Joss Whedon

#7. ’The Cabin in the Woods’

While there were plenty of more successful movies this year, no movie so thoroughly defined a genre, dropped the mic and walked away like The Cabin in the Woods. Horror is inherently dumb. Even the very best horror movies depend on a heaping dose of stupidity from the main characters; the girl will descend into a darkened basement alone, the jock will refuse to believe that there’s a killer, even while the corpses are piling up, and rag-tag teams will split up, even in the face of mortal danger, despite the entire course of human evolution screaming that that’s a terrible idea. Meanwhile, fans are forced to quietly tolerate it all because these bad decisions fuel horror. But The Cabin in the Woods manages to deconstruct all of those tropes, ripping apart the genre and taking a look at its guts before sewing it all back up into a really great slasher flick.

This is exactly what we want.

The Cabin in the Woods is self-aware from start to finish, following the story of archetypal teens trapped in a cabin while being hunted by torture-loving zombies, but it also follows the story of the pencil pushers working in an office building who orchestrate the whole thing as a sort of sacrifice to an audience that demands it (us). It’s simultaneously a critical analysis of the genre and a celebration of it, but to really understand how difficult that is to pull off, it needs the context of another film this year that tried to do the exact same thing and failed miserably: The Expendables 2 (Expendabler?).

Bear with me.

The Expendables 2 is stuffed with winks and nods to the action genre. The movie makes Die Hard references and Terminator jokes, and even acknowledges the Chuck Norris Internet meme. They want the audience to know that, yes, this is a mindless shoot ’em up, but everybody involved is in on the joke. But when The Cabin in the Woods breaks down the fourth wall, there’s an entire fictional universe back there that explains all of the horror movie cliches in a way that makes it clear that the creators love and respect the cliches and conventions they’re working within. The Expendables 2 seems to be ashamed of the action genre. Whatever love Stallone and the other creators once had for action movies is drowned by their crippling self-awareness as they keep indirectly apologizing for continuing to make movies about hairless buffaloes jump-kicking each other. The Cabin in the Woods allows the movie to keep the narrative structure alive on the table while simultaneously doing an autopsy on it.

But regardless of whether you agree, the fact that The Cabin in the Woods and The Expendables 2 came out in the same year is the sign of a bigger trend in film: The age of the unselfconscious movie is over. There will never be another Rambo or Blood Sport or They Live or Troll franchise because irony has swept through the entertainment industry and killed sincerity. Audiences are so jaded by tropes that it’s almost impossible to surprise them anymore. In the case of horror, that’s bad news for the whole industry, because it relies on surprises. The only way for a film to stay afloat now is to laugh along with the audience about how clever we all are for figuring out the patterns. At least The Cabin in the Woods is proof that it’s still possible to make good movies while simultaneously poking fun at the impossibility of doing so.

To understand why The Avengers is my pick for film of the year, you need to know just how impossible this movie would have seemed just a few years ago. Let’s take a look and see which studios own which major franchises.

As you can see, just about every major studio owns the distribution rights to at least one superhero property currently in development. They don’t just have the rights to these franchises; these movies are essential (assuming that the goal of the studios is to make money). You see this and you probably think "Uh, no DOY, of course everyone’s developing a superhero movie; they’re the only things that make money." It must seem so obvious to you.

"When did George Clooney make a Batman porn parody?"

That’s probably because you, like a lot of our readers, are younger than me. You didn’t have to live through a time when the idea of taking a superhero movie seriously was ridiculous. Sure, I had Burton’s Batman growing up, but even that went to shit almost immediately, and not until 2000’s X-Men would people even consider putting lots of money and competent directors behind a superhero flick again.

When I was a kid, I would have been foolish to hope for a decent Captain America movie, because we had one, and it was this piece of shit:

I grew up in a time when "superheroes = money" wasn’t tattooed on the lower back of every producer in Hollywood. Nerds like me had to accept that we’d never get superheroes handled seriously. We gave up.

But now it’s the future! The Avengers was an Avengers movie. Was it perfect? No. But I got to see Thor, Captain America and Iron Man all on the same screen fighting alongside each other, looking how they were supposed to look and saying what they were supposed to say. Joss Whedon didn’t make a flawless movie, but he made an Avengers movie, and that is goddamned impossible.

"That building is blocking our view. Destroy it in the name of justice!"

Also? It was fun as hell. In a summer full of movies that were too caught up with being dark and saying something to be entertaining, it was really refreshing to see that at least Whedon knows that going to the movies is supposed to be fun. I don’t care what anyone says: The Dark Knight Rises kind of blew. It was so preoccupied with arcs and symbolism and the real cost of being a Batman that it lost all sense of fun and ended up being an overly serious puckered asshole of a movie.

Whatever this is, it isn’t taking itself too seriously.

Wanting an Avengers movie that incorporated a bunch of other big-budget superhero movies 10 years ago would have been a certifiably insane idea. Joss Whedon pulled it right the hell off.