The Fair-to-Middling Four

 I really wanted to like Fantastic Four more than I did.

The beginning, the first steps, if you like, are phenomenal. The look, the feel, the family dynamics, pitch perfect.

I'm a sucker for analog retro futures and FF nails it. Everything seemed authentic. Too often, movies fail to think through the ramifications of the fantastic elements they add to the real world. It's just New York now with added superheroes! without considering the ripple effects that would inevitably result.

Verisimilitude isn't just about good production design or costumes. It's about a world that behaves as if it truly exists, where even the most outlandish elements follow an internal logic and cast believable shadows on everything around them.

But First Steps perfectly conceptualizes it and spins it into a living breathing world.

They felt like a family in exactly the way they should.

I'm sick of superhero origin stories and I thought the retrospective was an elegant way to get the exposition across.

The Thing looked great. 

Not quite it

Getting warmer...

There we go!

I wasn't sure about a mustachioed Reed Richards

but Pedro Pascal won me over. I shouldn't be surprised. He's always been consistently excellent 

I didn't care for the Storm Siblings. Percy kinda hates Vanessa Kirby for some reason. I liked her in the Crown, but there was something about her here that seemed out of place but I can't quite put my finger on it. I might have a better grasp of just what I felt was wrong if I watched the movie again but I'm certainly not going to do that.

Every time the force field came on, I felt like I needed an eye exam.

Eddie from Stranger things was Johnny Storm and...I didn't like him. The 2005 version was dogshit on so many different levels but Chris Evans delivered a pretty good performance.

And while I really liked the golden records, a brilliant mise-en-scène contributing to the worldbuilding, it feels like the arrival of the Silver Surfer is when the wheels started to come off.

Canada Dry must be huge on earth 828. (Or maybe not if they need to advertise as much as they do)

It felt like so many decisions were made solely to advance the plot. If you'll excuse a digression, The Last Unicorn is one of my favorite books, in my opinion, one of the greatest fantasy books ever written. It's full to the brim with iconic writing, but I'm thinking of one the scene where Schmendrick performs card tricks to entertain the bandits. The applaud politely at the right times, and generally act like the perfect audience, but everyone knows that he's not doing anything special.  "Offering no true magic, he drew no magic back from them." Everyone involved in the process is just going through the motions.

So the Shalla-Bal Silver Surfer shows up and kinda looks like crap. And shit on the 2007 movie all you want, that was a better looking Surfer.

And again, I could see the reason for the decision as clearly as if I were reading the script. We have a female Surfer so Johnny can fall in love with her, setting in motion the third act betrayal.

And now a caveat.

Back when Percy was a little kid, we were watching Stuart Little together. About halfway through the movie, there's a bit with a boat race, where Stuart pilots a remote controlled boat directly.  Baby Percy got scared when the mean kid started smashing the boat Stuart was piloting and climbed up on the couch with me. They were watching the drama playing out on the TV, and I was watching the one playing out on their face. There were whole worlds written there. They gritted their teeth when it looked like Stuart was in trouble, relaxed when he got control of the boat, and laughed out loud when he won the race.

I remember thinking how amazing it is that these hoary clichés we've seen literally thousands of times are still novel to them.

And I am aware that my approach is unusual; most people watch movies to enjoy them not dissect them and I may be holding this movie to an impossibly high standard it could not hope to meet. But dress it up a little. Tell me a story. Don't go through the motions. Offer us some magic. I was always acutely aware that I was viewing something someone had created. I was never able to suspend my disbelief.

Anyways, the FF, including 13-month pregnant Sue get on a ship and blast off to find Galactus. I imagine that her doctor would warn her away from boarding a commercial flight, so a trip on a spaceship is probably right out.

Galactus looked pretty good. No complaints about his appearance. Let's be honest. A lot of the Kirby stuff looks great on the page, but would need to be tweaked at least a little so as not to look silly in live action.

"It's not a G. It stands for Hope."

Maybe put some pants on if you want to keep eating planets?

The problem was with his demeanor. Galactus needed to be ancient and alien and inscrutable. What we got was a big guy who talked a lot.

Ideally, Galactus wouldn't talk at all. Telepathy or using the herald as an intermediary. Anything other than making small talk in unaccented English like a dude chatting you up from the next barstool. (A bit of trivia from Wikipedia "The actor spent time "ruminating" at the top of tall buildings to prepare for the role", knowledge which fills me with rage.)

