Thunderbolts* Is What Marvel Should Keep Making
Thunderbolts* (or, The New Avengers) is what you remember Marvel movies and shows being, back when it was a pretty sure thing that any given movie was going to be good, if not excellent. Somehow, the rhythms and plot progression that have now become standard work here. The comedy is funny. The action scenes are cool. The collection of very barebones characters doesn’t make the story flat or uninteresting.
But like, that doesn’t make for much of a review on its own, does it? If you’re reading this, I have to assume you’ve seen a Marvel movie before, and I don’t need to explain the above paragraph. You know what I mean. Fortunately, Thunderbolts* has two more things going for it that make it harder to forget in the homogenized soup of the MCU.
The Movie Has Two Ideas That Interlock Excellently
The first is the politics/conspiracies. Mainly, that it’s actually interesting in a superhero movie. It was world-built and presented much better than some movies actually devoted to that sort of plot. I found the court case intriguing. The machinations of Valentina (and her monologues) were actually good scenes, and were about as interesting as any battle. Making the inciting incident four different mercenary superhero characters all hired to kill one another is not something I’ve seen or even thought of as a possibility before. Marvel movies have a strange approach to lethality—plot armor always makes fights a little uncertain in a different sort of way—but that scene did a good job of maintaining tension. Not to mention how effectively exposition was seeded throughout those scenes.
The second thing of note was—paradoxically—how aggressively Thunderbolts* wanted to have a specific theme and topic and refused to make it subtle. It isn’t just a superhero story that contains a certain idea, like how Ironheart is about ambition. No, Thunderbolts* is about depression. There are lines in this movie that are shockingly raw and bleak. Yelena’s first scene is supposed to look like a suicide attempt for a second, and the way she talks about her internal feelings later is heartbreaking.
Thunderbolts* Makes It Clear What It Wants To Say
And then there’s our villain, Sentry. He’s a metaphor in the form of a person. I’m almost sure he’s intended to represent two different mental states, and how one feeds into the other. He’s either high on power or low in darkness. And to use one is to also have the other.
This isn’t even to mention what his power does to other people. That’s all pure metaphor, too. Especially the detail that anytime someone actively tries to fight their own memories (not others’ memories, though, as Walker proves), the dream constructs are apparently too strong. Yelena gets beaten up by the memory of a little girl. And it’s a bit of worldbuilding that never really gets pointed out, despite having clear messages attached. My absolute favorite example of this is how Sentry can’t stop what was happening by beating himself up. It won’t help. Regret is not how you overcome such things.
Thunderbolts* Let’s Its Metaphors Drive The Story
Honestly, these scenes of depression have so much more thought to them—and the action scenes are surprisingly short and sparse—that I get a certain impression. I think Thunderbolts* actually wanted to go even further with the topic. I think it was actually holding back so it would still be a fun action movie. And I don’t know how I feel about that—though I do understand why they would make such a decision. Marvel is in the odd spot of being so long-running that it needs to explore new stuff, but also needs to please audiences that have expectations of what these movies are. It’s not going to be obvious to a random movie-goer that they’re walking into an exploration of suicidal ideation, self-hatred, and the long-term mental effects of violence.
To be clear, though, I’m not damning this movie by saying this. I’d rather it have that depth, and it ensured I really enjoyed Thunderbolts*. Like, reread this article’s first paragraph again. I don’t know how they reclaimed the magic, but they did—and, especially as a media critic, that’s impressive. The cast is great. The car battle scene is awesome. I love how the plot actually lingers and uses its settings instead of constantly flitting about from location to location. This feels like a movie that had a lot of thought, a lot of care, and a lot of personal expression put into it. I have no idea what these new plotlines (and superpowers) could mean for the MCU going forward, but if the people who made Thunderbolts* are involved in the next few movies, then please, bring them to me faster.
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