This episode is also on Bilibili too.
Let’s talk about my personal top ten superhero movies.
Before we get to the top ten, let me get one gripe out of the way.
I recently watched Spider-Man: No Way Home and The Batman back to back, and was deeply disappointed by both. It feels like this wave of superhero movies is more or less nearing its end. Spider-Man: No Way Home proves that Marvel movies have now become “addictive drugs.” Three Spider-Men in one frame—fun, right? Very fun! But every time, the dose has to be increased further for fans to feel satisfied. This movie gives us three Spider-Men together; the next one brings the X-Men into the Marvel universe; where do they go from there? Are they going to connect it with the Star Wars universe? Then have Buzz Lightyear team up with the Guardians of the Galaxy? And will Disney buy into Shanghai Animation Film Studio and make Calabash Brothers vs. the Avengers? This model is just like drug addiction: the dose can only keep getting bigger, until you overdose and drop dead.
As for The Batman, its decline takes a different form. On the surface it looks profound, with everyone carrying the weight of the world on their face, but in reality it is feather-light and never touches anything essential.
The Riddler causes all that trouble, and the big reveal is just a bunch of old white men committing embezzlement?—That’s it?
Batman wears that sour face for three hours, practically turning the movie into “sorrow overflowing its banks,” and in the end he realizes that he shouldn’t hate, but should love?—That’s it?
The entertaining stuff and the serious stuff alike seem to be gradually running out of road.
Since superhero movies are such a mess these days, let’s look back on the good old days.
Here are my personal top ten superhero movies (and TV series). The films on this list aren’t all flawless five-star masterpieces; there are even movies I personally rated higher than some of these. But every title here has an irreplaceable value in my eyes.
For reasons known to everyone, there are only nine superhero movies in this top ten:
No. 9 on the Top Ten Superhero Movies list—Zorro
A superhero movie from ancient history, and a dubbed import that was wildly popular in the 1980s. Zorro wears a mask, hides his true identity, and uses his superb swordsmanship to uphold justice. Apart from lacking superpowers, everything from his swagger to his deeds is standard superhero material.
Don’t be fooled by how parents today look down on you for being obsessed with Spider-Man or Batman, saying they’re childish nonsense. When our parents were young, they were crazier about Zorro than we are by who knows how many times. Back then, French movie star Alain Delon became the first foreign heartthrob of the post-Reform-and-Opening-up era thanks to the role of Zorro, captivating countless Chinese boys and girls. Ask the older people in your family how many times they went to the cinema to see Zorro back then, and whether they could recite the dialogue backward and forward.
And while we’re on the subject, Mr. Tong Zirong’s dubbing of Zorro is another untouchable classic.
No. 8 on the Top Ten Superhero Movies list—Hellboy II: The Golden Army
The Hellboy series is the bible for fans of the “steampunk” art style.
Among superhero movies, this film’s visual artistry has no equal (even Zack Snyder’s Watchmen falls slightly short by comparison). The series was directed by the famous monster enthusiast Guillermo del Toro. Through Hellboy, del Toro created an utterly enchanting underground world of monsters, with a style all its own and no real equivalent. Hellboy II: The Golden Army in particular stands alongside del Toro’s masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth as one of the two monuments to his visual imagination.
Hellboy II: The Golden Army also has a pretty good plot, and the fights are especially terrific. The film’s action choreographer was Bradley James Allan, who passed away a few years ago and was a member of Jackie Chan’s stunt team.
Think about how boldly inventive del Toro was in the Hellboy series, then think about how stale The Shape of Water was later. Put the two side by side, and I can’t help mourning del Toro’s decline over the years.
No. 7 on the Top Ten Superhero Movies list—The Powerpuff Girls
Haha, surprised?
The Powerpuff Girls—including both the original and the reboot from the past few years—has been the biggest surprise of the five or six years I’ve spent watching all kinds of kiddie cartoons with my daughter. On one hand, it’s a cutesy children’s cartoon; on the other, it’s an adult cartoon packed with wicked humor, full of jokes that only grown-ups could possibly get.
The villains especially showcase the writers’ twisted sense of humor. In the world of The Powerpuff Girls, anything can become a monster, so the villains range from a monsterfied garbage dump to a monsterfied steak. You get every bizarre shape and form imaginable.
