Is “Thunderbolts*” Marvel’s Attempt to Salvage the Superhero Genre?

In the run-up to the première of “Thunderbolts*,” on May 2nd, Marvel earned some light mockery for the art-house vibe of one of its trailers. Over an edgy E.D.M. beat, closeups of the Academy Award-nominated cast members Florence Pugh and Sebastian Stan were interspersed with strobing text that conjured various prestige offerings from the indie studio A24. “From the stars of MIDSOMMAR, A DIFFERENT MAN, & YOU HURT MY FEELINGS,” the text read, with “the writers & director of BEEF”; “the cinematographer of THE GREEN KNIGHT”; “the production designer of HEREDITARY”; “the editor of MINARI”; and “the composers of EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE.” There were brief flashes of a man’s bare feet, of disused lab equipment, of a giant chicken wielding an arrow sign. “THUNDERBOLTS*,” the spot concluded. A24 reposted screenshots and added the “Euphoria” meme captioned, “Wait, is this fucking play about us?”

Marvel has been strenuously positioning “Thunderbolts*” (the asterisk is never totally explained) as a course correction, a return to form after a string of critical and commercial disappointments. But the trailer, rather than invoking the studio’s alien-pummelling heyday, accurately teased the movie’s more indie sensibility, a mix of loose-limbed chattiness, psychologically charged dream imagery, and volatile self-loathing. Since the release of “Iron Man,” in 2008, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has engulfed Hollywood, sucking up the buzziest writers and directors and much of the young talent. The studio’s seemingly endless series of quippy, breezy, semi-ironic action-comedies has successfully catered to people’s superhero fantasies and mocked them at the same time. But the franchise has been languishing, and part of the reason (alongside corporate venality and the prioritization of brand continuation over individual works) is that its shtick has grown stale. Marvel has always strategically disavowed the superhero genre—at least, in a partial, winking way—but the pose has proved harder to abide as they’ve kept churning out superhero content, and as the movies, in the scramble to set up future installments, have got worse. What distinguishes “Thunderbolts*” is that its repudiation of superhero tropes feels sincere rather than merely performed. The movie oscillates between forms—a dramatization of therapy, a cockeyed meditation on family, a two-hour sitcom—as if searching for a new creative frequency. It’s more fun than anything the studio has produced in years.

“Thunderbolts*” begins on a note of existential malaise: Gott ist tot, and inspiration has fled the earth. The arterial Avengers story line ended, in 2019, with the death or departure of Marvel’s principals—Captain America, Iron Man, Black Widow, and Thor, among others. For the characters who remain, there’s a sense that the world’s well of meaning has run dry; the old institutions have crumbled, and no one is coming to save us.

Heightening the absurdist mood, Selina Meyer, the “Veep” character, is the C.I.A. director. Here, she’s got an Italian countship and a new name, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, but Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays her as a familiar study in shameless, silver-tongued girlbossery. Valentina’s quest to forge superpeople who can defend the world (and champion her interests) has led her to conduct unscrupulous, not entirely successful experiments on human subjects. Now the walls are closing in: she is being dragged before a committee by Detective Bunk from “The Wire” (Wendell Pierce)—only, here, he is a congressman named Gary—and some of her secret agents know too much.

These agents form a crew of rejects akin to the dysfunctional M.I.5 operatives on the Apple TV+ show “Slow Horses”: lovable rogues who somehow manage to both fail upward and succeed downward. They include a morose Russian spy named Yelena Belova (Pugh) and John Walker (Wyatt Russell), a super soldier who lost the Captain America gig about as quickly and colorfully as Anthony Scaramucci lost his White House communications job. Glomming on are Yelena’s exhibitionistic father (a scene-stealing David Harbour); an everyman named Bob (Lewis Pullman), who, like Yelena, suffers from depression; and an Avenger turned politician struggling with the slow pace of institutional progress, played by Stan, whose presence, on the heels of his portrayal of a young Donald Trump, in “The Apprentice,” is an electric reminder that one person’s superhero can be another person’s demagogue.

But the main thrust of the story concerns mental health. (Spoilers follow, for those of you who care about the element of surprise in a Marvel-movie plot.) Bob, it turns out, is not just a regular guy; he is one of Valentina’s science projects. He can withstand machine-gun fire and boil water with his mind, but becoming a super-person hasn’t cured him of his melancholy or his childhood trauma. As the story progresses, various characters, upon making contact with Bob’s body, are transported back to painful moments from their past: Yelena to a dark wood where she watches a younger version of herself betray a friend; Walker to a fight he picked with his wife, who has since left him. Toward the climax of the film, Bob becomes trapped inside his own dismal memory palace, while his shadow self, a matte-black silhouette with pinprick eyes, drifts through Manhattan, dropping passersby into personalized torture chambers—“a big maze of interconnected shame rooms,” Yelena says.

