Heroes for All the Ages

The university town in upstate New York where I lived as a child had this “hippie” co-op store walking distance from my house. It contained the usual things you’d find in stores of the sort at the end of the sixties, colorful tie-dyed or embroidered clothing, incense, felt hats, posters, artsy smoking products, and the one thing that attracted us kids to the store almost daily during our lazy summer vacations: comic books. There were stacks of them available for our perusal. We’d stand there reading for extensive periods of time and would leave buying the most recent releases. I would get my Betty and Veronica reading done at the store but, having an older brother, would end up buying and reading a lot more of the Marvel and DC Comics superheroes magazines.

I grew to love these comics; they were nothing short of thrilling. My favorite superheroes were Spiderman, Iron Man and Batman. The first two had their wry humor in common; Iron Man and Batman shared that their alter egos, Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne, were both very rich, handsome and  flirtatious men, but with a passion for righteousness; all three were science and innovation-driven. Of course,   I also secretly preferred the comics where Pepper Potts, Vicky Vale and Mary Jane Watson showed up on more pages and story lines.

We had to be patient with the mediocre TV shows and cartoon versions of our heroes back then, since they fell so short of how those heroes read and how we’d imagine them if they came to life. I didn’t, in fact, feel that I was really watching one of the comics I had read in my childhood on a screen until I saw Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight in 2008.

A lot of things have happened to the men of iron and steel since those childhood comic book days. Marvel and DC Comics now belong to mega billion dollar corporations Walt Disney Company and Warner Bros. Entertainment. Scientific and technical achievement in movies, those incredible special effects, photography and editing, have brought the impossible to the screen.  And, a little more recently, the directors that make these films, such as Guillermo Del Toro or Christopher Nolan, as well as the actors that participate in them, are first-rate professionals who don’t seem to mind donning the cape and mask.

No superhero movie has won a best film award to date, thought I contend that The Dark Knight could have, but the actors that have now participated in superhero movies, while mostly male,  include an incredible cadre of talented, award-winning ones: Michael Caine, Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman , Russell Crowe, Anthony Hopkins, Mickey Rourke, Ben Kingsley, Gary Oldman, Christian Bale, Morgan Freeman,  Philp Seymor Hoffman,  Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Downey Jr., Guy Pierce, Heath Ledger, Terrence Howard, Don Cheadle, George Clooney, Hugh Jackman, Jeff Bridges, John Hurt,  and more. It wouldn’t be all that surprising if we were to see Daniel Day-Lewis or Denzel Washington in these movies one day soon.

Mickey Rourke, Ben Kingsley, Gary Oldman

The balancing act that superhero movies face these days is no small feat. They are trying to be true to the feel of the comics from which they derive their characters, while updating to our times, they have to be serious enough for the boomer-adults-former-comic readers that come to see them, while being super-fast paced and explosion-filled enough to interest the milleniums.

More and more are succeeding these days. Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises are probably among the best (and The Dark Knight the best of the three). Del Toro’s Hellboy has managed the detective noir feel of the comic and has done an excellent job in character development; Ron Perlman is great at capturing the suave yet brutish personality of this hero. The Iron Man Trilogy, while increasingly full of the fireworks and machines  more typical of the Transformer series, in particular towards the end of the Iron Man 3 movie,  does continue to include interesting twists and turns, and keeps Tony Stark from taking himself too seriously.  In the Iron Man 3 movie, recently released, the greatest mistake may have been to break from the previous two Iron Man movies and follow the plot line introduced by The Avengers movie, where Iron Man was included, with its space portals and alien attack.  It makes it harder to reconcile those space portals and aliens with the too close to reality characters like the Mandarin, with his scraggly beard and terrorist bomb attacks. Even in comic books these heroes weren’t all that great when they were thrown together.

Christian Bale and Heath Ledger

Superhero movies have done a good job catching up with the comics on which they are based. It is now as thrilling to see them in 3D as it was to read them on paper when we were kids and we let our imagination race along side them. These movies are not meant to be perfect, though they can certainly be artistic, and we can now admire the acting, photography, make-up, directing and special effects they contain,  while rooting for our favorite hero to defeat evil and wishing, maybe now more than ever,  that these heroes were real.