Minnal Murali: The best superhero movie of the year can teach Marvel how to solve the problem of villains

There are exactly seven good villains in the movies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (there’s one more if you count the movies). That’s a pretty disappointing success rate for a franchise that includes 27 movies and has had over a decade to fix this problem. You’d think mistakes like this would teach them a lesson, but for every ShangChi and The Legend of the Ten Rings and Black Panther, there are dozens of baker movies like Ant Man and the Wasp and Thor: The Dark World.
Collectively, this recidivism is known as the Marvel Villain Problem, which also found a way to infect SpiderMan: No Way Home recently. But few knew that an Indian superhero movie from the Malayalam industry, out a week later, would be the right movie to teach the billion-dollar giant of Marvel a lesson. on how to create convincing villains. Directed by Basil Joseph and starring Tovino Thomas, Minnal Murali is having a great time in the movies, and in a year has brought us 10 new MCU projects and a DC epic. Four hours long, this is your best superhero story. capable of seeing. This is not only because of the patience as the film tells the story with low intent, but largely because it gives its protagonist – a village boor named Jaison – a worthy opponent, played by the Guru. Somasundaram played the role. Minnal Murali is well read in cinematic parlance – it borrows elements not only from the lore of Superman and Batman, but also from key elements of SpiderMan’s plot. But upon closer inspection, you’ll notice it crept around the same trap that has consumed Thanos in so many MCU movies, but has a common sense of never falling for it. Like Iron Man 2, Ant Man, and even Black Panther, Minnal’s villain Murali is essentially an evil clone of the hero.
Jaison and Shibu were both struck by the same lightning on the same fateful night, giving them identical powers. Both are despised by the women they love, and along the way, Shibu and Jaison realize that they were, and always will be, strangers. There’s a reason you often hear villains in Hollywood movies say things like “You and I are so similar” to heroes. That’s because they are; they wrote it on purpose.
In a sense, Jaison and Shibu were both born equal; Every coin has two sides. But their circumstances have turned them into very different individuals who undertake parallel journeys of biblical significance. In another world, they could be friends, if not brothers. But as Jaison is moved and ultimately inspired by his late father’s stories, Shibu’s bitterness rises again when the only person he loves is taken from him.
They are bound by loss and prejudice – the same cop throws a caste insult at Jaison, while insisting that Shibu is Tamil. Minnal Murali at first glance is a vibrant superhero movie, but contains extremely attractive about religion, class and legendary way of doing things.

You may remember in Iron Man 2, how Justin Hammer and Ivan Drago used the same technology as Tony Stark. Or in Black Panther, Killmonger is indeed blood related to T’Challa.
Minnal Murali digs into this movie over the course of two hours, as it delves so deeply into Shibu’s past that you might mistake him for the hero – he’s definitely in his own head. But when the “turn” happens, followed by a wonderfully well-executed sequence on a farm, you won’t doubt it for even a second. Those who are willing to stick with the film, given its winding narratives that don’t always make sense for viewers who grew up in the boxed style of American superhero cinema, will be commended. reward. It’s dramatic, but it also forces you to consider seemingly arbitrary factors influencing our results. It’s not like Shibu has never felt compassion in his life – he did – but it broke him. It could be a classic case of a man longing for affection. Loyal and defeated, Shibu values ​​the first person to show love to him. And that became his downfall. But who can not relate to this?
The goal should never be to justify the behavior of the villains in stories like these, but to explain it. Minnal Murali doesn’t think Shibu deserves to live, but butchering him for more than two hours, it sheds light on the tragedy of his inevitable death. He doesn’t need to die; you’re sorry, he doesn’t have to make choices like he did. But how many of these choices were made for him? Was he destined to always be like this, resigned to living a worthless life from birth? The “what if” cannot be eliminated.
Not all heroes wear capes, they say. But they never tell you that some villains look like middle-aged uncles, it’s okay to have mustaches.