But he's like, hey, gimmee your baby and I'll spare the planet. And again, I was annoyed, because not only did Sue have no reason to be there, but they made no attempt to justify her presence.

Quick chase scene, the baby is born, quelle surprise, and they dump the Surfer in a neutron star before hoofing it back to earth. They land and immediately hold a press conference and Reed Richards, the smartest man in the universe, announces, "We had a chance to save the earth but decided not to. No further questions." 

And that's a little bit uncharitable of me, but whatever. The Fantastic Four gets enough lucky breaks over the course of the movie. They don't need any additional help from me.

I don't think "I would have done it differently" is a valid critique, and I do try to avoid it when reviewing movies, but I'm going to break my own rule here. The offer from Galactus is never taken seriously. There has been a lot of online discourse positing that he was never going to follow through or that his hunger would have been transferred to Franklin, but that feels like after-the-fact justification in an attempt to deflect valid criticism.  If those points were to be made, they would have needed to have been raised by characters in the movie in order to carry any weight. 

The whole world hates the Fantastic Four. But then Sue gives a very mid speech. So the whole world loves the Fantastic Four again. Yay, I guess. I guess bellyaching about adequate speeches in superhero movies is going to be my thing this summer.

Speaking of unlikely events, the team also convinces the entire world to build an extensive network of hyperspace pylons to shift the earth away from Galactus. It is by far the most monumental undertaking in the history of human civilization by about a factor of about a billion and although we don't get a sense of the time involved, it seems to concluded without a single hiccup in about a week.

This seemed rushed and they could have spent a little more time to add some stakes to the leadup to the climax, but that would take too much screentime from the extended Natasha Lyonne scenes that don't go anywhere and the painfully unfunny Moleman bits.

We gave up Red Ghost and his Super Apes for this!? 

It doesn't matter because the Surfer shows up and immediately blows up most of the pylons. But Johnny translates an entirely alien language from a couple messages well enough to deliver his own adequate speech. Didn't I just gripe about implausible translation in a superhero movie only the other week?  

Decoding the Rosetta Stone took TWENTY YEARS. 

So she flies off and we never establish just how big his ship is. In the comics, Taa II is described from anywhere from planet to star-system sized, so at the very least, we can assume it's...large. But Galactus only has one employee, and she's off getting ready for her third act betrayal so he has to come stomp around Manhattan himself like some kind of budget kaiju in a mockbuster Pacific Rim. 

He's on the cusp of sating his billion-year hunger, but still finds the time to play with his Stretch Armstrong. 

God, I hated this part.

Anyway, Galactus stomps around a little bit, then they teleport him away through the last remaining portal. He escapes, but the Surfer knocks him in just as it closes! Sue dies! But she gets better! Whew! 

I saw it with a buddy. He gave it a B. I gave it a C. It started out so good and deflated completely. It may sound like a joke, but I still think the Incredibles is the best Fantastic Four movie ever made.

Half a Century with Superman: Josh talks about the 2025 Superman

I saw Superman last week with the family and liked it.

But then, I liked Man of Steel for what it was. One of the things I enjoy about Superman as a property is how it tends to bring out the best in me. I can appreciate the stuff each interpretation does well and love it for that individual expression. Heck, I even liked (parts of) Superman Returns. There was that part where he lifted that heavy thing. And then, a little bit later, he lifted something slightly heavier. (And also, Brandon Routh was a great Superman and a great Clark, the scene with the piano was tense and great, it clearly loved the first two movies and you could see flashes of brilliance with what it was trying to do.)

The very first comic book I remember reading was a supermarket checkout aisle digest collection of the Legion of Super-Heroes. If you're not familiar, it's the adventures of Superboy with other teenage superheroes, a thousand years in the future. I worked at a comic book store before the internet was widely available, so instead of looking my phone all day, I read comics all day. I'm well-acquainted with Superman and have been all my life, is what I'm saying. So I was well-positioned to recognize the broad strokes of the movie as they unfolded. (That's certainly not a dig against it. If a well-informed and highly motivated viewer can spot the beats of your movie, well that's a feature, not a bug. It means it's been structured well.)

I would say that it's impossible to tell a completely original story about Superman after nearly 100 years of continuous publication, except Superman Smashes the Klan did it in 2019.

