At the beginning of Avengers: Endgame we find Thor having given up on himself, grown fat on beer and hamburgers. He must learn to embrace his godhood again. Tony Stark has retreated into family life, he must rediscover what it means to be a hero again, eventually giving his life for the cause. Hawkeye has descended into a violent quest for revenge, he must relearn to value his friends who still care for him.
At the beginning of Avengers: Infinity War we find Thor humbled after losing a fight to Thanos. He must journey to the far edge of the universe to forge an axe and learn to embrace his godhood again.
At the beginning of Thor: Ragnarok we find Thor overconfident, believing he has prevented Ragnorok and saved Asgard. He is soon humbled by a new, more powerful enemy, has his hammer destroyed, and winds up in a hellish, insane world where he is reduced to a gladiator slave. He must learn to embrace his godhood in order to escape and save his people.
At the beginning of Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 2 we find Peter Quill cocky and reckless, happy to dismiss his adoptive father and to ignore his friends when he is united with his natural father. He must learn to take himself seriously and value his friends.
At the beginning of Guardians of the Galaxy we find Peter Quill cocky and reckless, a thief and a self centred opportunist. He must learn to take himself seriously and value his friends.
At the beginning of ... well, you get the idea.
I have only picked films I liked for the above list, and only ones I can remember well, and yet I could go on. In particular I did not work my way back far-enough to hit an origin story, where an ordinary person finds they have superpowers and must, inevitably, learn what it means to be a hero. Thor (my personal favourite of the bunch) is a particularly egregious example; in five different movies he seems to need to rediscover what it truly means to be a god. Tony Stark, too forever seems to be learning how to balance a life between being Tony and being Iron Man. Peter Quill twice learned to be more serious and less self-centred, yet last we saw, on the fight on Titan, he costs the Avengers victory over Thanos in a moment of impetuous anger.
These personal journeys are nothing surprising, they are part of the well understood formula for storytelling, but over multiple films the endless character reset becomes jarring. Yet there have been multiple movies following the same superhero before without this niggle. It is new.
In the Richard Donner films, Superman never has a character ark beyond advancing his relationship with Lois Lane. He ends the movies no more committed to truth and justice and the American way than he began them. In the Tim Burton and Joel Schumaker Batman movies, Batman achieves no personal growth beyond his initial origin story. Stretching the definition of superhero, James Bond (his superpower is not falling over after three martinis) never learned anything about himself or confronted his own failings. Jet Li's marvellous Wong Fei Hung never discovered what it really means to be a Kung-Fu master.
Moving beyond the medium of film; the endless tea-time TV superheroes of my youth: Lou Ferrigno's Hulk, Spiderman, Wonder Woman, Manimal, The A-Team, Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap, the protagonists of Knight Rider and Airwolf, all ended each episode exactly the same person they began.
Comics are too wide a medium to make sweeping pronouncements on, but the dime-store periodicals where these characters began are famous for simply producing adventure after adventure after adventure. Superman might start an episode weakened by Kryptonite, but he never starts it with character flaws to overcome.
In novels too; Conan, Tarzan, Alan Quatermain, the myriad 'knight of the plains' cowboys modelled on Owen Wister's The Virginian, James Bond again. None of them are known for learning how to be heroes over the course of a book.
So has something has changed in the way we tell ourselves superhero stories?
Yes. Something simple. Something obvious. They're very popular now.
There are not enough superheros with the cultural cachet of Superman or Spiderman to populate a cinematic universe. Those two might get some buy-in from audiences before the curtains have risen, but Iron Man? If you want an audience of millions to watch an Iron Man movie, if you want to make a good film about Iron Man, you're going to have to introduce him to them properly, and make them like him, and make them care. You do this through good writing and acting, by creating a character who goes on a journey and grows as a person. It is what makes these characters attractive and the movies fun.
It is perhaps important to say that I think the Marvel movies are good movies. I'm not a huge fan (I like the funny ones best), but viewed as a single body of work the consistent quality is impressive; they are not always great but they are always fun. They are kind, and witty, and human. They have an admirable commitment to embracing all the camp visuals and wild lore of the comics while simultaneously bringing the characters down to earth, giving them real problems and real preoccupation. They try to embrace broader, more complex themes than just good versus evil while also eschewing the easy nihilism of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. They take place in the real world (even when they take place in space) where actions have consequences.
So the character reset is a property of good writing, not bad. The only problem is that superhero stories -hero stories if you prefer- impose one strict limitation that means it must be repeated every single time; the focus of each story is on the hero, it is about them. It is always the hero who must go on a journey and grow as a character, no matter how many times they have done so before.
It might, theoretically, be possible to have a hero -like Ellen Ripley- find reserves of steely strength in one film and learn to be a mother again in another, but his is hard (see Ripley learning to, err... appreciate the Alien's point of view? in cubed and Resurrection), it requires radically different circumstances for each story that you cannot just impose on pre-existing canon worlds.
So, instead, back we go each time to enjoy the ride again. Reset. Reset. Reset.
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