So it turns out that The Amazing Spider-Man 2 isn’t the best superhero movie ever. That’s too bad, but at the very least we’ve finally reached a point where the genre is so legitimate – and has so many legitimately great entries – that we can finally discuss which one actually is “the best superhero movie ever” without everyone resorting to the same one or two candidates.
So here it is, this week’s installment of The Best Movie Ever, in which we dared CraveOnline‘s film critics to pick once and for all which movie has earned the distinction. Read the picks from William Bibbiani, Witney Seibold, Fred Topel and Brian Formo and then vote for your favorites at the bottom of the page.
Witney Seibold:
Not The Avengers. Not Spider-Man. Not Kick-Ass. Not Iron Man, Catwoman, Batman Returns, Punisher: War Zone, Supergirl, The Dark Knight, Antboy, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and certainly not anything with a Thor in it. Mystery Men comes awfully close, but there is, in actuality, one clear and obvious answer to this question: the best superhero movie of all time is, far and away, Richard Donner’s 1978 feature film Superman. Superman is the Superman of movies.
Superman, as a character, transcends other superheroes. He has the longest history of any comic book mainstay, outstripping relatively dated peers like The Shadow and The Phantom. Superman has appeared on radio, TV, animation, and in countless comic books. He is the archetype. A square-jawed, smiling strong man. So scrupulously moral, he can only be held as an ideal to which we mere mortals can aspire. His cultural presence in America has become so deeply ingrained in our collective unconscious, that we all kind of know and love him at birth. Other heroes – even well known ones – are minor characters in comparison. Batman is not Superman’s equal. Superman is everyone’s better. This is true today, and it was true in 1978. So when making a feature film about Superman, it seems wise to take a large, epic, almost poetic approach to him. Make the music enormous. Make the special effects unique and amazing. And depict Superman as the most wonderful human being (er, Kryptonian) on Earth. Polite, capable, and yet ineffably powerful. Yet kind. Appealing. Almost childlike in his determined ethical innocence.
And this is what Donner’s film did. It turned a lingering childhood fantasy into something palpable and alive. Some superhero films are great entertainments (about 60% of the Marvel films). Some are even mildly poignant (Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies). But Superman is, as far as I’m concerned, the only truly great movie of the genre.
William Bibbiani:
I love superheroes. I learned to read on superhero comics, a world of heightened wonder where men and women were capable of amazing feats and overcoming remarkable odds. Over the past decade, a number of outstanding films have managed to transform the superhero genre, in the cinemas at least, into a socially acceptable genre thanks to Spider-Man, Iron Man, The Dark Knight, The Incredibles and The Avengers, each of which probably hold at least a somewhat valid claim to the title “best superhero movie ever.” And yet when I started seriously thinking about how to answer this question, one film kept coming up over and over again: Joe Johnston’s rip-roaring rocketpack adventure The Rocketeer.
The Rocketeer doesn’t ask big questions about society and the title hero’s neurotic anxieties, because it doesn’t have to. The Rocketeer is too preoccupied with actual “superhero stuff” to be bothered. There’s something beautiful about breaking down a myth into its component parts and finding the humanity within, but there’s also something beautiful about that myth all by its lonesome, and the tale of a naive flyboy who straps on an experimental jetpack and takes to the skies, performing daring aerial rescues and fighting Nazis on top of blimps, led by a traitorous Errol Flynn (sort of), reaches the height of wide-eyed wonder thanks to a delightful cast, witty script, still-impressive visual effects and a perfectly dashing tone imparted by future Captain America: The First Avenger director Joe Johnston.
Other superhero films may be cleverer, and many of them are more powerful, but none of the others send me back to the floor of my five-year-old bedroom, lying cross-legged on the carpet and flipping through the pages of a colorful comic book the way The Rocketeer does. For my money, it’s the best superhero movie ever.
Brian Formo:
Initially, Brad Bird’s The Incredibles appears to be a superhero spoof, but Bird’s too smart for that. The Incredibles is equal parts The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by A. Wolf and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron.” That is to say, it’s both a twist on a story we all know well: that no matter how many times a superhero can save the world, it’s always back in jeopardy in time for the next installment. And a remark on society’s move to the middle, celebrating mediocrity.
The Incredibles incredibly shows us that grand sweeping societal reform is necessary. Until it’s achieved we need superheroes (movies and comics) to save us from the boredom of bureaucratic paper pushing, and the bottom line that has taken precedent over human dignity. It shows all of this by placing a family of superheroes in environments that do not celebrate super-ness: insurance claims and the suburbs. The family, headed by the former Mr. Incredible, now Bob Parr (Craig T. Nelson) and Helen, no-longer-Elastigirl (Holly Hunter), were some of the many ex-superheroes who were forced into a relocation program (promising to no longer be super) after a series of lawsuits came from rescuing people who, although alive, sued for their injuries.
Fifteen boring years later, when Bob receives a super-challenge from an isolated island, it brings them back into action. Which also restores their dignity. And if it stepping outside of monotony restores their dignity what does that say about our dignity? In the words of – for my money – Pixar’s greatest character, Edna, their super costume designer (voiced by Bird himself): “Go! Confront the problem. Fight! Win!” Until we do, there’ll still be a need for superhero movies.
And this one is really smart, and really fun. Win.
Fred Topel:
This could be my chance to bring attention to a more obscure superhero movie of the pre-Marvel age, or champion an underrated one, but there really is no other candidate for the best superhero movie ever. What Christopher Nolan achieved with Batman Begins, and then further with The Dark Knight was truly extraordinary. Both movies would have been phenomenal films even if they weren’t about Batman (Christian Bale). The story of a billionaire vigilante traveling the globe to get his criminal fighting fix would automatically make a good movie, and the aftermath of his crusade would have made a superior sequel even with a more generic alter ego costume.
But The Dark Knight was a Batman movie too. It had everything I would have wanted in a sequel to Batman Begins: addressing The Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy), copycat Batmen and a Joker (Heath Ledger) with tricks more threatening than cartoonish ticking time bomb. His bank heist was more like Reservoir Dogs than a comic book villain, and The Dark Knight leapt from there. Even more than the story though, The Dark Knight is a visceral experience, maintaining a constant tone of dread that remains after multiple viewings. Just including Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) as a character made me always worried when the inevitable was going to happen to him, but even now that I know when that happens, the visceral momentum of The Dark Knight can always suck me in.
Filming certain sequences in Imax was a revelation, an effect that still works on Blu-ray when the frame opens up to fill your screen. The standard version doesn’t suffer though because the tone the film strikes is palpable in any format. There are nitpicks in the story (Harvey didn’t figure Batman’s suit was bulletproof?) but the point is it’s not about a sequential chain of narrative events. Those are mostly sound, and ask provocative philosophical questions too, but the point of The Dark Knight is to give yourself over to an experience that chances the way you might view costumed combat. This doesn’t mean that all superhero movies should be grounded, real world crime dramas. It just means it was right for these films, and The Dark Knight will stand until someone reinvents the genre again.
