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.
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| Not quite it |
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| Getting warmer... |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| "It's not a G. It stands for Hope." |
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| 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 that enrages me, "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.
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| 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.
