Superhero teams - Do we really need all these people to fight crime?

Obviously there has been a proliferation of superhero films over the past couple of years. Particularly popular are superhero “teams” - Avengers, X-Men, Justice League, Suicide Squad, Watchmen so on and so forth. Probably because of the studio’s ability to turn them into massive shared universe of films.

What’s also painfully obvious is that not every hero on the team pulls their weight. In some cases, there is really only a need for the one guy.
**Dr. Manhattan **was the only **Watchman **with actual super powers. And godlike ones at that. He could snap his fingers and evaporate every criminal in the world. The rest were just a bunch of violent jerks in masks. The only reason there were other Watchmen was because Dr M mostly didn’t seem to give a shit.

As cool as **Wolverine **and the X-Men are, with their various powers that usually involve some form of blasting stuff with mutant beams, at the end of the day, all **Xavier **has to do is shut everyone’s mind down or **Magneto **can either just tear every atom apart or drop a bridge on them. And some mutant powers just suck…ahem…Jubilee.

The **Avengers ** are the only team AFAIK to acknowledge that one of their members is actually kind of silly (Hawkeye).

Legitimately, you only have 4 Avengers with actual superpowers - **Thor, Hulk, Vision **and Scarlet Witch, who when they put their mind (or lack there of in Hulks case) to it, they are pretty much unstoppable.

You have a bunch of more or less regular guys in power suits -** Iron Man, Ant Man, Falcon** and soon Wasp

And finally you have these “enhanced” people like **Captain America, Black Window, Black Panther **and Hawkeye who don’t use real weapons but can be as strong, tough and indestructible as the story needs.

And don’t think I didn’t notice **Batman **doing jack shit while **Superman **and **Wonder Woman **fought Doomsday, until he could figure out how to kill him. But who knows about the rest of the JL. **Aqua Man **has bit a bit of a joke for years. “I talk to…fish!”
Also, one thing I’ve noticed is that whatever their powers, every “super” person has the innate power of surviving a direct blast from a plasma beam or being thrown 100 feet through a concrete wall. Half the Avengers should have been killed at the airport in Captain America Civil War. I mean why was Rhody even injured? How many times has Iron Man been thrown through a skyscraper with no ill effects other than some minor bruising around the ego?

Not quite true. Ozymandias was legitimately super-fast. Not at Flash’s level, maybe, but fast enough that he can (just barely) catch a bullet fired at him.

And don’t dismiss the metatechnologists like Stark so easily. The man literally made his first powered armor suit, powered by a nuclear reactor the size of your fist, out of scrap parts in a cave in a third-world hellhole. The ability to do that is most certainly super.

Look up “The I who defeated the Justice League” to see how Batman saved everyone’s ass without superpowers.

You’re so used to thinking that superheroes = fights, that you can’t concieve of intelligence as being important. Superheroes these days are not very smart, and only succeed because their villains are even more stupid (what moron would attack the Avengers directly?). Superhero teams used the talents of their less powerful members to outsmart the villains.

If you look at the Watchmen, and the background in the story, you’ll notice that it is actually criticism on the whole superhero thing. It’s just people who decided to wear costumes and this results in crime going up.
The only real powerful being is Dr. Manhattan who knows this and takes himself out of the equation. Also, keep in mind that he basically stopped understanding human emotions and actions so why would he stop crime? Might as well stop breathing as well.
Ozmandias has his smarts which he decided to use for his own gain (the company) and some skill (but nothing superhuman I believe)

In other universes it’s different. You mention Superman and Wonderwoman beat on Doomsday and then Batman figures out a way to stop him. That’s his role. He is not expected to be a powerhouse like the others. He is the guy that finds solutions. World’s greatest detective.
Aquaman is actually damn strong as well iirc, and besides fish he also talks (thus sorta controls) the monsters of the sea :slight_smile:

X-Men. Yes Xavier could do that with his mind but he made a promise to protect people and not control them. Magneto yeah he probably could destroy everything but he’s a villain not a good guy (yet has enough humanity left to not do it in the end)

As far as Avengers goes…again everyone has their part to play. Hawkeye and Widow (who isn’t enhanced in the movies and barely enhanced in the comics) do realize they’re out of their league but they bring their own type of smarts. Hawkeye’s ability to hit anything sure comes in handy when they needed it in Manhattan. Widow’s assassin/spy skills were useful when she infiltrated the the world council in Civil War.
And yes, some of the powerhouses are unstoppable but also have limitations. Scarlet Witch is mentally unstable. Just talk to her and she’ll stop. Hulk is a force of nature that might just walk away. Thor is big & strong but he does tire, depends on the hammer etc etc.

