Dave Callaham, co-writer of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, says that writing the film’s antagonist, Wenwu, was a tricky balancing act.
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings screenwriter Dave Callaham says that the film’s antagonist, Wenwu (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), was one of the trickier aspects of the script to nail down. The film itself is the latest entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the first MCU Phase 4 project to adapt an entirely new superhero from the pages of Marvel Comics. Shang-Chi is also significant in that it is the first mainstream comic book movie to feature an Asian-American superhero.
The film follows the titular protagonist Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) as he butts moral (and literal) heads with his estranged father, Wenwu. Wenwu is the leader of a secret terrorist organization known as the Ten Rings, aptly named after the ten magical rings that supply his supernatural powers. Despite serving as the film’s antagonist, Wenwu is portrayed as a sympathetic character that will exert any cost to reunite with his late wife (Fala Chen). His actions are motivated by a tragic lost love, which affords the character significantly more depth than most of the villains in Marvel Studios’ rogues gallery.
In a recent interview with THR, screenwriter Dave Callaham talked about the difficulties he encountered while writing Wenwu. According to Callaham, the character is meant to be both a tragic figure and a villainous antagonist so “Finding that balance was tricky.” Check out the writer’s full comments below:
That was a character that was really hard to massage into the final form. Not because of Tony, certainly. It’s just because of the things that he believes and because of the motivations he’s utilizing to get to these more villainous ideas. One step too far in either direction and he’s not scary enough or he’s totally unrelatable and kind of a nonsense villain. We wanted this character to be three-dimensional. He’s motivated, ultimately, by love. He is this broken man who has made a bit of a mess of his very long life and just wants desperately to believe he can put things back together, and that’s all very human and very relatable. But we did still need him to be the figurehead of a giant terrorist organization who is looking for magical villages and presumably torturing people in his dungeon and all this other stuff. Finding that balance was tricky.
Callaham makes a point to emphasize that the writer’s behind Shang-Chi “wanted [Wenwu] to be three-dimensional.” Shang-Chi’s frequent use of flashbacks provided the perfect opportunity for the film to flesh out the character’s desires and motivations.Clearly, their efforts paid off, with Tony Leung’s performance as the immortal crime lord being one of the most unanimously praised aspects of the film as a whole.
While future MCU projects shouldn’t outright copy the template that brought Wenwu to life, they should nevertheless take notes on how to construct compelling villains. One of the most frequent criticisms leveled toward the MCU is its lack of strong antagonists. The studio has begun to rectify these issues in recent years with more three-dimensional villains like Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) and Thanos (Josh Brolin); however, the criticisms nevertheless persist with more recent projects like The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Black Widow. As the MCU moves forward, future filmmakers should look toward Shang-Chi as an example of how to do a villain right.
Source: screenrant.com