While romantic comedies and dramas tend to concentrate on personal relationships, comic-book movies have lately been backing away from such trivia.
DC and Marvel seem far more occupied with things like multiverses, alien invasions, explaining the intricacies of the various plots and so on.
In other words, mostly the sort of thing that would inspire your average, obsessive 13-year-old male comics fan.
It wasn't always so. When the hugely successful movies took off - I think of early Iron Man and Spiderman, Batman Begins and others - family and romantic relationships featured just as much as scary monsters.
Captain America - Steve Rogers - was always the most interesting Avenger to me. He was brought up in the old-fashioned 1940s, with an old-fashioned girlfriend Peggy Carter, then dragged away from her into the present day with its rather different values.
It took a while, and several time-machines, but Steve got his happy ending and handed his gigantic Captain America frisbee, or whatever it is, to his best buddy Sam Wilson.
Sam used to be the Falcon - think Captain America with wings. Now he's sort of the new Captain America with his own sidekick, Joaquin, and an older mentor called Isaiah something.
Photo: Walt Disney Studio
And he's got a jurisdiction problem with the new President of the USA, none other than Thaddeus Ross.
Of course, you remember that Ross was originally….
What, you're telling me you don't remember any of this stuff? Surely, you've been paying close attention to the past 30-plus Marvel movies, or if not the movies, then the comic-books themselves?
What do you mean "Get a life, for crying out loud!"
Because if you're not already on board, the latest Captain America movie, Brave New World, then there aren't a lot of reasons for you to catch up.
Among the goodies, President Ross - who used to be the Hulk's nemesis, so goodness knows what he's doing here - is played by an unlikely replacement for the late William Hurt. Harrison Ford, what are you doing here?
Well mostly he's telling neo-Captain America, Sam Wilson, that he's not a patch on Steve Rogers.
And - no offense to the hard-working Anthony Mackie as Wilson - the new Cap is a pale shadow of the original.
There's no culture shock, there's certainly no doomed girlfriend. All there seems to be is a dogged determination.
On the baddie side, it's a bit of a smorgasbord. There's Sidewinder, who seems to have been added at the last minute for some reason.
And there's a bilious-looking gentleman played by Tim Blake Nelson, who looks vaguely familiar - and not just because he's an all-purpose evil genius.
Turns out - I admit I Googled it - evil Samuel Sterns, who doesn't seem to have a cool villain nickname, was actually in one of the old Hulk movies. But while he pops up all through Brave New World, he's not exactly imposing.
He's a monstrous thingy that looks exactly like the old Hulk after a last-minute paint job - proof perhaps that the Marvel Villain Department is starting to run out of puff.
Otherwise, he's just a red Hulk, wearing the traditional blue board-shorts.
So, to sum up, we've got the wrong Captain America battling the wrong Hulk in the wrong colour, and the wrong president played by the wrong actor. But the story is still the same old stuff, with no redeeming features.
Depressingly Captain America Brave New World is doing pretty well in the States this week. Mind you, they're currently used to that situation.
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