As for the power suits…slight fanwank here but I assume that even when Iron Man gets thrown 100 yards through a building the suit functions and tries to stabilize him. It protects him, creates buffers, air bags whatever.
When Rhodes got shot out of the sky he went in complete shut down and just splatted.
The suit didn’t help break his fall

Obviously everyone’s power levels and weaknesses simply depend on the story that needs to be told but I do feel most of the time it does make sense in some way.

To teach valuable lessons about teamwork and how everyone has an talent which is exploitable for the benefit of society.

Nope. He didn’t catch the bullet with speed, he caught it by having the tunnel of his curled fingers being in exactly the right place relative to the bullet’s trajectory. His power is smarts, not speed.

ETA - of course, he did have to be way fast to get his hand in position in the first place, but that’s comic-book “peak human” speed, not Flash-style superspeed

Hawkeye knows he’s not as tough as the other Avengers - and he can sing about it too. :cool:

Can’t wait to read how you ruin Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Don’t get me started on Rudolph.

Generally super-heroes don’t fight crime. Crime comes to them.

For a long while the Avengers should have been called “The Reactors”

In the Watchman opening fight, Comedian punches a chunk out of his fireplace while Ozymandias tosses Comedian around like a sack of flour and easily catches a cleaver thrown at him. Both seem at least a little above the norm, especially relative to their physiques. I’ve never read the comics and thus never been sure if that is intentional or just artistic license for the sake of a compelling fight scene.

The movie has all the non-powered heroes waaay more powerful than in the comics. There is no fireplace-punching in the comic, nor is the alley fight of NO&SS vs the gangsters presented as anywhere as martial artsy.

The problem is that if you assume that in the Watchmen-universe, anybody other than Dr. Manhattan has superpowers, it really undercuts the narrative—basically, everybody’s just playing at being something greater than normal humans, while Dr. Manhattan actually is as a contrast; nobody’s got superpowers except for him, and he gets all of them. So when they do something that seems implausible for a human being in our universe, then just remember that their universe isn’t ours (after all, Nixon getting five terms in office is also implausible in our universe). From a story point of view, everybody besides Dr. Manhattan is clearly meant to be non-super.

They should have been called…I don’t know…something clever that means someone who cleans up the very mess that they themselves caused and then asks for a bigger cleaning staff with more expensive mops. Since they largely caused all the problems that would require people like the Avengers to resolve:

Hulk is the result of Banner’s reckless experimentation on himself.

The Stark family is responsible for massive proliferation of advanced weapons, including the super soldier serum used to create the Winter Soldier. Not to mention Stark’s whole Ultron experiment. And would it have killed Tony to have been nicer to Aldrich Killian?

If Thor didn’t show up on Earth with Loki, the McGuffin Stones and all their Asgardian baggage, we wouldn’t have half the films.

Turns out SHIELD was really HYRDA all along. Sort of begs the question of why they even created the Avengers in the first place.

If you don’t want a proliferation of Ant-Man suit technology, stop making Ant-Man suits.

And I kind of think destroying an airport in reaction to the Sokovia Accords is just the sort of thing the Sorkovia Accords was trying to prevent.
What are they going to do in Avengers: Infinity War? Split the Earth in half in Part 1 and then spend Part 2 gluing it back together?

Traditionally, even perfect bullet catching technique and form results in having the fingers on your hand blown off.

This?

msmith537:

Well, that one’s easy - not all of SHIELD knew about the Hydra infiltration, notably, Fury and Coulson, the drivers behind the Avengers, were not in the loop.

I imagine the directors who WERE Hydra did not try to stop Fury from assembling the Avengers because they were assembled in response to Loki’s invasion, which was a threat to Hydra’s interests as well.

The classic story outline is one in which an ordinary terrorist/madman/blackmailer/dictator gets hold of a machine/artifact that gives them the power to create disasters/monsters, and the heroes split up. The big guys handle damage control and rescue operations while the more down-to-earth heroes track down and subdue the mastermind.

Making the mastermind a megapowered juggernaut himself is a relatively recent trend that throws off the formula. (Hey, to me anything under four decades is “relatively recent.”)

Having the power to generate explosive plasma (and potentially detonate matter on a sub-atomic level) sucks?