This has probably replaced All-Star Superman as my favorite Superman story.

We're going to get into spoilers about now, so beware.

BEWARE

BEWARE

BEWARE

BEWARE

"Bewarb?"

Good stuff:

Outstanding supporting cast. Nicholas Hoult,  Rachel Brosnahan, and Skyler Gisondo were born to play their roles. I saw David Corenswet in the Politician years ago, and while I hated it, I had the same thought everybody did on seeing it, "Holy shit, this guy needs to play Superman!"

It had humor. After the movie, I went online (as one does) and saw that Luthor's sidekick Otis was credited as Otis Berg. That's actually hilarious.

It wasn't embarrassed about about being a comic book movie. I love the X-Men movies of the 90s, but it started the "mature" trend of sneering at the source material that it believes the audience has outgrown (or should have).

I overall liked the movie, and I didn't want to open up with critiques, so I'm going to try the compliment sandwich format here. Good-bad-good.  Taking a break.

Some bad stuff (or at least stuff I didn't like):

As much as I enjoyed seeing Clementine Pennyfeather,

You're new. Not much of a rind on you.

and this is a personal issue, but I don't like Superman's space mom and dad being evil. And maybe we'll get a qualifier or additional context, but it rubs me the wrong way.

I see the Kents as his parents, and, along with his Lois, the most important people in his world. Lara and Jor-El are an important part of his backstory, but not his parents in the way the Kents are. I think this is an especially egregious misstep particularly since the narrative leaned heavily into the immigrant angle. I believe that they are people who deeply loved their son and sacrificed to give him a better life they would not live to see.

 

Instead, the subtext is that Superman is one of the only good ones, the extraordinary member of an outsider group that is otherwise universally bad.

And speaking of his parents....I'll buy that some kind of handwavy nanotechnology super-nonsense allowed the Engineer to decode/repair the message. I'm suspending my disbelief, but it's there. She's a polymath. She does both hacking and handstands. If it's so easy that puny, incompatible Earth science fixes it in about ten seconds, then maybe Clark could have had his robots look into at some point over the past two decades.

That's not the part that bothers me, though. Translation is hard. Languages are not a cipher where one word in English corresponds to a one word in another language. When translating something you have to keep in mind the context and the intention. For an earlier post, I looked into Baudelaire's poetry. He did most of his writing from the 1840s-1860s, so the language hasn't changed monumentally in that time, and English borrowed a lot from French. But as you can see from this link, there are a number of very different translations of his work. And these are from experts who have had all the time they needed to explore it and I think it's fair to say we have a much better understanding of French than we do of Kryptonian.

I get what they're trying for, but that very quick, absolutely universal acceptance of the authenticity of the message is another weak point. Experts take a long time to validate something unusual and this seemed to have been completed in hours. Quickly enough that none of Mister Terrific's pals who did the investigating thought to reach out to him. Yeah, it's a picayune complaint in a movie about flying aliens, pocket universe gulags and super-powered dogs, but it's another thing that bothers me. 

I don't like a reckless Superman. I loved Grant Morrison's angry young man interpretation 

With his working class ties and his radical plans...

but in the movie, it just seemed like he didn't think through the consequences of his actions. I like a Superman who will take a principled stand even though he knows there will be consequences, not one caught unawares by the entirely predictable blowback from his actions.

I want a Superman who stands up for the weak and knows and accepts that there are sometimes consequences for it. (Fortunately, we get him later in the movie)

Ugh, this negative part is getting bigger than I had hoped. One more thing. The ending speech was a little flabby. "I'm as human as anyone. I love, I get scared. I wake up every morning and despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other and I try to make the best choices I can. I screw up all the time, but that is being human. And that's my greatest strength."

It was fine. 

You said it, Mister Fantastic!

And sometimes good enough is good enough, but not at the climax of the movie. It wasn't the best version of itself. 

Okay, back to stuff I like. I already mentioned Jimmy and Lois. But they were just so good. They were the best versions of themselves. I liked her understated purple color scheme, hearkening back the S:TAS. They were great together and great on their own or with others. 

The movie had a lot of heart. His parents, the Kents, were perfect too. In a lot of ways, the Kents are the bellwether for how a Superman adaptation is going to be. Small role, big impact.

