Madame Web Is Caught In a Time Loop, Back to When Superhero Movies Were Bad
The post Madame Web Is Caught In a Time Loop, Back to When Superhero Movies Were Bad appeared first on Consequence.
Madame Web, Sony’s latest effort to hold onto the rights to its Spider-verse of Marvel characters, is about a young woman (Dakota Johnson) whose secret spider-based powers cause her to get unstuck in time, eventually giving her the ability to see the future. The predicament of Cassandra Webb, it turns out, is actually a pretty good mirror for the critically panned movie; it’s not just bad, but it’s bad in very specific ways that reflect a totally different era of superhero filmmaking. Specifically, 2003 — the same time period in which the movie is set.
It honestly seems like we’ve all forgotten how bad superhero movies used to be, on a regular basis. Because let me tell you, children, of a time before the ascension of Kevin Feige. A time when major studios knew that nerdy adults, but more importantly kids and teenagers, would go to see movies featuring superheroes. A time when many of said major studios had no conceivable idea how to translate those stories into actually good cinema.
It was a dark time. Prior to Christopher Nolan changing the game with Batman Begins and especially The Dark Knight, even the better superhero movies had their goofy moments, as American cinema slowly developed a whole new language not just for crafting this genre, but understanding it. For every X2: X-Men United, you got a… well, X-Men: The Last Stand — hacky nonsense without any clear point-of-view… or point at all, really.
Madame Web happens to be making its theatrical premiere exactly 21 years after the 2003 Daredevil (not a shining moment for anyone involved except Colin Farrell), and since those days, the industry as a whole has learned so many lessons about creating layered characters from fantastical origins, about hitting the right balance between awestruck adventure and self-aware humor. Unfortunately, Madame Web exists in an alternate universe where none of that happened, taking the concept of it being a period piece to the most literal extent possible. Again, not only is this movie is set in the year 2003, it could have been made then.
Okay, some of the film’s flaws are pretty universal across space and time. Director S.J. Clarkson’s bonafides when it comes to superhero stories are legit — her moody, atmospheric direction was an essential component of Marvel’s Jessica Jones Season 1 — however, this plays like a work-for-hire job. Meanwhile, Dakota Johnson gives exactly the kind of performance you give when you’re a young actor in Hollywood and your agent tells you “You gotta do a superhero movie” and you resent the fact that you didn’t feel like you could say no.
To be fair, Johnson’s given a cardboard cutout of a character to work with: Cassie’s arc is that she doesn’t like… having to engage with people? Because she grew up in foster care? And then at the end, she’s engaging with people. It’s technically more character development than we got in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, but that really isn’t saying much.
Also, Johnson does not give the worst performance in Madame Web — that honor belongs to Tahar Rahim, a gripping actor in past projects like The Mauritanian and The Serpent, but the very definition of wooden and flat here. This is a problem throughout the film’s dialogue, but it especially stands out with him: Every line feels like it has five too many words in it. Often in scenes that are exposition on top of exposition in a scene all about exposition.
Too much exposition was a common problem in the 2003 era of superhero movies, because of writers who didn’t trust audiences to hold onto basic plot details — or because clumsy rewrites during production were changing the plot on the fly. It’s the idea of product over passion, hitting that release date to provide a four-quadrant moneymaker as opposed to creating an actually interesting film.
Being able to see the future should make things easier for Madame Web, in terms of visual storytelling, but the time loop sequences are not nearly compelling or clear enough to successfully sell the idea. That’s another 2003-ish touch — throwing a crap-ton of CGI at a story problem, and hoping the swirly effects will distract people from the amount of sense being made. In fairness to Madame Web, its digital effects are of a modern caliber. That doesn’t mean they’re used at all effectively.
Another fun 2003 thing echoed in Madame Web is that sometimes a Marvel movie back then would make subtle references to characters from the comics who couldn’t be mentioned by name, because the rights to them belonged to a different studio. Okay, maybe this one’s a stretch, but it’s the only possible explanation I have as to why this movie didn’t just full-on pull the trigger on revealing that Adam Scott’s Ben was the uncle of newborn Peter Parker. Like, of course it’s painfully obvious, the movie is set in the year 2003, and the dude’s name is Ben. But it’s still pretty much the only plot point that’s not drilled into our heads, for whatever reason.
It is of course unlikely that a movie exactly like Madame Web would have been made in 2003, not just because it focuses on a relatively obscure character, but because it stars a woman — when Catwoman debuted in the summer of 2004, it made headlines on the basis of its female protagonist alone.
Later, Catwoman made headlines for its widely critical reviews, because that too was a movie that failed to understand the appeal of the comics, that relied too hard on VFX and clumsy rewrites to carry the final product across the finish line. A time when “good enough” and a shrug was what most superhero movies aspired to. A time when not just the box office potential of the genre, but the creative and cultural potential, was still untapped.
The cliché is true: We are literally repeating the mistakes of the past, because the lessons just haven’t been learned.
You’d have thought Madame Web would have seen this coming.
Madame Web is in theaters now.
Madame Web Is Caught In a Time Loop, Back to When Superhero Movies Were Bad
Liz Shannon Miller
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