Secret super hero movie: Idiocracy. Except instead of gaining superhuman abilities by becoming better, he gains his from everyone else getting worse! 😀

I was quite vaque about the hidden superhero story. In the end it’s really up to what you guys felt qualified, personally I thought there tends to be some tropes to it that go beyond just having special powers.

For me The Invention of Lying is a great example. When you watch the movie you’re basically expecting a romantic comedy (which it is, to be fair), but when you think about it if you replace “guy lies when no one can lie” with “a dude shoots out white goo and does backfips and stuff” you basically have yet another Spiderman origin story…

The story has two major halves, wooing the girl and dealing with his new powers. As is customary.

The structure of the story goes basically:

– Ricky Gervais finds himself with a superhuman ability (lying), while previously he was just a nobody.

– His first impulse is to simply mess around and abuse his ability to his own benefit. As is customary in origin stories.

– He realises that he is in a position to affect the lives of the people around him and his focus shifts from looking out for number one to using his new lying powers to help the people around him. To me a superheroes are about helping those in need, sort of the hero part of the equation. (Sometimes they just mope alot and snap necks, but those aren’t very inspiring ones.)

– He accidentally creates the conflict of the movie, using his lying powers to create religion and motivating his rival to go after the girl. Heroes like doing this, for example Tony Stark’s designs creating the Iron Monger suit in Iron Man 1.

– The hero becomes mopey and recluse from his failure, until in the end we see him regain his confidence and re-apply his powers to correct the situation. He even triumphs on the romantic plot without relying on his lying powers, which is something you also see super heroes do during the final showdown.