The Prescription to Save Ailing Superheroes (NY Times)

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It’s probably not a good sign for the superhero genre as a whole that the most talked-about comic-book movies of summer 2011 are the ones due out in 2012. But it’s not even August, and the conversation in superhero-nerdspace is all about leaked trailers for “The Dark Knight Rises” and “The Avengers,” both scheduled to be released next year, or about how Andrew Garfield, that kid from “The Social Network,” looks in his Spider-Man suit.

So as we approach total hype-cycle self-cannibalization, I feel that it’s my duty to stick up for this summer’s most underappreciated $143-million-grossing comic-book film: Matthew Vaughn’s “X-Men: First Class,” which hit theaters way back in June and was the No. 1 movie in America for exactly one week, until “Super 8” came out. Then it more or less disappeared. Which is a shame, because — at least for the first hour — it was more fun than any superhero movie in recent memory, not to mention any movie whose opening scenes take place at Auschwitz.

Set in the early ’60s, just before a certain missile crisis (which the movie nonsensically pins on mutant meddling), “First Class” plays like the invention of a sloshed Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce copywriter dreaming about James Bond. I mean this in a good way. Oxford! Geneva! Argentina! Vegas! Neon! Push-up bras! Ascots! Swoopy midcentury furniture! Sex! Teleportation! The music of Freddy (Boom-Boom) Cannon!

Vaughn eventually dusts off the familiar superhero-movie playbook — code names are chosen, sacrifices are made, be-yourself-ist maxims are reiterated and the fun drops off precipitously. But compared with other movies in its category, “First Class” still feels like a jailbreak.

The comics version of the Marvel Universe is one of the most amazing acts of sustained collective creativity in the history of American letters — one ridiculously vast cosmic soap opera about a huge cast of characters brawling and teaming up and falling in love and living and dying and living again, told in tens of thousands of saddle-stapled installments by scores of different artists and writers. Generations of readers have grown up taking it for granted that Spider-Man, Wolverine, the Fantastic Four and the Hulk all live in the same world and can wander in and out of one another’s story lines. (Marvel’s longtime nemesis, DC Comics, has an equally huge and complex universe, but Marvel got a head start — DC’s Superman and Batman, introduced in 1938 and 1939, respectively, didn’t actively team up until the ’50s.) It was immersive before “immersion” became an entertainment-industry buzzword, it was “interactive” back when interactivity meant writing reasonable letters to the editor about characters named Tigra and Man-Thing and it linked like-minded thinkers in an open-ended virtual fantasy world before there was a World of Warcraft or even a Web to play it on.

Plenty of comic-book movies have tried to reproduce the tone and imagery of superhero comics, but no one managed to translate the “shared universe” aspect of the comics-reading experience to the screen until 2008. At the very end of the first “Iron Man” movie, released in May, eye-patched superspy Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) turns up to tell Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark about something called the “Avengers Initiative.” “The Incredible Hulk” followed in June, with an appearance by Downey’s Stark. Subsequent Marvel movies have packed in even more elbow-your-seatmate cameos and secret-except-on-the-Internet teasers, fleshing out an interconnected Marvel movie-verse. The idea is that fans will follow the bouncing Easter eggs all the way to next summer’s “Avengers,” in which Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk and Captain America will join forces, with director and fan-deity Joss Whedon banging the action figures together. (“Avengers” will also be the first Marvel Studios movie distributed by the Walt Disney Company, which bought Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion in 2009, undoubtedly dreaming of a magic kingdom of synergistic crossover events.)

As a person who has spent more man-child-hours contemplating the mighty Marvel master narrative than I care to admit, I am, on paper, exactly the kind of moviegoer who’s supposed to flip out when (for example, and, um, spoiler alert) Jeremy Renner turns up in “Thor,” playing a sniper named Barton who uses a bow and arrow. But if I lost you with everything after the word “Thor” in that sentence — well, that’s part of the problem.

If you don’t know that Renner has been cast in “Avengers” as the superarcher Clint (Hawkeye) Barton, and that this scene is a little coming attraction for Hawkeye fans, his cameo is a weird speed bump of famousness that jolts you right out of the narrative. And if you do know why he’s in the movie, he’s still a disruptive presence, because suddenly you’re conscious that the movie is servicing the agenda of another as-yet-unmade movie, a movie that will maybe be better than the one you’re watching right now, and before long you’re no longer thinking about Thor’s arc from arrogant god-prince to humankind’s hammer-wielding buddy.

