Should Secret Wars Be A Marvel Movie?
I mean, it will be, of course.
Directors Anthony and Joe Russo say that Marvel’s “Secret Wars” is their dream movie project. It’s a superhero throwdown that would dwarf Infinity War’s scale. The Russos also say it’s the Marvel tale they best remember from their childhoods. It does seem an inevitable part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But the Middlebrow, who also loved the Secret Wars comics as a kid, thinks this story should stay within its pages and panels.
The first Secret Wars series (there were three, if memory serves) was about an all-powerful being called The Beyonder who lived in a universe separate from ours. A cosmic event (to be explained later) formed a pinprick hole between The Beyonder’s universe and the Marvel universe and the being looked through it, saw life on Earth (and presumably elsewhere in the cosmos) and became curious to understand the concept of desire.
Like any omniscient being, The Beyonder decided to explore desire through an elaborate experiment. He gathered all of the super-powered white hats and baddies from the Marvel Universe and put them on Battleworld, a planet of The Beyonder’s design. He also brought the world eating Galactus, a value-neutral force of nature who eats planets because that’s just what Galactuses do. “Defeat your enemies,” said The Beyonder, “and all that you desire will be yours.” (Paraphrasing here, it’s a comic book.
The heroes and villains divide naturally into teams, with Galactus set apart. The baddies are led by Victor von Doom, who went to Doom medical school, and the heroes choose Captain America to lead them. Like in a pro wrestling battle royal, the big fun here is that characters that rarely interact will have to fight each other. What happens if Dr. Octopus gets his tentacles on Iron Man? Is the Mighty Thor a match for Magneto’s mastery of magnetism?
In that sense, “Secret Wars” is like all the kids coming over for the afternoon with their Marvel action figures, nobody having any doubles, and every character of consequence represented and ready for action. This, more than anything, is why kids liked Secret Wars.
Sure, there was some good storytelling about desire and torn loyalties. The mutants, including Magneto and the X-Men, who seek justice for their oppressed kind, don’t necessarily share loyalties with either side. Galactus, who seeks an end to his unceasing hunger, has a cosmic agenda. Doom wants power, but more to perfect the universe than to rule it. The ever-loving Thing, transformed into a hideous but powerful golem by cosmic radiation way back in Fantastic Four #1 just wants to be loved and to reclaim his human form while Bruce Banner wishes to be free from the curse of the Hulk (who saves the heroes by holding up the Rocky Mountains, which the powerful Molecule Man, who can control all matter and energy with just a thought, had dropped on them.
If you don’t know what much of this means, don’t worry. The point is that “Secret Wars” was just a super-powered slobberknocker — a Pier 6 brawl, if you will. Anything deep or nuanced was purely accidental, though some momentous things did happen, including Spider-Man finding the black and white alien symbiotic costume that would become the antihero Venom and the creation of Titania, a woman who can lift 80 tons and go on to big-time rivalries against Thor and She-Hulk. The heroes also learned that James Rhodes was donning the Iron Man armor as Tony Stark faced his alcoholism.
In the end, The Beyonder’s rumble turns out a no contest. Galactus tries but fails to force The Beyonder to end his hunger. In the process, Doom steals The Beyonder’s omnipotence and destroys the good guys with a “bolt from the blue.” But he doesn’t really desire to kill all the heroes, it turns out and Doom’s inability to control his psychological insecurities despite his power allows the heroes to be reborn to face him at which point, what’s left of The Beyonder reclaims the power and banishes Doom. The denouement is how the heroes and villains find their ways home.
Then, Secret Wars II happens. Unsatsified with toy sales from his first experiment, The Beyonder travels to Earth, makes himself a copy of Captain America’s body, gives himself dark hair and a Jerri curl and lives among the humans, again trying to understand desire. Realizing that he will never understand the nature of wanting when he is all-powerful, The Beyonder builds a machine that will suck his omnipotence away and birth him as a truly mortal human. As he does this, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes debate whether they should kill him in his mechanical womb or let him be born. In the end, the Molecule Man strikes the fatal blow and an explosion rocks the Earth. Two things arise from this — the Earth is badly damaged and in danger of falling apart and The Beyonder’s energy travels back to its Universe where it kicks off a cycle of evolution that spawns life. In the process of saving the Earth, the Molecule Man and cosmically-powered Silver Surfer combine their energies to heal the planet’s crust. This apparently burns out the Molecule Man’s power (it doesn’t, really, but he fakes being powerless so the heroes will leave him alone.)
A few years after that, The Thing, leading a version of the Fantastic Four, travels to The Beyonder’s universe where they find a planet much like Earth, full of fundamentalist Beyonder-worshippers. During this adventure, we learn that The Beyonder is really a warped piece of a Cosmic Cube. In the Marvel Comics a Cosmic Cube is a vastly powerful, well, cube, that can bend reality to the will of its user. There are naturally occurring cosmic cubes, which are very powerful, and artificial cubes made by the US military that are less reliable. In the Marvel Movies, the Cosmic Cube is the tesseract from the first Avenger’s Movie, later revealed to be the Reality Stone, of Infinity Stones fame.
Around when The Beyonder was revealed to be a Cosmic Cube and merged with the essence of a being called Kubik, The Middlebrow stopped collecting and regularly reading Marvel comics.
Why all this recap? Well, it was fun to revisit these old tales through nothing but memory and the Secret Wars were the thread of Marvel storytelling that bound the titles of the 1980s together. But fun aside, summarizing the three Secret Wars and the story of The Beyonder just emphasizes how its inherent campiness is perfect for the comic book but maybe not so much the blockbuster prestige movie.