Why is it so much more interesting when regular people get super powers? Is it because comic book super humans are so undeniably unrelatable? Or, are we simply drawn to average Joes with super powers because we’ve all secretly wished that we were the ones with super powers? Maybe all are true, to an extent, which makes movies about super human everymen all the more entertaining to watch.
Not to be confused with superheroes, most super humans in fiction are not vigilantes. They don’t don masks or tights or attempt to rid some city of crime. No, super humans are much more under the radar. They lead incredibly boring lives which suddenly become more eventful after they discover that they’re no longer an average Joe.
Anatomy of Super Humans
Have you ever noticed that no one ever roots for the super humans in the movies? It’s as if their entire existence is predicated upon garnering sympathy from the audience. They are often the punching bags of their community and even the butt of jokes among their so called friends, if they have any. Then, just when they think their lives can get any worse, they either do something terrible or something terrible happens to them and well, it really all goes to the crapper for them.
Take the dark thriller Horns for example. In Horns, a heartbroken Ignatius Perrish finds himself the prime suspect of his girlfriend’s murder, the town pariah and ultimately completely alone as he grieves his loss. In a moment of weakness he decides to do something terrible i.e. destroy the Virgin Mary statue at the memorial site for his girlfriend, which then changes the trajectory of his life. He wakes up the next day to find two actual devil horns growing out of his head. What’s even more interesting is that suddenly everyone he comes into contact with is now compelled to tell him their deepest darkest secrets. Basically, he became a super human overnight. He also found a renewed purpose using his new super power: to find his girlfriend’s actual murderer and clear his name.
Things Start to Change
It may take our super humans a moment to adjust to their new abilities, but it does happen. When it does, that’s when things really start to change and get interesting to watch, like in the sci-fi action film Lucy. In the movie, Lucy is forced to house an illegal drug in her belly in order to transport it elsewhere for the dealers who surgically put it there, but when she is physically assaulted and kicked in her stomach, highly concentrated amounts of the drug are released into her blood stream.
Lucy then develops super powers, which included an increasing ability to access untapped human potential. She was able to develop telekinetic abilities along with her exponentially higher retention rate of knowledge. Lucy was moving further away from being a human being and closer to a metaphysical state of existence. Lucy may have accidentally ingested her nootropic pills, but even when they are ingested on purpose—controlled dosage or not—the effects are just as impactful, i.e. Eddie Morra in the thriller Limitless.
In Limitless, Eddie Morra turns to an experimental nootropic drug, NZT-48, to help with his writer’s block and encroaching manuscript deadline. The NZT-48 gives Eddie a much needed boost to take advantage of untapped potential in all aspects of his life, including aiding him in the completion of his book and success in the stock market. The drugs completely changed Eddie’s life, initially for the better, then for the worse, then seemingly for the better again. But, as implied in the ending, he was still chemically dependent on the experimental drug, which could only mean that the drug would ultimately cause his demise.
No Happy Ending
There’s a saying, “what goes up, must come down,” and in the case of super humans in the movies, nothing could be truer. It’s all by design. Remember that all the average Joes that get super powers are sympathetic characters, which of course means that they are forbidden to have a happy ending; as sad as that fact may be.
Ignatius didn’t get a happy ending—at least not in this life—when he died from wounds inflicted from his girlfriend’s real killer/his lawyer/his friend in their final confrontation. Lucy didn’t really get a happy ending—at least not in the physical sense—when she basically evaporated into thin air as a result of amassing full access of her brain. The only person that perhaps got a happy ending was Eddie, but then there was that implication in the end that he was probably going to develop some serious side effects from taking so much NZT-48 for so long. So, that’s not happy either.