What’s even more remarkable is that, for all its childish surface and absurdist gags, the show actually touches on the serious topics supposedly reserved for superhero movies—superheroes’ identity and responsibility, and the negative impact superheroes can have on the world—all through the three little girls’ various adventures, which are by turns hilarious and exasperating.
No. 6 on the Top Ten Superhero Movies list—X2
Before Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy elevated superhero movies to a new level, which work could be called the greatest masterpiece of the genre?
Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man 2 is certainly one candidate. From its themes, character development, and narrative rhythm to its action sequences, it was one of the benchmarks of early-twenty-first-century superhero movies. But I decided, with a heavy heart, to give my vote to X2.
I think that in the past twenty years, apart from the ceiling we’ll get to at the end, only two series have raised the superhero-movie genre by a whole level: Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy and the X-Men series.
The reason I think X-Men holds that position is that the series touches on the most central question in the superhero genre—
If superheroes existed in this world, what would that actually mean? As individuals, they are superheroes.
But what if you put lots of superheroes together?
As a group, they would actually be a super-species! A super-species that surpasses the human race! This is the heaviest, most thought-provoking, and most deeply frightening question lurking in every superhero movie.
X-Men is precisely what touches that question. In X-Men, mutants and ordinary humans exist as two mutually conflicting species; the conflict and reconciliation between them is the through line running throughout the series.
That said, X-Men only touches the question; it doesn’t dare delve into it. Because while emphasizing the confrontation between the two species, it also introduces a convenient setup: the mutants, despite possessing all kinds of miraculous powers, are actually the disadvantaged side. Most of the time, it isn’t humanity trembling as it waits to be enslaved by mutants; instead, mutants are constantly being bullied by ordinary humans and scrambling to save themselves. As a result, the question of how humanity should respond to being crushed by another super-species is merely “touched upon” in the X-Men series, never explored in depth.
But regardless, the arrival of X-Men still raised the seriousness of superhero movies by a whole notch.
The X2 chosen here is the most mature and complete entry in the original trilogy. Also, as an action-movie fan, I think one major highlight worth mentioning is the sheer impact of its action sequences. The action director was also from Hong Kong: the renowned martial-arts choreographer Corey Yuen (the one responsible for “Safety First” in Fong Sai-yuk II).
No. 5 on the Top Ten Superhero Movies list—Man of Steel
What should superheroes look like when they fight? X2 actually falls a little short. The film that takes superhero combat to its extreme is Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel.
Starting with his breakthrough 300, director Zack Snyder created a highly personal kind of “violent beauty”: using slow motion and painterly imagery to show the elegance of action. This approach was not only developed throughout Snyder’s own films, but also influenced a huge number of action movies. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, it seemed as if many directors didn’t know how to shoot an action movie without slow motion.
But then, unexpectedly, Snyder used Man of Steel to overthrow his own style. In its action scenes, he abandoned slow motion completely. When Superman throws a punch, there isn’t a single slow-motion shot; Snyder even deliberately used the then-uncommon Digital Double technology to speed up the characters’ movements, showing Superman moving faster than the eye can follow. He also burned through an incalculable production budget to show Superman’s world-destroying destructive power.
The sense of power, speed, and destruction in Superman’s fight against the Kryptonian soldiers and the final battle with General Zod in Man of Steel has yet to be surpassed. To this day, these two sequences remain the peak of superhuman combat in live-action film.
Sadly, in Snyder’s later cut of Justice League, Zack Snyder returned to his old path and went back to slow motion and painterly visuals.
It seems that becoming conservative and stale with age is a destiny even great directors find hard to escape.
No. 4 on the Top Ten Superhero Movies list—Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Just like multiple Spider-Men sharing the screen, just like a multiverse, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse can be said to have crushed the later Spider-Man: No Way Home from every angle, leaving no blind spot—
In terms of attitude, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse isn’t coy or pretentious. It doesn’t resemble No Way Home, where every shot of three Spider-Men together feels like it’s shouting at the fans, “Are you climaxing yet?”
In terms of the plot setup, the multiverse is introduced in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse because the main villain, Kingpin, conducts an experiment to get his wife and son back. It’s not only plausible; it also makes the villain more complex and vivid. By comparison, in No Way Home, the multiverse appears because Spider-Man asks Doctor Strange to cast a spell and the spell goes wrong—both the motivation and the process feel like a child’s game.
