How to Make Movies Feel Huge (w/ Characters)

A few months ago at this point, I went into the movie theatres to see Black Widow. It was the first movie I had viewed in a theatre since Birds of Prey back in February of 2020, and I was far more invested in the sheer experience of seeing a movie than I was in the movie itself. To my surprise, I really liked Black Widow! But I didn’t think I had a lot to say about it in terms of review. Like, I enjoyed it an awful lot, but it also had some central problems, especially in the third act, and my takeaway was largely, “yeah, it was fun!” And there’s nothing wrong with that, but it makes for a boring review.

It's deeply unfortunate that they finally gave Nat a tangible sense of depth after they'd already wrote her out in Endgame. But that's an essay unto itself.

So, I didn’t end up writing anything! But I felt bad because I had been so excited to get back into writing reviews. It had been a year and a half since I’d been able to do a proper review like this! And I felt a little obligated to talk about my return to the theatres, and Marvel’s return to the big screen, etc. But I didn’t know if I had enough to fill out a review (in reflection, I probably could, but alas – time was short). Then, I saw a second movie in theatres – The Suicide Squad. This, too, was overall a pretty solid movie! I had much less criticism of it than I did for Black Widow, but I still didn’t know if I had a lot to say about it. It was good! It was fun! But in comparison, I actually had a ton of similar things to hit on between the two movies. Both were movies with relatively small stakes – and yet they felt huge, and I don’t think that was entirely driven by the theatre experience. I think they both tapped into this understanding of what makes a story work.

Yelena is the best character in the MCU right now and she should be in everything.

There’s a lot of things that work and don’t work about Black Widow. There’s a pretty big adaption change from a classic Marvel character in this film, but it worked for me. Meanwhile, a lot of the third act spectacle kind of didn’t work for me. It was alright and everything, but nothing really grabbed me about the ending, at least not to the extent that the opening did. Because I adored the first twenty minutes.

That’s kind of a weird thing to say, but it’s the thing that’s stuck with me the most about this movie. I don’t know if it was the sensation of seeing a movie on the big screen again, but something about those opening twenty minutes felt huge. And they felt huge in a way that didn’t really persist throughout the movie. What got me, the reason I’m so captivated by these opening twenty minutes, is how small they are, practically speaking. This is a franchise that has featured collapsing cities, the domination of humanity, and an alien plotting the death of half of all life in the universe. The opening of Black Widow simply depicts the death of innocence, and yet it’s the most powerful thing in the whole script.

It's crazy how quiet the beginning of this movie is. The long quiet shots of Nat in Norway make it feel like an actual film, almost.

Black Widow opens in 1995, where Natasha Romanov is living in Ohio with her makeshift family. Given what we’ve come to know about Natasha, we can put together that this family is a fragile thing; a group of Russian spies undercover under the guise of family, and a group that won’t stick together for long. But in a very short segment, we buy this family so quickly. We buy especially that these young kids, Natasha and Yelena, would get lost in playing family. When that act begins to crumble apart around them, we feel every moment. It’s devastating, and the action that ensues is possibly some of the most gripping action in the MCU? That seems like a reach, but I just remember seeing David Harbour hanging desperately onto the wing of a plane and losing my mind. It’s such a small conflict in the scope of the greater franchise, but something about it felt huge. Again, maybe it was just the bigness of the screen, but I think it was something more. I think there was something about the characters. Because this wasn’t just David Harbour, this was Nat’s dad, Nat’s family – and what does it mean for this eleven-year-old girl if her dad dies in front of her?

It always comes down to character. Every decision I like in this movie comes down to character. The characters tie Black Widow together and it would be nothing without them.

This is the best bit of the whole movie. I love this scene so much.

The characters of Black Widow work because there is a deep sense of reality to all of them. Their biggest problems aren’t aliens or robots, but domestic fallout and deep trauma. After the aforementioned opening sequence, the movie breaks into a haunting credits sequence depicting the abuse and trafficking in the Black Widow program sandwiched against propagandist imagery. It sets up a much more serious movie than we eventually get, but it immediately demonstrates that there is some very real subtext to the sort of past that our characters suffered through. Our awareness of this past brings a lot of weight to their struggles in the present, especially those of Yelena. I have nothing but love for Florence Pugh, and she really brings Black Widow to a whole new level. The only family she ever had was the family that was manufactured for her in Ohio – a family that was always a ruse, and one that was inevitably taken from her. Moreover, her father figure was directly responsible for all the hardship she went through in the Black Widow program. This central tragedy underlines the entire movie. The further the movie drifts from that core family dynamic, the less it works. For as long as Black Widow is a small character piece about this broken family coming back together, it is incredible. But as it fades back into the typical Marvel action, you lose the central drama. The bigger the movie gets, the less it really feels big. But the small moments, where we slow down and just sit with our characters? Those are huge.

I had all this written in my head months ago, and to my surprise, there’s now another Marvel movie that I could describe in basically the same fashion. But we’ll get to that another day.

There's something so perfectly 'comic book' about this movie. It's just a real blast.

