A few spoiler-filled thoughts on Marvel’s Thunderbolts, its characters, themes and ending. Read on at your peril.
Warning! This feature includes MAJOR spoilers for all of Thunderbolts*, including its ending!
Spoilers, then. Last chance. This feature will be full of them, as specifically, I’m digging into the last third of Thunderbolts. And unexpectedly, it’s going to involve a big blockbuster movie tackling mental health issues.
Mental health isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when talking about Marvel Studios and its roster of movies. Most of us think about an Asgardian god, the Avengers, a talking tree and Samuel L Jackson’s eyepatch.
But Thunderbolts*, Jake Schreier’s new team-up movie, is looking to change that. What starts out as a pretty standard superhero adventure with cross-references (hey, there’s a red Hulk in the last film!) becomes a thoughtful look at fighting your inner demons and the importance of being there for each other. The film’s final third brings almost unprecedented depth and complexity to a type of film that has often sought to deliver big action sequences.
This isn’t to say Marvel hasn’t previously explored some meaningful, themes in its screen work. WandaVision was a surprisingly heartfelt study of grief, and more than one of James Gunn’s Guardians Of The Galaxy films were emotional and grounded enough to make this writer tear up.
But Thunderbolts* might be the studio’s first film that isn’t about defeating evil, but about saving someone, in this case, from themselves.
It’s established at the beginning of the film our team of heroes – Yelena, Ghost, John Walker, Bucky Barnes and Red Guardian – are all struggling with loneliness and missing a sense of purpose. And while they find some sort of companionship in each other, it’s Lewis Pullman’s mysterious outlier Bob who becomes the film’s emotional core.
Allow us to set the scene and do a bit of necessary plot recapping: the Thunderbolts – not yet a team – meet Bob as he crawls out of a box at Valetina Allegra de Fontaine’s secret bunker, which she plans on torching to hide the evidence of her evil plans. Bob has no memory of how he ended up there and, at first, has no idea he has superpowers. As we quickly find out, Bob is the only surviving test subject of the Sentry project and has essentially been made into a god, which explains why he can survive being shot by machine guns. The Marvel infinite lives trick in this case is woven straight in.
Read more: Thunderbolts* review | Marvel tries to reinvent itself
Yet even gods struggle sometimes.
Bob, having had a tough childhood and struggling with meth addiction, turns into the Void, a darker version of Sentry. Void begins to swallow up New York, turning its citizens into shadows, trapping them in a terrifying realm formed of several rooms of bad memories. Our heroes can do nothing but watch it all happen.
And then Yelena, understanding Bob’s pain, goes to find him in the shadow realm, eventually locating him in his childhood bedroom while his parents are arguing downstairs.
It’s there that Thunderbolts* dares to go further than any recent blockbuster film of its type, as Bob, Yelena and the rest of the Thunderbolts look for Bob’s worst memory in the hope of finding a way back out.
Bob then faces Void on his own after the dark god incapacitates the rest of our heroes. He begins to beat the dark version of himself mercilessly, but as he does so, the darkness begins to devour Bob. He’s giving into the darkness inside him and it’s swallowing him whole. It’s not a particularly subtle metaphor, certainly, but it makes its point.
Bob is then saved as Yelena breaks free, followed by the rest of the Thunderbolts, assuring him he’s not alone. Yelena just being there is enough to get through to Bob, releasing him of at least some of the darkness he carries, and thus saving the world. Just like Charlie in The Perks Of Being A Wallflower or Maggie and Milo in The Skeleton Twins, Bob finds solace in others. They’re ultimately his saviour.
Mere words don’t do the scene’s emotional stakes enough justice. Where most superhero films put time and effort – not to mention money – into a big final battle, Thunderbolts* tones everything down and focuses on character rather than action.
It’s not quite the first time Marvel has elected to tone its final third down considerably. Doctor Strange pulled a similar trick by having Benedict Cumberbatch defeat Dormammu by trapping the entity in an endless time loop. But Thunderbolts* is the first film in the franchise that asks us to consider that mental health is something many of us struggle with, including superheroes. Furthermore, that it’s not necessarily something that can be defeated completely.
And it’s not just Bob either when you go through the rest of the film.
Thunderbolts* begins with Yelena telling us via a voice over how she’s still struggling with the death of her sister, Natasha (Scarlett Johansson), who perished in Avengers: Endgame. “There’s something wrong with me,” she muses while sitting atop of the world’s tallest building. She goes on to describe the emptiness she feels inside, yearning for purpose in life outside of doing someone else’s dirty work until she throws herself off the building.
“Maybe I’m just bored,” she ponders as she falls. She, naturally, has a parachute which she uses to maneuver to the lab she’s been tasked to break into, but the scene shows not only does Yelena have nothing to lose, she’s doing anything to just feel something.
Similarly, Red Guardian and John Walker also search for meaning. And why wouldn’t they? It’s not just superheroes who want to believe they’re doing something that matters. Regardless of your job or life situation, most of us want our everyday lives to count for something.
In an interview with Screen Rant, Pugh expanded on where Yelena is at the start of the film. “She’s just so ready to experience life. But then losing her sister really, really kneecaps her. It completely cuts off her savouring of life. She doesn’t have purpose anymore, she doesn’t know why she’s here anymore, and I really think she’s struggling to understand what she’s doing here.”
Pugh also credited Marvel for allowing the Thunderbolts “to be human.” She added: “You’ve got to allow them to feel.”
And feel they do. At the end of the film and in one of the post-credits scenes, Bob is still part of the Thunderbolts, now branded the New Avengers (hence the asterisk in the film’s title). He’s had to put his superpowers on hold, though, as the risk of him turning back to Void is simply too great. It’s a reminder that mental health isn’t healed with a snap of your fingers. It takes time, effort and those feelings might never go away. Maybe you just become better at controlling that annoying little voice inside your head.
There’s a bit of Bob in many of us, I reckon. Most of us won’t turn into an all-powerful supervillain, but it’s easy to relate to the feeling that nothing is ever going to get better and to give into that voice that tells us we’re not good enough. I’m not a mental health expert and it’s not my job to convince you it does get better, but it is my job to communicate that Thunderbolts* made me feel less alone and more seen than any other film this year. How many other films can you say that about?
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