The pitfall of superhero cinema, which the great directors criticizing it allude to, is not the inherent silliness of the genre. One of Shakespeare's great works is about fairies crashing a wedding. Legendary heroes of old threw animals into the sky to become constellations.
Science fiction and fantasy are filled with supernatural powers, extraordinary beings, hidden identities - all the components of superhero mythology. The problem isn't whimsy or absurdity. It's lazy storytelling, which comes down to a lack of consequence, the absence of tragedy.
The writers who strove to give superheroes more gravitas in the 80s and make them respectable fiction were acutely aware of this. Frank Miller's genius innovation was to write the tragic ending of the Batman saga. Alan Moore had a supervillain win by killing millions.
But most superhero stuff lacks that sense of finality and tragedy, so it's missing some important elements of drama. You never really know what these characters can *do*, what threatens them, what obstacles they can't overcome. Nothing sticks to them. No dramatic stakes.
Sometimes the characters are barely in the climax of the movie at all - the whole thing just becomes a goofy CGI festival, vomiting into your eyeballs. The actors leave the stage before the final act, and they take drama with them when they go.
Now the superhero movies are rolling out the laziest of all comic-book tropes, time travel and alternate universes. Now we're REALLY leaving drama, tragedy, and consequence behind. Anything goes, so nothing matters.
That lovably grumpy retired superhero you've gotten to know? Yeah, there's an alt universe where he's a bloodthirsty serial killer. The genocidal villain of our grand space opera? In another universe, somebody talked him out of all that and he's a nice guy, great sense of humor.
The problem with all this is, it unravels the core premises of drama and tragedy. What makes us who we are? How much of it was fate, how much was imposed on us by others, how much was our own choice? Drama is the quest to explore these mysteries without firmly answering them.
All of that only works if there are consequences that stick, choices that cannot be unmade, failures that haunt the characters, people whose lives change forever. You *can* do that with superheroes, but the writers usually don't.
Having said that, there's nothing wrong with light entertainment and high adventure. There have always been fun movies like that. The great directors of the golden age of Hollywood didn't spend a lot of time complaining about cliffhanger serials or the goofy sort of Western.
But of course, the goofy stuff from the old era of Hollywood did not achieve absolute box office dominance, muscling almost everything else aside. The fun stuff didn't start assimilating other genres and bidding for Academy Awards. Everyone kinda stayed in their lanes.
Martin Scorsese spends his career as a cinematic gourmet chef, cooking up the finest of steaks... then he watches somebody else grind his steak into hamburger and make a billion dollars selling it. You can understand why he'd be a little testy about it.
The core difference between "Joker" and "Taxi Driver" is that "Joker" is not complete and whole unto itself. It only works because the audience already knows who the characters are. Joker's final lines only make sense if you know what happens to that little boy in the alley.
I think that's what irks some of the directors who trash superheroes - not the silliness of the genre, because most of these guys have made fantastic or implausible films themselves. It's the laziness, the incompleteness, the weightlessness - as exemplified by all that CGI. /end
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