A super genre

The wonderful Tom Hiddleston has recently written an apology, a defence, for the (currently ubiquitous) superhero genre. As a film fan, I have had to defend any number of excellent comic book and superhero films from the dismissive snobbery with which they are often greeted. They are judged as silly, pointless and without meaningful parallels to real life. Can I, I am asked, in all good conscience, say that Batman Begins or The Dark Knight are as good as The Godfather? Yes, I believe I can.

Genre shouldn't be important when judging a film's worth. If superhero movies are treated with disdain, surely that means that animation should be even further down the list: goodbye Studio Ghibli and the genius of Hayao Miyazaki, goodbye Up and the Toy Story trilogy. It's a very childish and narrow minded stance to take, especially when the themes and dramatic tropes of the genre are even more far-reaching than films that subscribe to the realism some critics find so important. Due to the scale of some of the superhero films, Thor, for example, these movies often encompass a huge variety of human emotion and circumstance purely because they depict grand, extreme conditions and occurrences. As Tom points out, Shakespeare wasn't exactly known for his quiet, banal observations of the human condition; he wrote genuine pot-boilers, soaked in blood and murder and sex, yet he is still held to be the paragon of literary genius.

If you enjoy it and it fulfils its brief, then it is a good film. Surely it should be as simple as that?