Marvel’s latest is a textbook example of dopamine cinema.
If you’re a long time Cinapse reader, you will know about our admiration of Roger Ebert’s description of films as “empathy machines.” This is very vividly describing the ability of film, at its best, to provide a window into a world totally unlike the viewer’s and to live in someone else’s shoes for a while. The power of film then becomes transformational, giving you peeks in alternate realities you may not otherwise have access to. It’s true movie magic.
Unfortunately, the past decade of blockbuster filmmaking has seen a more insidious idea of what film’s ultimate power can be, what I have taken to describing as movies functioning as “dopamine” machines. This can best be described as taking familiar, comfortable symbols or tropes and feeding those back to the viewer in uncomplicated, digestible ways. This provides the sense of feeling like the movie is with you, rather than the movie itself pulling you towards it. It’s basically this
…as cinema. And as that example may underline, the absolute king of weaponizing this has been the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The crowning achievement of this style of filmmaking came with the climax of Avengers: Endgame, where over a decade’s worth of groundwork finally culminated in a final flash of jackpot. Those videos of people losing their minds in those final moments? That’s a high that, quite frankly, is hardwired into our brain and had never quite been achieved with such mastery before
And as with all highs, those in charge of the MCU have been chasing it ever since. Something resembling it was achieved in No Way Home, but you could feel the diminishing returns slightly. And it is worth noting that every other attempt to wrap a similar decades-spanning franchise into a similar moment fall slight flat because they feel manufactured. You can feel the manipulation, and thus our minds reject it.
Of course, Marvel in particular has attempted to also move away from this. Be it misunderstood experiments like Eternals or realigning efforts like The Marvels, the MCU has felt adrift since 2019; that’s five years now, and the fact they have pared down their releases to a single film for 2024 is telling. But make no mistake: this year’s offering, Deadpool and Wolverine, is another dopamine machine. The difference now is the movie at least wants you to know it knows that you know that we all know what the game is now.
The third Deadpool film and 14th X-Men film overall, Deapool and Wolverine starts with a fairly strong conceit. At the end of the previous film, Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds), AKA the hyper-violent anti-hero Deadpool was gifted a gadget that allowed him to fix his timeline and seemingly cross between realities. This led to him having an existential concern about his broader place in the world of superhero films, and after a failed interview to become an Avenger, he decides to give up the life of being a superhero. Only for the TVA (they’re from the Loki TV show, so hopefully you’ve seen at least some of that) to pluck him out, tell him his timeline is doomed, and to basically offer him a chance to move for…reasons?
Wade naturally rejects the offer, and proceeds to attempt to save his universe, but to do that he’ll need a version of the X-Men Wolverine (Hugh Jackman). Eventually after montaging through various alternate realities, only to discover he happened to pick the saddest sack Wolverine available. The pair then have to team up to save their universe from both the TVA and malicious forces from other forgotten or discarded superhero franchises.
This being a Deadpool movie, you can imagine how aware the whole ordeal becomes more or less immediately. Yes, Deadpool is aware he’s in a movie, but even more pointedly, he’s aware he is in a film that serves as both the bridge for Deadpool to come into the MCU and also what will technically be the fourth swan song for Fox’s X-Men film franchise. Plenty of industry insider humor, going every way, that will certainly appeal to both comic and film obsessives alike. The movie wants you to feel like you’re in on the joke.
The problem is the joke is a bit exhausting. Even as someone who has a perhaps misplaced fondness for the shagginess of the Fox Marvel films that came before the MCU template set the bounds of what superhero films had to follow,
Beyond all of that, this bit is centered around stylishly staged but ultimately numbing violence. Deadpool’s whole deal, outside of being self-aware, is how unapologetically violent he is allowed to be. The film certainly earns its R-rating once again, both in terms of copious amounts of violence and constant, unrelenting coarse language. But very little of it feels especially thrilling, especially when you hit yet another gigantic fight scene that is punctuated by buckets of CGI blood splatter. You can feel the applause shots begging to be admired like 2016-era Jeb Bush.
The highlight of the film, perhaps unsurprisingly, is Hugh Jackman. Jackman has over 20 years of Wolverine under his belt now, and he clearly can slide into the character without much trouble. This version is a variant on the theme he presented in Logan, adding to the depth of survivors guilt and weariness a sense of self-loathing. But it is telling that part of that weariness is directed at having to do all of this nonsense, to be stuck in yet another parade of references and easter eggs, that the war has ultimately been lost and now he’s stuck fighting the same battles over and over again.
I never wish for films to fail, partially because making any movie is hard work and people putting hours upon hours of labor into an artifact deserve to have that hard work admired. But I also fear that if this is a harbinger of what the brain trust at Marvel think their audience wants, and they are proven correct, the MCU as a whole is on a trail to become little more than a hollow ouroboros.
