Alright! Let’s talk about the violence in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The latest PG-13 family flick off the MCU assembly line was released last week to solid critical reviews and extremely healthy box office receipts, but there is one thing that almost every review has mentioned: The level of violence in the film.
I’ve seen some complaints/wonder online directed towards this film and its level of violence, which is unusually graphic and bloody for a casual MCU flick. These people seem genuinely astounded it “got away with” PG-13, challenging others to “name a PG-13 film in recent time that has an onscreen death as brutal as…” The truth of the matter is, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is not exuberantly violent. It’s merely a superhero movie that earns its PG-13.
Basically, it has more in common with Lord of the Rings than Ant-Man. It hearkens back to the time when movies had to earn a PG-13 rather than being arbitrarily rated. As I noted in my essay “The Rating System is Overrated,” movies are no longer rated by their content but rather the genre - G is dead, PG is every animated film, PG-13 is de facto family films, and R is everything else.
You see, when you think back to thirty years ago, we had the G rating for movies like Beauty and the Beast, PG for movies like The Truman Show, PG-13 for Jurassic Park, and R for Terminator 2: Judgement Day. However, the G rating died after The Princess and the Frog underperformed, causing everything to shift up a level. So now we have barely any G movies, PG takes movies like Frozen and Encanto (Neither of which are objectively more scary or violent than their G-rated predecessors), and PG-13 takes on both PG movies (Arrival) and big blockbusters. The R-Rating takes the leftovers, either for historical dramas or excessively violent-for-the-sake-of-violent escapades.
PG-13’s adoption of what would have been PG and the “made for grown-ups” blockbusters has become a very strange neutering of both. This change was both caused by and best exemplified by the MCU. The largest franchise on earth produces blockbusters that are relatively chaste of language, sex, or explicit violence. While this and of itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it means their rating as PG-13 is arbitrary.
In the early 2000s, superhero movies needed a lot of grit to feel less like a movie made for kids and more like an “adult” film. This is why the X-Men films were comparatively violent (Wolverine’s murder spree in X2 originally earned the film an R), Spider-Man 2’s birth of Doc Ock scene was ripped straight from The Evil Dead, and why The Dark Knight’s pencil trick was so iconic back in the day. This trait of “we need to justify ourselves” continued into Tony Stark’s playboy behavior in Iron Man. However, once the MCU began to dominate the conversation and cinema as a whole, they became easier and easier to swallow - people are stabbed, shot, kicked through walls with seemingly little consequences, and rarely are there ever “icky” moments.
This neutering of the PG-13 rating has made us forget that violence has consequences or that violence can come in forms that aren’t punching and stabbing. I highly doubt we’ll see something like X-Men: The Last Stand’s opening where Angel tries to cut off his wings in any superhero movie nowadays. The modern superhero is clean, light, and breezy, and the action never has consequences. It’s all walked off.
This isn’t to say every blockbuster nowadays lacks grit - looking at any Mission: Impossible flick, Kong: Skull Island, or DC’s recent release The Batman will tell you otherwise - but that the superhero genre as a whole has become neutered. As their stories grow more and more fantastical, they easily transition to become less and less real-world violent. In several Avengers films, Shang-Chi, Eternals, nearly all MCU flicks for that matter, small disposable CGI creatures are hacked and sawed at in ways that would constitute R if they had splatter.
Multiverse of Madness merely takes real-world consequences and applies it to these outlandish CGI creations - case in point, Gargantos’s death. The fact a magic sorceress kills people in magically creative ways shouldn’t be surprising, it should be expected. She’s evil and has the power to shift reality at will, what’s she going to do, punch them? This is just part of a larger series of evidence that, as the MCU has become more and more popular, just living up to standard will be applauded.
“This MCU movie actually had a decent score! Wow!” “This MCU show had an Emmy-worthy performance! Wow!” “This MCU movie actually had violence! Wow!” We’ve gotten to the point where what should be the bare minimum is now a rare premium. The MCU is no longer being judged by its relation to the industry as a whole, but rather judged by its relation to itself, which is to be expected when you’re nearly 30 films in and the envy of every rival studio. Rather than meeting the standard, it has now become the standard and lowered it to the point where basic competence is acclaimed.
It’s not just the violence - look at the sex scene in Eternals. While I personally find it unnecessary, that didn’t stop the presses from writing numerous articles about how the MCU had a sex scene, which was a fairly common practice in PG-13 movies 20 years ago. And I guarantee the MCU’s first F-bomb will warrant the same coverage, just as Multiverse of Madness is getting buzz and near reprimand for “daring” to have violence.
It is PG-13. By definition, that means it has content that might be unsuitable for children under 13. It’s shockingly violent - for the MCU. Otherwise, it’s just a movie that “earns” its rating, unlike most of the other MCU flicks which are rated PG-13 because that’s what blockbusters are rated. They’re PG PG-13. Multiverse of Madness is PG-13 PG-13, and even then it’s not as violent as the genuine horror articles such as Insidious, The Ring, The Sixth Sense, A Quiet Place Part I/II, or even Sam Raimi’s own Drag Me to Hell. They could have pushed the violence much, much further, which I imagine would have absolutely exploded MCU Twitter’s mind. Kevin Feige just said, to quote a certain other franchise, “Consider this mercy.”
It’s not that Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was more violent. It’s that everything else it would be compared to is less violent, shocking only the masses who have been spoon-fed MCU content for the past decade and not bothered to look outside the franchise for entertainment.
TL;DR - If you thought Multiverse of Madness should have been R, you need to touch cinematic grass.
Comments
Post a Comment