In terms of characterization, the Spider-Man in No Way Home causes a pile of trouble and relies on his older Spider-Man brothers to clean it up, while Miles, the Spider-Man in Into the Spider-Verse, actively refuses his older brothers’ and sisters’ help at the crucial moment, shoulders the responsibility alone, and grows into his own hero.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse—the best Spider-Man movie to date.
No. 3 on the Top Ten Superhero Movies list—Watchmen (the TV series)
I’m not talking about the hugely famous film version of Watchmen, but the HBO TV series released in 2019. Although they share the same name, this series is actually a sequel to the Watchmen comic. If you’re thinking of getting into it, I recommend reading the original Watchmen comic first. It’s a legendary graphic novel that made Time magazine’s list of the 100 best English-language novels, and it won’t disappoint you.
But if you really can’t get used to the rather rough-looking art style of the comic, you can watch the movie version of Watchmen first, then look up how the comic ends, because the movie makes a major change to the original’s ending, while HBO’s Watchmen series picks up directly from the comic’s conclusion. If you go straight from the movie to the series, you definitely won’t be able to follow the connection.
The Watchmen series is a god-tier continuation of the original Watchmen story—the kind of continuation where even if you lent me ten extra imaginations, I still couldn’t have come up with a way for Watchmen to go on like this.
The writer of the Watchmen series, Damon Lindelof, was one of the core writers of the hugely popular TV series Lost. The man’s imagination has always been astonishingly wild, and this time he goes all out, turning episodes 6 through 8—the three most central episodes of Watchmen—into a dazzling stretch of television that may well go down in TV history. Just look at the short reviews on Douban: plenty of people started episode 6 with their jaws on the floor and kept them there all the way through episode 8.
Unfortunately, Lindelof isn’t very good at wrapping up a story. Lost had a somewhat lousy ending back in the day, and this time, compared with those three god-tier episodes earlier on, the ending of Watchmen also feels just a little limp. Still, the flaws don’t outweigh the brilliance. I personally love this series, and to me, it is an extraordinarily vivid stroke in the history of superhero television.
Number two on my top ten superhero movies list — The Dark Knight
The Dark Knight is the ceiling for superhero movies in many people’s eyes, and it absolutely deserves that reputation. There has already been far too much praise and analysis of The Dark Knight, so I won’t say much more here.
Number one on my top ten superhero movies list — Glass
The most prestigious superhero work in my eyes, and number one on my top ten superhero movies list, is Glass—a movie many people consider terrible.
I’m really not trying to grab attention for its own sake. If you’ve followed my Douban ratings before, you know that after watching it, I wrote the short review while literally trembling. Glass is actually a very unlikable film. Director M. Night Shyamalan likes to slow his storytelling down; although I personally love that style, many viewers find it severely lacking in the kind of visceral fun they want, so it has very little audience appeal. That’s exactly what Glass is like. Rather than calling it a superhero movie, it would be more accurate to say it feels like an unhurried art film.
But I think what makes Glass great is that it inherits and carries forward the legacy of X-Men, truly plunging into the deepest question in superhero movies: when humanity encounters a species that completely surpasses it, what exactly happens?
If the emergence of superheroes is bound to have a powerful psychological impact on ordinary human beings, what kind of impact would it actually be?
I think the impact is this: the existence of superheroes is bound to remind ordinary humans that they are not the spirit of all things on this Earth. Losing that status, falling from God’s firstborn to the second child—that is the impact superheroes, as a new species, have on humanity. And this may be one of the most bone-deep fears humanity has ever experienced as an intelligent species.
The world needs heroes, but what if that hero is another kind of creature? Do you worship heroes, or fear them?
The story of Glass unfolds precisely around this line of thought. It describes how ordinary humans might respond when confronted by a new species—superheroes—that completely overwhelms them, and how superheroes, as a new species, rise up while surrounded by humanity’s deepest fears.
In that sense, Glass is an apocalypse of superheroes, and also an epic of superheroes—an epic with no grand set pieces and almost no special-effects shots.
That is why this seemingly insignificant little production, Glass, is the greatest superhero movie in my eyes.
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