It’s the height of sad-boy power trips: because Bob is so powerful, his fate and the world’s are twinned. If he succumbs to the void, then everyone else must, too. Yet, somewhat touchingly, “Thunderbolts*” eschews the standard third-act battle—in which an answering “good” ego is summoned to restore order—in favor of a rescue mission. Our heroes have to protect Bob, one another, and a subsection of New York from Bob’s splintering mind. They inflict almost no violence and are mostly shown shielding bystanders from falling debris. The people whisked away into shame rooms are eventually returned. In the “Avengers” era, anonymous city dwellers were always sliding into chasms or down the sides of their uprooted office buildings or getting blasted or impaled or crushed like ants. But “Thunderbolts*,” with its small-bore focus and egalitarian streak, gives civilians their due. This could make the movie feel sanitized, as if it were awakening some appetite for combat or destruction in the viewer and then failing to slake it. Instead, though, the low body count seems commensurate with the horror of death.

In its emotional realism, “Thunderbolts*” feels less influenced by other Marvel movies than by a group of hallucinatory films that came out in the late nineties and early two-thousands: “Being John Malkovich” (1999), “Adaptation” (2002), “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004), and “Inception” (2010). These works varied in the sophistication of their psychological insights, but they all used plot and imagery to externalize the phenomena of an inner life. Like them, “Thunderbolts*” finds a visual language that can be beautiful in its symbolic compression. At one point, Pullman’s character hovers motionless in the cloudless sky above New York City—an arrestingly lyrical shot that conveys the quietness of dread. Later, Yelena executes a run of aerodynamically impossible flips and spins in her effort to reach Bob. The sequence is thrilling, and it literalizes the heroic measures that people take every day to be present with one another in dark places. (It helps that Pugh is an incandescent performer; we see her light up the gloom.) Toward the end of the movie, Bob’s house of shame disintegrates. The scene signifies a breakthrough, in the psychic sense, and a breaking open of the foreclosed future that his mind has lowered over the city. It also feels a bit like Marvel getting free of its baggage.

Superheroes, who belong to an epic tradition of gods, kings, and warriors, are ill-suited to our moment of intense self-consciousness. Self-awareness—the kind cultivated by the digital panopticon and a consumerist culture that constantly directs our attention toward ourselves and our choices—tells us that there is something shameful about the epic scale. Invulnerability, perfection: isn’t it pathetic to want what you can’t have? Marvel’s solution has been to specialize in superheroes—blatantly suit-clad beings who zoom around and kick people—who also, ha-ha, think that superheroes are dumb. The M.C.U. is designed to provide fan service, but it has also tried to give mainstream viewers—who might be, at once, tempted by and skeptical of superhero movies—a subtly shimmering force field of plausible deniability to crouch behind.

They’ve done this mainly via metacommentary and sheepish jokes. Often, the films have a weird, pandering (and thus contemptuous) vibe. They can seem so eager to reassure you that you are not watching a superhero movie—those are silly—that they lose sight of the deeper shame that might drive someone to watch a superhero movie to begin with. This is the humiliation of not being good or powerful enough.

But this humiliation is exactly the subject of “Thunderbolts*.” The film succeeds in part by flipping Marvel’s script: the main characters aren’t embarrassed because they’re superheroes; they’re embarrassed because they’re not. (In one of Yelena’s most relatable scenes, she tells her father, “All I do is sit and look at my phone and think of all the terrible things that I’ve done.”) Instead of a would-be power trip that is too hamstrung by self-awareness to get off the ground, “Thunderbolts*” is an emotionally potent story about vulnerability.

Marvel films are littered with figures we’re supposed to identify with who triumph over their foes by showily revealing their true selves. Steve Rogers–Captain America was a great-souled warrior in a puny body until the government injected him with a substance that made him look like Chris Evans and fight like an entire SWAT team. Peter Parker–Spider-Man was a prototypical Queens kid who stumbled into superpowers and spent the rest of his first movie proving that he deserved them. Both of these origin stories root their allure in the democratic myth that excellence lives in all of us. In a climactic scene from Marvel’s first television show, “WandaVision,” the Avenger Scarlet Witch, who has forgotten her actual identity and believes herself to be a housewife on a classic sitcom, reclaims her magic and her status as one of the most formidable figures in the M.C.U. As she does so, she snarls at an opponent, “I don’t need you to tell me who I am.”

Compare this with a representative sequence from “Thunderbolts*.” The team is standing at the bottom of an elevator shaft. None of them fly. They all “just punch and shoot,” as Yelena remarks drily, her voice thick with Eastern-bloc ennui. The character who can go through walls is useless, because beyond the walls is nothing but dirt. The character who can jump really high can’t jump high enough. The protagonists’ inadequate abilities are a metaphor for their damaged self-esteem. Collectively, they’ve sold out their friends, fought for the wrong armies, succumbed to mind control, hurt the innocent. Asserting “who they are” is not going to help them out of the pit; they have to acknowledge their frailty and interdependence, lift one another up. These are heroes for our compromised times, which won’t let us imagine that we can save the world in a burst of effulgent egotism. And this, perhaps, is what garden-variety, human heroism looks like: knowing that you’re not as great as you wish you were, but trying anyway. ♦