Superhero team movies are all the rage these days. If it’s not the Justice League teaming up then it’s the X-Men or Fantastic Four. All of which is very cool. But as I started thinking about the upcoming Avengers: Infinity War movie I came to the realization that a lot of superhero teams really don’t make sense.
If you look at a team like the one in Avengers (2012) of Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Incredible Hulk, Hawkeye and Black Widow, these are characters thrown together to battle some great, unstoppable foe that they can only hope of defeating with each other. Which makes some sense. They all come together for the big dust-up and prevail in the end. What doesn’t make sense is why do they stay together?
Thor is a god who lives on another planet, so making it to Avengers meetings can be problematic. The Incredible Hulk is an unstable monster who’s only kept in check by Bruce Banner and should probably stay as far away from people as possible. Captain America is a super soldier, and as such shouldn’t he be working for the government? Tony Stark/Iron Man is a playboy whom time and time again proves that he doesn’t work well with others.
Who’s paying them? Are they indentured servants giving up any semblance of normal lives in order that they can put their lives on the line day in and day out to battle things like robotic terrors and science gone amok for the greater good? Are they superheroes, or are they superslaves?
I suppose you’ve got Hawkeye and Black Widow who are already working with SHIELD when the movie begins, so they make at least some sense working as part of the team.
But for the others, not so much.
Things get even worse when you take into account the X-Men. The X-Men are a group of super-powered mutants lead by Professor X who secretly teaches outcast mutants at his school where the teachers moonlight as this super-powered team. By day Jean Grey might teach math to a bunch of seventh graders, but by night she’s out saving the world from the likes of Magneto with the other X-Men. So these are teachers, who have to be doing all the things teachers do like helping kids with their homework and coming up with their curriculum. But these X-Teachers are really spending most of their time zooming around the globe trying to stop armageddon. Am I to believe that Scott Summers is aboard the Blackbird grading papers in between fighting Apocalypse and Mr. Sinister?
I suppose the one team that does make sense is the Fantastic Four. This is a family-ish team with stretchable Reed Richards who’s married to, or at least gets married to at some point in the story, Sue Storm who’s brother Johnny and friend Ben Grimm are all given superpowers after one of Reed’s experiments goes awry. Regardless of the fact that they’re all almost killed by this experiment, them banding together does make some sense because of the whole family angle and the fact that they get their powers at the same time.
While all that might be plausible, at no point did anyone like Johnny or Ben say to Reed, “I appreciate the opportunity to fight the Mole Man once every few months, but I’d really like to go back to school to learn how to become a chef.”
Looking at the superhero team from the outside it’s interesting to see how scary someone like Iron Man is. He’s got the power of a small army at his fingertips and roams around the globe doing whatever he thinks is right no matter what the consequences. Or even the Incredible Hulk who at any moment can Hulk-out can devastate any city more effectively than even an atomic bomb. For them to be running around together to the average person might just be terrifying.
Of course these movies all take place in a fictional universe where all of the superheroes are nice to each other and none of them has ever thought about how much better the world were be if it were their group running it. 😉