Just as politicians wink at evangelical-Christian voters by slipping coded religious language into their stump speeches, these movies deploy moments like that Renner cameo to subliminally thank the hard-core fans for their continuing support. That’s the biggest difference between today’s superhero movies and yesterday’s — they’re expected to please as many people as possible and make bajillions of opening-weekend dollars, but they’re also supposed to make a coterie of cultists feel listened to. Occasionally, they manage to do both those things well — Christopher Nolan’s “Batman Begins” and “Dark Knight” are probably the best examples.

More often than not, though, the obligation to turn a profit and satisfy a cult and tee up multiple sequels and spinoffs turns the work of directing these things into a middle-management gig. Directors are accountable not only to studio heads and producers but to an audience that has spent years or decades thinking about how the pluperfect screen version of Captain America or Thor or Man-Thing would look and act and punch and emote. It’s moviemaking by committee with a really big committee, another byproduct of our culture’s weird need for entertainment that behaves as if it’s been reading our blogs instead of trying to surprise us.

I’m not naïve enough to suggest here that superhero movies would become some kind of hotbed of auteurist innovation if Hollywood stopped trying to please the comic-book cognoscenti. I’m old enough to remember the days when studios assumed that A) only kids liked comic books, and B) those kids were idiots, a mind-set that brought us movies like Joel Schumacher’s contemptible “Batman Forever” and “Batman and Robin,” both of which looked like “Starlight Express” on crank.

But I’m also old enough to remember when Warner Brothers entrusted the 1989 “Batman” and its sequel to Tim Burton, and how bizarre that decision seemed at the time, and how Burton ended up making one deeply and fascinatingly Tim Burton-ish movie that happened to be about Batman (played by the equally unlikely Michael Keaton, still the only screen Bruce Wayne who seemed like a guy with a dark secret) and an even-more-Burtonian latex-fetish fever dream of a sequel that I’m not 100 percent sure Batman was even in.

And you don’t have to go that far back for examples of comic-book movies that exploded the genre — less than 10 years ago, we got a Freudian-monster-movie version of Hulk by Ang Lee and Bryan Singer’s “Superman Returns,” with a blatantly Christ-figureish Man of Steel. Each of those films is, shall we say, a problematic viewing experience, but they also represent honest attempts by their makers to impose a personal sensibility on superhero myths instead of just playing to an audience’s preconceptions. Lee and Singer had a take on their material; you could waterboard me and I still wouldn’t be able to tell you what Kenneth Branagh’s take on Thor was. And he’s Kenneth Branagh! You know a genre sandbox has become a prison when a guy who’s never been shy about punching up William Shakespeare’s work is afraid to leave fingerprints on Stan Lee’s.

As a fan of comics, I understand why fans want comic-book-movie directors to act like respectful stewards, but as a fan of movies, I want to see these movies directed by megalomaniac geniuses who’d rather fly to Cannes in coach than crowd-source one iota of their vision. Maybe then we’d get superhero movies that honor comics’ tradition of inventiveness, instead of D.O.A. brand-extensions like “Green Lantern,” a glorified video-game cut-scene of a movie in which Ryan Reynolds once again plays a jerk who learns to be less jerky.

I’m not suggesting that Marvel give “Thor 2” to somebody like Lars von Trier, much as I’d love to see what that guy would do with Norse mythology and a nine-figure budget. But since the whole reason Hollywood keeps making superhero movies is that they (theoretically) come presold to an audience that buys opening-weekend tickets no matter what, why not turn over these huge canvases to filmmakers who want to splatter them with similarly huge ideas?

If that’s too much of a risk, why not give them to craftsmen who understand that not every movie based on a superhero comic needs to operate in a genre called “superhero”? A few years ago, the film-geek Web site Chud.com posted a hoax review of a lost masterpiece from Clint Eastwood and Sam Peckinpah: a stripped-down and brutal take on Batman that abandoned every aspect of the mythos except the vigilantism and the car. Only the fact that this movie never existed keeps it from being my favorite superhero film of all time.

“Captain America: The First Avenger,” directed by Joe Johnston, is less revisionist; it exists primarily to get Chris Evans’s Captain out of the 1940s and into next summer. Yet when the film becomes a World War II guys- on-a-mission movie in which one of the grunts just happens to be a supersoldier in American-flag pajamas, it develops a pulpy life of its own.

Joss Whedon has spent his entire career bringing unparalleled emotional intelligence to bear on high-concept premises; if anyone can make “Avengers” into something other than a C.G.I. traffic jam, he can. Whedon used to write X-Men comics for Marvel — really good ones, in fact — so I’m assuming he’s seen “X-Men: First Class.” I hope he takes some inspiration from it, and the way it holds off the moment when the X-Men put on their X-Men suits long enough to play like a spy movie, a Nazi-hunting thriller and candy-dipped period-interior-design porn. “First Class” isn’t a cover-band version of a comic book. It’s a movie that does what movies do well, and in this genre, that’s downright heroic.