long time a way of
thinking which has held true. Isn’t this why actors from Redford to Clooney
have operated with the ‘one for them, one for me’ philosophy? To balance their
own artistic wants with the financial greed of the studio? Sure you can have Oceans 12 (2004), but I want you to fund
Syriana (2005) … Everyone’s happy.
Audiences can see fun, but forgettable films, yet there is also a space for
smaller, more intelligent films to find a cinema audience.
Well, the issue Heston
spoke about seems to have been solved by Marvel. Not in the sense that they
have managed to create films to rival Bergman or Bresson (as Ethan Hawke recently
pointed out), but that they’ve changed the game and turned mainstream film into
a business. Art has simply been removed from the equation.
It is not that many of
the Marvel films are bad films; they are well constructed pieces of work. But it
is their sheer number and repetitive formula that reveals their business mind
and starkly highlights their lack of an artistic one. There is no risk. It is
all reward. And this is not what art is about, it is not what film is about. If
no one took risks, then the world of cinema as we know it, from day one in
1895, would looking nothing like it does today.
Marvel are not shy about
this. They hold conferences that mirror AGMs, where their output for the next
decade is laid out for audiences investors to see. Where is the
surprise? The areas for audiences to turn for surprising, risk taking mainstream
cinema are becoming smaller and smaller. It would appear that audiences have
bought into a formula, which is safe and predictable and that is now the
majority.
To watch Avengers Infinity War is to find these
issues squarely in your face. As a narrative, it plays out like the first half
of most Marvel films, just on a much bigger scale. But, it’s not the size of
your CGI budget, it’s what you do with it and here they do little that is
creative. Yes, the CGI is impressive, but its execution is lazy. The USP of Infinity War – that your heroes will die
– is handled with such crassness that even the ardent Marvel fan must, has to
be, aware that they are being used purely for financial gain. To ‘kill’ off a
handful of characters for who sequels have already been announced at the yearly
AGM is disrespectful of an audience in the extreme.
This is not to say that
summer blockbusters have not always been about money. Of course, when Jaws (1975) was released and the phenomenon
born, ways to cash-in were instantly hatched. Yet Jaws, outside of its sequels, is inventive, risky cinema, whereas Iron Man (2008), the first of the Marvel
MCU canon, reveals the same formula we are witnessing 10 years later. Star Wars (1977 -) is only some
exception and there is an argument to be made that Marvel for today’s youth
will be what Star Wars is to the
youth of the 1980s. But the level of formulaic, risk free storytelling
(narrative as an investment opportunity) is new and it is depressing. As is the
disregard for audiences. Star Wars,
as a franchise (even since being acquired by Disney, Marvel’s home) still
maintains more of a sense of risk than any Marvel film. We’re never going to
see a cliff-hanger like that which closes The
Empire Strikes Back (1980), and have to wait for three years, but The Last Jedi (2017) showed their
willingness to take risks with story and character. A risk not taken in the
Marvel world.
That Infinity War will
appear on most lists for best films of the year in mainstream film publications,
where films such as First Reformed, Soldado or BlackkKlansman will be absent or lower down the list is a real
shame.
Just because it isn’t
broke (financially), doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be fixed (artistically).
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