Rather, I wanted to kill two birds with one stone in this article because, as I said, there was another movie that I saw a while ago that also kind of fits in this category, and that was The Suicide Squad. This was also a movie that I really liked, thought was really fun, but didn’t feel I had very much to say about it. And it’s also a movie that has a strong family dynamic, and one that really feels bigger for it. Even more than Black Widow, this is a movie that is riding some big coattails – the DC movies always just feel big by nature. Snyder’s style is like that. While Black Widow had the virtue of being the only MCU movie in a hot minute, The Suicide Squad came out shortly after the much-discussed release of the “Justice League Snyder’s Cut,” which I still have yet to see and possibly never will. Not only that, but it’s also a kind-of sequel to David Ayer’s poorly received Suicide Squad, and was directed by James Gunn who was launched into the public eye through the Guardian of the Galaxy movies. So, there’s a lot going on. But despite all the hype… The Suicide Squad is a pretty small, straightforward movie.

James Gunn has always excelled at this, GotG 2 is almost purely a character piece, to the delight of some and chagrin of others. The movie rides the line in following suit. I don’t know if it reaches the highs of the Guardians movies, but I also think I need to watch it again without my other expectations. Because even under the simplicity, there’s a lot going on. There are plenty of antagonistic characters but not a lot of genuine villains – and they aren’t where you’d usually expect. It’s a straightforward found-family dynamic that sits on top of messy and complex conversations of American militarism and patriotism. Like, there’s a lot. But it’s all underneath these really solid characters. Gunn has an incredible talent to create a full cast stuffed with different, complex characters who are all uniquely loveable. With this one, we have a team of seven that carry us through most of the action, and they’re all clearly identifiable and interesting in their own right. Each one gets to carry a scene, gets a moment of depth. I would watch a full-length show about just about any one of them. And without that depth they hold, without the different aspects they represent, the movie would lose a lot of its weight.

Idris Elba as Bloodsport was probably my biggest surprise from this one. He's just so cool? I'm way more interested in him than any character Snyder has written.

Even more than GotG, The Suicide Squad is a movie about the ‘scum of the earth.’ It’s a collection of people who were rejected by their past lives, who have strained and complex relationships with parents, daughters, etc. Their only purpose now is to serve their country and die. But in each other, they find not just a sense of belonging, but acceptance. Sure, one of them is a talking shark played by Sylvester Stallone who just wants to eat everything he sees. One of them pukes polka-dots, and his deep trauma warps his perception of the world. But with this team, these people all find purpose. Their past begins to mean something. While they don’t piece together a family they had lost like in Black Widow, they begin to put together a new family in the present. The counterpart to Yelena in this movie is Ratcatcher 2, played by the very new but very incredible Daniela Melchior. She brings a deep sense of heart and soul into every interaction she has. Through her, we get a quote towards the very end of the movie, in a flashback where she asks her father (played by Taika Waititi!) why he uses rats as the tools for his crimes. “Rats are the lowliest and most despised creatures of all, my love,” he says, “If they have a purpose, so do we.”

That’s the heartbeat of The Suicide Squad, a group of people finding purpose in one another and in this new dynamic they’ve created than in the systems they’ve been thrust into that don’t give a damn about them or their well-being. The entire opening of this movie is establishing how throwaway the lives in this organization are, and how this cast is going to evolve beyond that. Even that opening only works because of his innately fun and interesting Gunn immediately makes his characters. We get that this is a “suicide” squad for a reason, and are invested in each of these screwballs as we get into the movie proper. The action is usually small and tight, but because we care about these people, it all works. Through our explorations of Bloodsport and Polka-Dot Man we get to see that these aren’t just silly characters with weird and fun abilities, but people with dark pasts that they’re struggling to overcome. And when they begin to overcome those pasts together, we are deeply invested in their future. We want to see these people succeed – not just because they have this big mission, but because we want the characters themselves to flourish. That’s what a good movie does, and that’s how these smaller movies get to feel so big. Sure, by the end of both Black Widow and The Suicide Squad we get to big comic book action. But by that point we’re invested because of the small moments.

John Cena really kills it in this movie. He's really something else.

I don’t want to spoil too much from either of these movies (the aforementioned quote already feels like a quote, despite not giving anything away), but there’s a beat in the third act of The Suicide Squad that really gets this. You’ll know it when you see it. But sufficed to say, even as the movie is getting bigger in scope, Gunn knows when to focus in. The moments that land the best in that climax aren’t the huge action moments, rather, it’s the small conflict between characters, the moments when ideologies and worldviews violently clash. There is so much more tension in those beats than in the bigger spectacle, because it comes from genuine expressions of these characters that we’ve gotten to know over the course of the movie. Legitimate conflict from within your cast is always going to hit deeper than any outside force will. They’re often smaller moments, but they dramatically affect the characters, and as such leave a much bigger impact on the audience.

I didn't have a caption for this, so I'm just going to rant that despite both of these movies being on streaming I still struggle to find good stills??

I could really go on about this sort of thing forever – a few months ago I watched 10 Cloverfield Lane for the first time and it definitely operates on the same principle. I also played through Spider-Man PS4 recently (and boy do I want to do a piece on Spider-Man content, now) and it really gets how to ground drama in core character beats. While we’re talking about Spider-Man, it’s also why I’m increasingly worried about No Way Home, because I’m really afraid the character of Peter Parker is going to be lost in all the spectacle. The spectacle is fun, but it can’t make a movie feel huge the way that a small character beat can. Ten-minute freefalls and giant starfish attacks are cool, but neither of them feel as big as David Harbour hanging off a plane or Taika Waititi talking about rats. Those are the moments I took away from those movies. Even with all the spectacle of being in front of the big screen again, the biggest moments are still the small ones.