Most often i see this in MCU projects. The number of times in the Loki series any kind of projection weapons were used was like three. None of the TVA people had projection weapons.
Even worse when you have fliers with projection abilities fighting a non-flier without any, like in Endgame vs Thanos.
See also: Comic-book universes have the most incompetent SWAT teams ever.
Do you want your fights to be over with in a second?
Yes, the MCU ends every movie with an unbelievably stupid endless scene in which faceless hordes are punched in the face by the good guys. But really, how different are those from all the westerns or war movies in which the bad guys shoot off thousands of bullets that never hit anyone or martial arts movies where a horde of baddies step up one by one to fight the hero? Or Superman ever fighting in person instead of using his powers from thousands of miles away or flying in at the speed of light?
Fiction doesn’t have logic. Visual excitement trumps everything. Roger Ebert put out his Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary a quarter century ago, a compendium of idiotic movie cliches that keep getting repeated long after everyone over the age of twelve could spot them. They’ve never change until audiences do. Good luck with that.
“Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight”?
There was an Agents of SHIELD episode I caught part of where a bunch of guys in full SWAT gear and assault rifles breach a room full of bad guys firing guns back at them, but for whatever reason the normal ass main characters ran ahead of the SWAT guys and proceeded to fight the armed bad guys with judo.
This isn’t necessarily dumb in the context of superheros. Superman can punch waaaay harder than a gun. The characters that have more effective range attacks do use them, but for the Hulk to go for range when his fist is orders of magnitude more devastating would be the stupid thing.
The original Ghostbusters fought Gozer at the end, bringing their streams together. It was cool. The rebooted Ghostbusters fought a horde of faceless ghosts, Marvel style. It wasn’t cool.
Hey, I got an idea for the next MCU movie. Show Iron Man stepping on an anthill. For a half hour.
As in Infinity War…eventually one of the ants gets tired of all the buzzing and knocks down Tony…errr…Rhodey, with an anchor or something.
I just rewatched blade and the (pretty cool if a little cheesey now) opening scene of that is the most ridiculous example of this. Blade walks into a warehouse rave full of countless vampires, a good percentage of them apparently packing various firearms. But other than the odd pot shot (not taken from cover, obviously so Blade can return fire and a take out the shooter with a single shot) they all line up to fight blade hand-to-hand one at a time.
This is a trope of it’s own. There is no surer guarantee that a body of infantry in an action movie will be spectacularly incompetent at every aspect of military conduct than being presented as “elite”. The more bad ass they are attired and equipped the more certain they will not be able to hit a barn door or show a hint of situational awareness.
The new XXX movie has well armed teams of mercenaries losing to a guy literally running them over with his dirt bike.
They’d have to figure out a way to bring Tony Stark back without making his sacrifice in Endgame seem meaningless.
Well yeah - they’re vampires. They may dress all pretty, but they’re still basically animals who are driven more by instinct than by logic. Why shoot an enemy when you can establish your dominance by killing him with your bare hands? Remember, the higher-up vampires - the ones most capable of acting human - didn’t take part in that first fight, just the monsters.
A superhero-themed video game I play has gangs of low-level villains, some of whom use guns, and some don’t. In one zone where they interact, you can overhear one gangster telling another “He who lives by the sword gets shot by he who doesn’t”.
This is why the Indiana Jones scene (you know the one I mean) was so brilliant.
And nicely riffed on in the next movie.
Prolonging a fight is the manly thing to do.
In one of the later seasons of The Strain, one of the main protagonists is explaining to one of the newly-arrived special forces guys the various ways to kill the vampires - stakes, silver dust, beheading and the like. Special Forces guy proceeds to use his rifle to blow one vamp’s head off.
“Yeah, that works too…”
I started losing interest in the Marvel Netflix TV shows (Daredevil, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Jessica Jones) once I realised they all had the same power: super-punching.
I remember thinking about this as I watched Aquaman. Black Manta, wearing a suit that lets him fly and has a beam weapon, still felt the need to trade punches with our intrepid hero. But in retrospect, I am willing to believe that Black Manta, thirsty for revenge, would only be satisfied with the visceral thrill of a proper brawl. And his beam weapon might not have had the batteries to finish off Aquaman, either.
That is, of course, factually incorrect. At least one Marvel movie ends without a big punchy-shooty fight at all (Dr. Strange). Another ends with a big punching fight between the two most popular heroes of the series, both of whom think they are in the right (Civil War), with the actual bad guy long since out of the picture. Many Marvel movies end with a big fight between a hero and their nemesis, but with no hordes involved. And I’m sure I’m forgetting some other variations.
I mean, honestly, I wish people would stop thinking “the MCU is big and popular and at least somewhat formulaic, hey, I’ll dunk on it” without realizing that it is as close as we’re ever likely to see to a massively popular movie franchise with special effects and explosions and CGI and so forth that actually puts a pretty obvious good-faith effort into keeping its formula fresh, taking artistic chances, making movies in a wide varieties of subgenre, etc.
