[COLUMN] Thunderbolts* Confronts Superhero Fatigue at the End of the American Sentry | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Thunderbolts*, which is a fairly decent superhero film after what has been a rough couple of years for the genre.

One of the most interesting aspects of Thunderbolts*, the latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is the film’s strong sense that the best days of the superhero genre in general and this mammoth franchise in particular are long gone. The film feels very self-aware about the diminished cultural cachet of the larger Marvel brand, and is actively interested in using that framing device to engage with bigger ideas.

Thunderbolts* exists very firmly in conversation with The Avengers, to the point that the film’s closing credits reveal that its “real” title is The New Avengers. This makes a great deal of sense, The Avengers was a crucial moment in the evolution of mainstream superhero cinema. It was the first movie from Marvel Studios to gross over a billion dollars, it established the template for the modern cinematic shared universe, and solidified Marvel as a brand unto itself.

By the time that Thunderbolts* begins, The Avengers feels miles away. Valentina Allegra De Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), the head of the CIA, addresses her impeachment inquiry by reminding the assembled public, politicians and press that the Avengers are gone. Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) muses to De Fontaine’s young personal assistant Mel (Geraldine Viswanathan) that the events of The Avengers – “the Battle of New York” – “must seem like ancient history” to her.

Mel admits that she was “in high school” when The Avengers happened. However, she feels some pang of nostalgia for it. “It’s so strange that it’s over,” she admits to Barnes. De Fontaine tries to capitalize on that nostalgia, distracting attention from her shady dealings by hosting a fundraising gala packed with memorabilia from the first Avengers movie. Congressman Gary (Wendell Edward Pierce) is unimpressed, warning De Fontaine, “This gaudy Avengers propaganda reeks of desperation.”

In the context of the film, De Fontaine is clearly meant to evoke Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the savvy spymaster who put the Avengers together. However, De Fontaine is constantly behind the curve. It seems like she has failed to strike while the iron was hot. She is revealed to have been the mysterious buyer of Stark Tower all the way back in Spider-Man: Homecoming, but eight years later she has yet to open it for business and is still remodelling the interior.

This makes a certain amount of sense in the context of the larger universe. Since the events of Avengers: Endgame, it has been unclear which heroes are supposed to be the protagonists of “the Multiverse Saga.” Six years after Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) retired and Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) died, there is still an obvious power vacuum in the shared universe. That absence is a central plot motivator in Thunderbolts*, one of the voids at the heart of the film. “We have no reliable heroes,” De Fontaine states at her impeachment inquiry, as if addressing Disney shareholders directly.

There is a metatext at play here. Thunderbolts* positions De Fontaine as an obvious stand-in for Marvel Studios. The studio was once on top of the world, having produced the most successful film franchise in the history of cinema. However, the company recently found itself beset by a variety of problems: public scandals, underwhelming reviews and declining box office. Thunderbolts* is engaged with this idea. The first image of its closing credits is a Hollywood Reporter cover.

At times, Thunderbolts* feels like a mea culpa for the current disorganized state of the larger universe. The central plot motivator is De Fontaine, who has appeared in projects as diverse as Black Widow, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever teasing some grand vision of the shared universe, gathering up loose ends from various recent Marvel Studios projects and trying to burn any evidence of them in a giant incinerator. The brand is being realigned.

It feels like a panicked and frantic clean-up operation, particularly just months away from the make-or-break release of the alternate-universe-set Fantastic Four and next year’s gigantic cameo fest Avengers: Doomsday. So much of the modern Marvel Cinematic Universe has turned its gaze backwards towards nostalgia, rejecting the future. This becomes part of the plot of Thunderbolts*, which builds its first act around an attempted cull of recently-introduced characters.

Thunderbolts* suggests a general fatigue with the superhero genre as a whole. In the movie’s opening action set piece, Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) dispassionately narrates her way through a fairly generic fight scene. She already knows all the beats – the rationalizations, the poor marksmanship, the collateral damage. Yelena is bored of all this. The conventions of a classic superhero movie have little new to offer her. She’s seen – and done – it all before. Of course she has. The shared universe has been around for nearly two decades, and she is a late arrival to it.

This is an interesting framing for what is the final film of Phase 5 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is certainly a more honest way of engaging with the state of the modern superhero genre than the weird nostalgia that informs the marketing of the summer’s bigger superhero marquee releases like Fantastic Four and Superman. While there is a certain melancholy that permeates Thunderbolts* beneath the trademark jokey exterior, it is at least a movie that feels firmly anchored in the present.

