I’m not interested in superhero films.
At one time I was much into sci-fi and “speculative” fiction. Tried writing some, with scant success, though I did manage to get a novel published in the “sword and sorcery” genre despite zero sorcery. Which tells you something about me.
One science fiction story I remember reading involved a crew crash-landing on a far-distant planet. Doomed — unless they could devise some previously unknown technology to return to Earth. Undaunted, they set to work. I think it required inventing anti-gravity. And they did make it back! Only to do so, it turned out, they had to drag along that whole other planet.
A big plausibility stretch, but no natural laws were overtly violated. No superpowers involved. Only human powers — used to the max.
To me, stories and films with superheroes and superpowers are cheating. Sure, we’ve all mused how it might be to fly like Superman, or to be invisible, or to have x-ray vision (don’t go there, dirty-minded reader). However, the whole point of our primordial human penchant for stories and storytelling is to think about human predicaments and how we negotiate them. Imagining ourselves in such situations, vicariously experiencing them.
This is why I say it’s cheating to bring in superpowers. It’s akin to a “Get out of Jail Free” card. When a problem can be solved by flouting natural laws, then there’s no such thing as a problem; if one superpower doesn’t do the trick, just make up another. There are no limits. Any suspense is necessarily false; the whole story meaningless.
The ancient Greeks had the “Deus ex Machina,” the “God from the machine,” to do the equivalent — divine intervention. In their plays that was sometimes literal, the “machine” being some off-stage contraption inserting the god into the action. Something similar persists among modern religious believers, imagining a deity working like that. With powers like Superman’s, only better, since even Superman seems subject to laws of physics. (On the other hand, he at least operates in the open, visible to all.)
I prefer grounding in the real world, which offers plenty of stimulus and drama, with no need for the supernatural, super-beings, or superpowers, none of which exist or can exist. It’s why I wrote a sword-and-sorcery novel with no sorcery. And why I eschew both superhero movies and religion.
The Rational Pessimist 
