re: Spielberg: "There Will be a time when Superhero movie go the way of the Western"

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Scientists estimate that we reached Peak Superhero in the summer of 2008, when “The Dark Knight” sucked the attention of every critic, pundit and sentient moviegoer into its inky nexus. It is not as if the number of movies featuring troubled guys wearing costumes and fighting evil has diminished since then. Quite the contrary. But the genre, though it is still in a period of commercial ascendancy, has also entered a phase of imaginative decadence. (Do you really want to have an argument about this? If so, put on your best oversize metal suit and wait for me at the top of the New York Times building. I’ll be there as soon as I finish beta-testing my death ray. Apologies in advance to any commuters crushed by flying debris.) The latest evidence — though it is unlikely to be the last, with a new “Spider-Man” and another “Dark Knight” looming on the horizon — is “Marvel’s The Avengers.”

While “The Avengers” is hardly worth raging about, its failures are significant and dispiriting. The light, amusing bits cannot overcome the grinding, hectic emptiness, the bloated cynicism that is less a shortcoming of this particular film than a feature of the genre. Mr. Whedon’s playful, democratic pop sensibility is no match for the glowering authoritarianism that now defines Hollywood’s comic-book universe. Some of the rebel spirit of Mr. Whedon’s early projects “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Firefly” and “Serenity” creeps in around the edges but as detail and decoration rather than as the animating ethos.

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