However, Thunderbolts* is about more than just the state of the brand. Part of what makes the movie so compelling is the way in which it uses these understandable corporate anxieties to explore deeper themes and bigger ideas. While post-Endgame projects like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Thor: Love and Thunder were effectively films about the brand’s midlife crisis, its moment on top of the world, Thunderbolts* taps into a more millennial existential ennui.

“There is something wrong with me,” Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) explains in the film’s opening lines. The characters of Thunderbolts* arrived too late into a world that has no space for them. Yelena talks about feeling isolated. She doomscrolls. John Walker's (Wyatt Russell) wife Olivia (Gabrielle Byndloss) calls him out for being “in [his] phone” instead of present with their child. Bob Reynolds (Lewis Pullman) yearns to be special, but is trapped his own depression and self-hatred.

These characters were supposed to be the future of the shared universe, but were largely abandoned and neglected by those who came before. Bucky only crosses paths with this misfit team at the halfway point, initially tying them up and planning to fly them back to Washington as evidence against De Fontaine. There is something true to the millennial experience in how these characters are presented: a generation that inherited a broken and less stable world, with no real guidance.

Thunderbolts* is also using this narrative of superhero fatigue to say something broader about what superheroes represent in contemporary culture. The superhero has always been a distinctly American figure, an archetype like the cowboy or the classic movie gangster. This is not to suggest that superheroes are exclusively American, but that they are codified as an American archetype and often an expression of American self-image. Superman fights for “the American Way.” John Walker was literally Captain America and is still dressed in the stars and stripes.

More broadly, the rise of the superhero in popular culture coincided with the Second World War. The genre really exploded during the atomic age, in which America emerged as the dominant global superpower. In this context, it’s interesting that the codename for De Fontaine’s state-sponsored superhero program is “Sentry.” Spoken aloud, it cannot help but evoke “the American Century”, the period of global dominance that began with the American intervention in the Second World War.

This is not some abstract metaphorical reading. It is the text of these stories. Tony Stark was a weapons designer, the sort of industrialist who became rich during the Second World War. Bruce Banner (Edward Norton, Mark Ruffalo) was a scientist who was transformed into the Hulk by “gamma radiation” harvested from a gamma bomb. Even Spider-Man (Peter Parker) and Daredevil (Charlie Cox) came by their superpowers by radiation. The X-Men are “the Children of the Atom.”

Thunderbolts* explicitly ties the Sentry to the manifestation of America’s postwar global dominance. Bob Reynolds is imbued with “the power of a thousand exploding suns”, language that evokes the Manhattan Project and the harnessing of atomic power’s destructive potential. Director Jake Schreier has acknowledged the power employed by the Sentry’s dark side – “the Void” – was deliberately designed to serve as a reminder of the horrors of atomic power, the Hiroshima shadows.

In Thunderbolts*, the Sentry is not just any hero. Just like his comic book counterpart, he is clearly meant to evoke the iconic hero: Superman. Sentry can fly, is nigh invulnerable, wears a cape and an “S” insignia and even uses heat vision. As if to underscore the reading of Thunderbolts* as a film about the state of the superhero genre, this is a film in which a bunch of B-list characters are thrown into conflict with a Superman analogue, just weeks before the release of James Gunn’s Superman.

While the comic book superhero genre exploded in the aftermath of the Second World War, the modern cinematic iterations of these characters were shaped by the War on Terror. Iron Man opens in Afghanistan after the American invasion. Iron Man 3 finds Shane Black interrogating the use of superhero narratives as propaganda in these conflicts. These movies – most strikingly the original Avengers – are haunted by 9/11 imagery, with these superheroes often cast as soldiers in war. Even Spider-Man gets a suit with an “instant kill” mode and a fleet of lethal drones.

If the theatrical superhero is a manifestation of American power filtered through archetypes and metaphor, Thunderbolts* suggests that superhero fatigue might in some way reflect an exhaustion with or cynicism about what this archetype has come to represent. After all, America has tried in recent years to close the book on the forever wars associated with the War on Terror. Maybe moviegoers aren’t tired of these figures, but the narratives constructed around them.

In Thunderbolts*, the superhero is a contested and political figure. The film opens with impeachment proceedings, which clearly have a contemporary resonance. Although the second act features a military confrontation in the desert, that desert is America itself; the sequence is set in Utah rather than any of the recent international theatres of combat. The film was shot in Grand County, just a few hours away from Monument Valley, a location of almost spiritual significance to that other classic American genre, the cowboy film.

