‘Stan Lee’ Documentary Review: A Sanitized, Corporate Documentary That Doesn’t Do Comic Genius Justice

Ask any person on the street if they are at least somewhat familiar with comic book legend Stan Lee, and almost always the answer will be a resounding yes.

Lee has become such an icon in not just the world of superheroes, but in just popular culture as a whole. The man has helped create some of the most iconic characters in all of fiction, so naturally, considering the legacy that Lee has left on the world since his passing, it only makes sense for a documentary to be made about his life. However, while I’m sure that a great, honest and detailed documentary about Lee will exist at some point in my lifetime, this is certainly not that.

Regardless of my personal feelings about how this film approached its subject matter, it should be said that this is not a poorly-made documentary. The film is directed by David Gelb, the same director behind Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which is an outstanding documentary that I highly recommend you check out, and it’s clear that the same level of talent that was put into Jiro was also applied to Stan Lee as well.

The way that information was cleanly presented created a very cohesive structure that made it very easy to digest and process the information thrown at the audience. Additionally, along with footage of Lee, the film also uses a lot of miniatures to visually showcase scenes that do not have footage, and for the most part, I found this to be a pretty inspiring choice.

However, regardless of the actual craft that was put into Stan Lee, I cannot fully support this documentary because of how sanitized, rose-tinted, and at points, dishonest this film feels. I should state upfront that I am by no means an expert on Lee or comic book history, so I did not hold any bias going into this film. However, despite my lack of familiarity with the subject matter, it was still incredibly obvious how much the film was either sugarcoating or surgically removing parts of Lee’s history for the purpose of making a clean, almost fantastical portrayal of the man’s life.

Sometimes it was incredibly obvious, like towards the end of the film when the film completely jumps from the 1970s to the modern day for no real reason, thereby either downplaying or skipping any accomplishments Lee had made between the timeframe when he stopped regularly writing Marvel comics and served as publisher for the company.

Sometimes, it was in more subtle ways, like how the film claims that all the early characters Marvel are known for like The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, were entirely Stan’s ideas and deserve all the credit despite it being well-known that his collaborators Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were just as vital for the creation of these characters. Instead, the documentary chooses to downplay their roles in favor of putting Lee on a pedestal, which just feels incredibly dishonest.

Overall, this film feels less like a passionate documentary about Lee’s life, highlighting both the good and bad of his legacy and more like a corporate, rose-tinted, clean PSA for Marvel Studios that dozens of executives at Disney had to approve before it got released. The fact that the last 10-15 minutes of the film is just an ad for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and how great it is was just incredibly insulting and left me feeling frustrated and disappointed.

It does not matter how well-made this documentary is because if the film still feels incredibly manipulative, then what value am I supposed to get out of this experience? How can I say I learned anything from this movie if all it felt like was just a glorified Wikipedia article that cherry-picked parts of Lee’s life to make the documentary feel more fantastical than it actually is? When I watch a documentary, I don’t want to just be informed, I want to be drawn into the subject matter, and Stan Lee does not accomplish either very well.