I Thought We Had Learned Our Lesson, Guys





















Suicide Squad, The Justice League, The Eternals, and Black Adam. What do these films have in common? Apart from the fact they're all superhero films and pretty poorly made, they all have one fatal flaw. They're all films that try to use an ensemble cast without properly establishing each character first.

The first time we had seen an ensemble film in the superhero genre with any presence was 2012's the Avengers, the at-the-time penultimate Marvel film that brought together characters from five different franchises released over four years and epicly showed them working together onscreen. Since then, many have tried to replicate this effect however, none of them seem to realize that in order to have the film be as compelling and entertaining as Avengers (2012) is, we need to care about the characters.

Suicide Squad wasn't the first film to make this mistake but it indeed serves as a fantastic example of why not to make it. The film is begging, pleading for its audience to care about the characters onscreen but it falls short simply because we are only meeting each one for the first time in this film, which subsequently means we have five, six, seven characters all trying to share screentime and development which makes every character have little to none. 

Justice League falls into the trap even though it has every reason not to. Half of its ensemble has already been established by the time we see them in the film, the other half either had made a cameo in a previous film or is completely new. Unfortunately, though, it still fails to make us care about any of the new characters.

We analyze films to learn from the innovations and mistakes of the past, and this is a mistake that's been made time and time again. For the love of god, can we please stop making ensemble films without establishing the characters first? Please? It makes boring movies, movies that spend so much time establishing that we never get a good story or so little time establishing that the audience is never invested.

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