I love the janky secondary level of the Superman mythology that's usually too weird to include, like the Bottle City of Kandor or Krypto. I'm glad that he's there. I'm even happier about the real world consequences of his presence, that shelter dog adoptions have surged. 

He also leads to the best exchange in the movie.

Superman: I'm gonna turn myself in. Maybe they'll take me wherever they took the dog.

Lois Lane: It's just a dog.

Superman: I know, and he's not even a very good one. But he's alone... and probably scared.

Percy said that felt like a line I would write and I wish I had. There is so much of Superman in that line. 

It was good. It wasn't perfect. But maybe that's what I need to take from the movie. Things don't need to be perfect.

Roger Zelazny Poetry Month Overview

Here's the Final List:

1. For a Breath I Tarry – A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Housman
2. The Last Defender of Camelot – Sir Galahad by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
3. Eye of Cat – A Blessing by Luci Tapahonso
4. Godson – Because I Could Not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson
5. Creatures of Light and Darkness – The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats
6. The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth – The Kraken by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
7. Divine Madness – To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell
8. Comes Now the Power – Still I Rise by Maya Angelou
9. Damnation Alley – Invictus by William Ernest Henley
10. Nine Princes in Amber – Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
11. A Rose for Ecclesiastes – Ecclesiastes 
12. Lord of Light – The Upanishads
13. And Call Me Conrad (This Immortal) – Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley
14. Jack of Shadows – Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
15. The Guns of Avalon – La Belle Dame sans Merci by John Keats
16. The Changing Land – The Haunted Palace by Edgar Allan Poe
17. Home is the Hangman – The Tyger by William Blake
18. 24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai – Death poem by Bashō
19. He Who Shapes – The Lady of Shalott by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
20. Isle of the Dead – When You Are Old by W.B. Yeats
21. The Graveyard Heart – Love After Love by Derek Walcott
22. The Force That Through the Circuit Drives the Current – The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower by Dylan Thomas
23. Roadmarks – Roads by Edward Thomas
24. Doorways in the Sand – When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer by Walt Whitman
25. Permafrost – What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why by Edna St. Vincent Millay
26. Deus Irae – God’s Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins
27. The Courts of Chaos – Correspondences by Charles Baudelaire
28. Donnerjack – The Distance That the Dead Have Gone by Emily Dickinson
29. Love is an Imaginary Number – Paradise Lost by John Milton
30. A Night in the Lonesome October – Ulalume by Edgar Allan Poe

Overall, it wound up being more difficult than I expected, but I broadened my horizons as part of the process and I'm happy for having done it. 

30 April - Roger Zelazny Poetry Month - A Night in the Lonesome October

Stupid April for only having 30 days.

It really ought to have 31, just to match A Night in the Lonesome October a little better. 

And after all, Ulalume gave the story its name. It’s only fair.

The parallels are baked in. Both the poem and the novel take place in a landscape shaped by grief, memory, and moonlight. Both are narrated in first-person by someone (or something) keeping secrets. Both rely on rhythm, atmosphere, and slow-building dread.

Poe’s narrator wanders through the haunted woods of October. Zelazny’s characters do the same, though their woods are filled with familiars, rituals, and the threat of something larger breaking through. Ulalume is dreamlike and mournful; Lonesome October is playful but melancholy underneath. They rhyme in tone, if not in structure.

It’s a perfect closing for April, even if the month doesn’t quite give us all the time we want. Cruelest month, indeed.

The skies they were ashen and sober;

      The leaves they were crispéd and sere—

      The leaves they were withering and sere;

It was night in the lonesome October

      Of my most immemorial year;

It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,

      In the misty mid region of Weir—

It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,

      In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

Here once, through an alley Titanic,

      Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul—

      Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.

These were days when my heart was volcanic

      As the scoriac rivers that roll—

      As the lavas that restlessly roll

Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek

      In the ultimate climes of the pole—

That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek

      In the realms of the boreal pole.

Our talk had been serious and sober,

      But our thoughts they were palsied and sere—

      Our memories were treacherous and sere—

For we knew not the month was October,

      And we marked not the night of the year—

      (Ah, night of all nights in the year!)

