Marc N. Kleinhenz how Marvel has made character king and plot irrelevant…
The Marvel Cinematic Universe – which, as of right now, consists of 11 movies, three television series, and five short films – is a rather big place, with an extraordinary number of components that all have to align to one degree or another.
Needless to say, the sheer amount of revision that happens with each and every production is an almost endless affair, which, in turn, affects all subsequent projects, domino-style. A single but highly illuminating case in point: when the studio first unveiled its Phase III slate of films last October, it didn’t originally include a solo Spider-Man entry, even though it was extremely close to finalizing the deal with Sony to bring the character back into its creative fold. Instead, the back-up plan – featuring “only” nine pictures from May 2016 to May 2019 – was unrolled, with the real lineup having to wait until February.
(Okay, one more example: director Joss Whedon originally included a cameo appearance of Captain Marvel, who’s due to get her very own movie outing in November 2018, in his original drafts of the Avengers: Age of Ultron script. It wasn’t until the post-production process that Marvel opted to remove the character and replace her with Scarlet Witch, who it felt would be a more natural or otherwise organic fit for the role.)
The guiding principle through all these alterations, intriguingly enough, can be said to be story, but, even more fundamentally, it’s character. It’s an emphasis that not only explains the still-fledgling studio’s almost unprecedented success, but one that has been clearly on display since its first film: the Tony Stark at the very beginning of 2008’s Iron Man is very different from the Tony Stark at the end. And by the time the character makes it to Iron Man 3’s denouement five years later, in which he’s perfectly willing to give up his superhero fame for love, he’s an altogether separate person.
It’s not a minor point to consider. The fact that the Marvel pictures’ villains are almost universally boring, two-dimensional caricatures makes perfect sense once seen in this context; they’re not characters, they’re placeholders, set dressing for helping the various protagonists chug along on their path to greater development and interrelationships. It’s no mistake that very little in the way of plot points or other types of narrative luggage got carried into last month’s Age of Ultron – it’s Thor’s newfound dedication to Earth (and, of course, to Jane Foster) that matters, or Steve Rogers’s decision to forego S.H.I.E.L.D.’s duplicitous ways to focus on the moral clarity that personal relationships provide.
Which brings us to Captain America: Civil War.
The argument has recently – and eloquently – been made that a combination of commercialism and contract negotiations with Iron Man star Robert Downey, Jr. sidetracked the third film from its originally intended plot, robbing the presumed trilogy (Chris Evans’s contract with Marvel Studios will have only one last Avengers appearance once Civil War is complete) from a great deal of closure, at the least, and narrative cohesion, at the most.
Regardless of whether Captain America 3 was originally intended to tackle the civil war storyline from the comic books or not – in a recent interview, Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige stated that a version of the titular war would still have been told even without Downey, Jr.’s participation, perhaps suggesting a long-gestating development period – the overall focus on plot is a misleading one, if only because Marvel itself views such trifles as being almost entirely irrelevant to the main storytelling task at hand. Whether highlighting the Winter Soldier or Iron Man, whether introducing Black Panther or Spider-Man (or, more than likely, both), the film will have as its primary concern the continued evolution of Cap himself, moving his arc forward while, one can assume, bringing it to something of a full circle, should the last Iron Man be any indication.
And this, of course, is the real brunt of the trilogy; it’s less the specific relationship that Steve Rogers forges with Bucky Barnes that matters and more his relationship with the greater world around him. In this way, such interpersonal dynamics are mere manifestations of the time period he finds himself in – the straightforward, traditional friendship with Bucky befitting the relative moral clarity of the 1940s, and the convoluted, schizophrenic, ambiguous relationship with the Winter Soldier fully embodying the post-modern, War-on-Terror world. This is how the first two films could be so continuous and, indeed, thematically fulfilling despite their 70-year gap in chronology, and how expanding this relationship to the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe may provide the ultimate degree of finality for Cap.
(Additionally, given the bevy of factoids we have on the Winter Soldier – his prominence in the second Captain America, his being name-dropped in the new Avengers, the remainder of six films on actor Sebastian Stan’s contract – it would stand to reason that Marvel will still devote a sizable amount of screen-time to the character, providing a sense of closure while simultaneously beginning his next phase of involvement in the meta-franchise.)
Is Rogers battling Bucky or Stark in Civil War? Is it Baron Zemo or Adria who will be the nemesis in Doctor Strange? Which Avenger will have a split-second cameo in Spider-Man? All these questions are, ultimately, moot, leaving just one final one in their wake:
How did Marvel succeed in making character king and plot irrelevant?
Marc N. Kleinhenz
https://youtu.be/yIuEu1m0p2M?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng
