Ranking of Superhero Movies
Several friends have requested that I codify and post the All-time Superhero Movie rankings that I’ve been talking about for some time and been referring to knowingly as if I had already put it together and they should know all about it already. But I couldn’t possibly rank all the Superhero movies without first ranking the Superheroes themselves. So first, top ten Superheroes:
- Fantastic Four: I know, you hated the movie. I don’t care about the movies. This is a ranking of the characters themselves, their backstory, their suit, their artist and inker. And I don’t care who would beat who in a fight, morons! If I accomplish anything with this modest list, I hope it will be to introduce a higher level of critical rigor in comic book discussion. Don’t message me with your sub-mental fight scenarios, I don’t care! Why are the Fantastic Four the best? It’s complicated. A complicated vortex of comic book reasons. I loved the Thing, as he reminded me of the Hulk, but tortured in a different way; Banner could be a normal human sometimes, go on dates and eat dinner. The Thing was an outcast, a monster, always, with an intelligent man inside. The Four’s leader, Reed Richards, had my all-time favorite superpower (see Plastic man below), and could invent super science weapons and vehicles, so I forgave him for the weird grey sideburns that made him look too old for his wife the Invisible Woman. I didn’t understand the Invisible Woman and ten year old me found her uninteresting as a character, except for being a girl that the guys in the group would try to impress, until the memorable issue where I saw an image of her riding one of her magic force fields like a hovercraft or something and I thought; ‘Wait, she’s been able to move them all this time?’ and it seemed to me that it - ‘it’ being every fight the Four had ever fought with the Invisible Woman in attendance - was all a lie because she could move impenetrable force fields around at will and could crush anyone like a bug instead of fooling around Invisibly and occasionally throwing up a boring, momentary wall when Johnny got himself in trouble. Was she just being modest? How could you possibly justify this person just standing around in her blue outfit when she could immediately win every fight? I didn’t much care for the Human Torch, speaking of Johnny. I found his personality trying and his superpower bothered me as terribly dangerous. What if he burned someone? What if he burned one of his friends? There were very few villains, even, that I felt deserved to actually be set on fire. Why have a hero flying around even threatening people with that? Especially since his sister could easily smash anyone with her magic force fields. My review isn’t sounding particularly rave about the FF so far, but that’s because I saved the best one for last; that’s right, Doctor Doom! The greatest marvel character ever! The villain who regularly goes into hell and fights the devil for his mother’s soul! The inspiration for Darth Vader - you heard me! A wizard and inventor of robots. The King of his own country. I could go on and on. The miraculous Fifth member of the Fantastic Four, archenemy of the Four, and - wait for it - no actual superpowers, besides being a king and super rich and knowing magic. The one Fantastic Four movie I saw (it was enough) completely screwed up Doctor Doom. I still can’t get over it, it’s as if they wanted to fail. Anyway, besides the best villain ever, there’s the Fantastic Four’s origin story (second best origin story ever, see 6 million dollar man below) Best comic book ever. Even better than -
- The Incredible Hulk: My second favorite comic book as a child, actually the first comic book I read, until I began to find the Hulk’s lack of intelligence a little tiresome. As an intelligent kid, or at least a kid who valued intelligence enough to enjoy thinking of himself as intelligent, I didn’t have the soft spot for stupid people that a lot of Americans have, so I began dislike the way Hulk talked, even while I deeply emphasized with Banner because he was smart and tortured. And of course as a smart guy he got picked on by dumb guys, and for a little boy the whole point of the Hulk comic book (and later the TV show) was the building anticipation, the delicious anticipation, that you felt when you came to a part where someone started to pick on Banner and you knew, you could feel the Hulk clock ticking and you knew he was going to explode and grow to giant size and shred his shirt and start pounding the crap out of the guy and all the surrounding buildings, and as a little kid, this anticipation constituted one of the 3 prime pleasures, along with eating sugar and scratching bug bites. The Hulk had an appropriately awesome origin story too, second in grandeur and scope to the Fantastic Four’s.
- Spider-Man: I read Spider-Man after the Fantastic Four, after the Four began their late Beetles phase and Sue Storm began to trouble me (see above). I appreciated Spider-Man as a loner, a smart kid who got picked on, and as a loser with an unrequited love. Later, of course, the writers tossed out everything good about Peter Parker in order to write a teen soap opera about him and a pinup. Compared to the FF, Hulk, $6MM, and Moses, Spider-Man’s Origin story sucks. As a matter of fact, it’s the worst origin story, compared to the quality of the comic book in general, ever. The radioactive spider idea is just plain lame, and the subsequent “Uncle Ben” episode is just ripped off from Batman. And Batman’s origin story sucks too! Another sad example of the basic truth, that a person might be a kind, loving, mentally healthy human being, and still write crap. But immediately after that origin unpleasantness, Spider-Man was great fun. His superpowers were minimal and confused, especially the wall crawling with gloves and socks on, a major disconnect for me - how the hell did that work again? Did they eventually figure out some kind of explanation? It was supposed to be a physical ability, and he would often take off his shoes and socks to climb walls, but then what’s with the gloves and socks? And why couldn’t he just invent wall- climbing gloves and socks? After all, he invented his best superpower - the webshooters. Probably the best superhero weapon, as a plot device, in any comic book. Think about it, he’s not actually hurting anyone, a big no no in the old comic books, just trussing them up, and he can use them at a distance, and he gets to swing around on the webs like jungle vines, looking awesome, unlike Superman with his ridiculous mid-air synchronized swimming poses. I liked almost all the villains in Spider-Man too, especially Doctor Octopus, who ranks right after Doctor Doom on my all-time villains list, and Green Goblin too. Actually all three of those guys wore green, which is weird.
- Plastic man: My all-time favorite superpower, and one of my personal favorite “small-scale” origin stories, since Plastic man began as a petty thief. And the old Plastic man comics are funny.
- 6 million dollar man: Best origin story ever
- Ant man and the Wasp
- 1969 Batman and LEGO Batman
- King Kong
- Moses: Specifically from the Ten Commandments as depicted by Charlton Heston
- Gandalf
I’m thinking that in order to fully develop and explore numbers 4 - 10, we’ll have to stop and continue the discussion in another post. I have a history of promising to cover something in a post and then not ever getting back to it, but this won’t happen here because I don’t really have anything else to cover or discuss so I should have all the time in the world for this analysis. So next week; 4 through 10
No comments:
Post a Comment