We noted not the dim lake of Auber—

      (Though once we had journeyed down here)—

We remembered not the dank tarn of Auber,

      Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

And now, as the night was senescent

      And star-dials pointed to morn—

      As the star-dials hinted of morn—

At the end of our path a liquescent

      And nebulous lustre was born,

Out of which a miraculous crescent

      Arose with a duplicate horn—

Astarte's bediamonded crescent

      Distinct with its duplicate horn.

And I said—"She is warmer than Dian:

      She rolls through an ether of sighs—

      She revels in a region of sighs:

She has seen that the tears are not dry on

      These cheeks, where the worm never dies,

And has come past the stars of the Lion

      To point us the path to the skies—

      To the Lethean peace of the skies—

Come up, in despite of the Lion,

      To shine on us with her bright eyes—

Come up through the lair of the Lion,

      With love in her luminous eyes."

But Psyche, uplifting her finger,

      Said—"Sadly this star I mistrust—

      Her pallor I strangely mistrust:—

Oh, hasten! oh, let us not linger!

      Oh, fly!—let us fly!—for we must."

In terror she spoke, letting sink her

      Wings till they trailed in the dust—

In agony sobbed, letting sink her

      Plumes till they trailed in the dust—

      Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust.

I replied—"This is nothing but dreaming:

      Let us on by this tremulous light!

      Let us bathe in this crystalline light!

Its Sybilic splendor is beaming

      With Hope and in Beauty to-night:—

      See!—it flickers up the sky through the night!

Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming,

      And be sure it will lead us aright—

We safely may trust to a gleaming

      That cannot but guide us aright,

      Since it flickers up to Heaven through the night."

Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,

      And tempted her out of her gloom—

      And conquered her scruples and gloom:

And we passed to the end of the vista,

      But were stopped by the door of a tomb—

      By the door of a legended tomb;

And I said—"What is written, sweet sister,

      On the door of this legended tomb?"

      She replied—"Ulalume—Ulalume—

      'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!"

Then my heart it grew ashen and sober

      As the leaves that were crispèd and sere—

      As the leaves that were withering and sere,

And I cried—"It was surely October

      On this very night of last year

      That I journeyed—I journeyed down here—

      That I brought a dread burden down here—

      On this night of all nights in the year,

      Oh, what demon has tempted me here?

Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber—

      This misty mid region of Weir—

Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber—

      In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir."

Said we, then—the two, then—"Ah, can it

      Have been that the woodlandish ghouls—

      The pitiful, the merciful ghouls—

To bar up our way and to ban it

      From the secret that lies in these wolds—

      From the thing that lies hidden in these wolds—

Had drawn up the spectre of a planet

      From the limbo of lunary souls—

This sinfully scintillant planet

      From the Hell of the planetary souls?"

29 April - Roger Zelazny Poetry Month - Love is an Imaginary Number

This is one of the stories where the poem came first.

Love is an Imaginary Number isn't one of Zelazny's best known or most loved stories, but there is something about it that calls to me.

I do love Milton's writing. When I started putting this list together, one of my favorite phrases in the English language came to mind: Awake, arise, or be forever fallen. That line alone might have been enough to get Paradise Lost on the list. It’s a rallying cry and a warning, all at once.

Zelazny draws from the same well. He calls on Loki and Lucifer to populate Love is an Imaginary Number with their metaphors. It’s a story about defiance and identity, about the masks we wear and the roles we’re handed. It’s brief, strange, and deliberately slippery.

Milton gives us a devil who chooses rebellion over submission. Zelazny gives us something less straightforward but just as sharp. The pairing works not because the story tries to match Paradise Lost in scope, but because it glances in the same direction and smiles.

He call'd so loud, that all the hollow Deep

Of Hell resounded. Princes, Potentates

Warriers, the Flowr of Heav'n, once yours, now lost,

If such astonishment as this can sieze

Eternal spirits; or have ye chos'n this place

After the toyl of Battel to repose

Your wearied vertue, for the ease you find

To slumber here, as in the Vales of Heav'n?

Or in this abject posture have ye sworn

To adore the Conquerour?   who now beholds

Cherube and Seraph rowling in the Flood

With scatter'd Arms and Ensigns, till anon

His swift pursuers from Heav'n Gates discern

Th' advantage, and descending tread us down

Thus drooping, or with linked Thunderbolts

Transfix us to the bottom of this Gulfe.

Awake, arise, or be for ever fall'n.