The superhero reflects American self-image, with Michael Goodrum noting that “their rise to prominence and popularity resonated with the rise of American power and the optimistic feeling that this could be used to reshape the world.” What happens when America no longer believes itself to be heroic? What can Sentry do when the American Century comes to an abrupt and premature end? What if America stopped believing in the logic that held the postwar world order together?

One of the revelatory framings of the modern crisis of American identity is that the Trump era has seen America say “goodbye to the good guy”, firmly rejecting the longstanding narrative of American exceptionalism in favor of something closer to pessimism or even nihilism. De Fontaine gives voice to this cynical attitude, the belief that there are no heroes, that “there are bad guys, and there are worse guys. There’s nothing else.” Thunderbolts* responds to these questions earnestly, rather than retreating into nostalgia.

Thunderbolts* ties its characters’ existential ennui to the collapse of belief in a national ideal. Yelena asks her father Alexei (David Harbour) when he last felt purpose, and he answers that it was when he served a country that he believed in. Later, during Alexei’s stirring speech to Yelena outside Stark Tower, American flags waft in the background, a reminder of that purpose. In the film’s postcredits scene, Bucky laments that the current Captain America (Anthony Mackie) won’t recognize or legitimize the team. However, Bucky also reminds Mel that the philosopher Kierkegaard believed that it was up to individuals to define values, rejecting the moral authority of the state or religion in determining purpose or moral authority.

Sentry is the ultimate manifestation of the superhero as an extension of the American military-industrial complex, in a way that is in conversation with the franchise’s history. If, as the closing title reveal suggests, Thunderbolts* is to be read as an Avengers movie, its invocation of the iconography and imagery of The Avengers feels pointed. Once again, New York is under attack. However, this threat is not some faceless alien horde. It is a superhero tailor-made by the director of the CIA.

Indeed, just before Bob has his breakdown and transforms into the Void, De Fontaine welcomes Yelena and her team to the penthouse of what was once Stark Tower. It is a scene that directly evokes Tony Stark’s conversation with Loki (Tom Hiddleston) in Avengers, an iconic meeting of hero and villain. However, in this iteration of the scene, De Fontaine is not Loki. De Fontaine is Stark; she mixes drinks at the bar and, while she might not have a Hulk, but she does have a Sentry. It is an inversion of The Avengers.

Like so many superhero movies, the climax of Thunderbolts* is steeped in 9/11 imagery. A block cloud descends across the island of Manhattan, particularly the southern tip. The bustling streets fall silent. Aircraft smash into buildings. In a wide shot of the island, the last part of the island consumed is One Freedom Plaza. It evokes The Avengers, but there is no “avenging” here. The heroes don’t even fire any projectile weapons at the climax.

When Sentry does lay siege to New York, Thunderbolts* never becomes a war film. The eponymous superhero team doesn’t come together to fight or to kill Bob. They do not seek to avenge the lost or the destroyed. Instead, the team spontaneously and instinctively works together to save civilians. While this was part of The Avengers, it was framed as a tactical concern in a military operation. In Thunderbolts* , the superheroes are not soldiers. They are instead first responders.

There is something very charming in the repeated emphasis on the futility of violence in Thunderbolts*. The first time the team meets, they spend several minutes trying to kill one another before realizing that they have walked into a trap set by De Fontaine. Their hastily-conceived plan to storm Stark Tower through hordes of soldiers is pointless, with De Fontaine revealing that she was waiting to let them up to the penthouse. Their fight against Bob in the penthouse is humiliating.

Instead, Thunderbolts* hinges on a non-violent resolution to its central plot. Yelena ventures into Bob’s subconscious not in some plan to assassinate him, but instead to reach him and to help him find his way back to himself. The rest of the team follow her into Bob’s psyche. Bob’s attempts to beat his alternate self into submission only feeds the monster. The result is the rare superhero film that builds to a largely peaceful resolution, allowing for some property damage. The seemingly dead New Yorkers are resurrected. Even Bob himself is redeemed. The literal shadow that 9/11 casts over the superhero genre is lifted.

It is an interesting reworking of the modern cinematic superhero template, one that seems built upon the argument that “superhero fatigue” is an expression of a more fundamental exhaustion with the way that these stories have been constructed and told over the past few decades. Iron Man and The Avengers spoke to a very different vision of America than Thunderbolts* does, and maybe that type of story doesn’t resonate in the way that it once did.

Whatever team name they finally settle on, Thunderbolts* wonders whether it is possible for its central characters to be heroes rather than avengers.