shallowness

I didn’t get around to going to the cinema in July, but I watched Deep Cover on streaming. It was often literally too dark, and not funny enough, though I noted the swipes at past Bloom roles. Dallas Howard and Considine are good. When I found out the tonally weird police officers were the scriptwriters, it made sense.

I have subsequently seen The Fantastic 4 – First Steps. I loved the retro 60s look, was somewhat amused by the sitcommy feel, thought the effects were pretty good, but as the plot kicked in, I realised I wasn’t all that emotionally invested. So, I didn’t like it as much as Thunderbolts*, and The Incredibles remains the best Fantastic 4 movie adaptation (both soundtracked by Michael Giacchino.) To be clear, I only saw the 2000s ones where Chris Evans and Jessica Alba were somehow siblings, not the remake in between.

I liked that it wasn’t an origin story. I presume that the rubbishy enemies they’d been dealing with since coming back from space all supered up were all from the comics. The Silver Surfer (cool that the Herald was a woman) and Galactus were well done.

I liked the attempt to give Sue more agency – using the forcefield as active powers, but she is essentially The Mom of the team, backed up by being the political leader who can cut through men’s nonsense. And then, quite literally, because of the pregnancy. I rolled my eyes at ‘this won’t change anything’, which was subverted by the ‘babyproofing' montage, and rolled my eyes even harder at heavily pregnant Sue going into space to spy on Galactus. Yeah, yeah, vital part of the team, but serve you right that you nearly gave birth in zero gravity.

Making Franklyn a magic space baby led to me dispassionately noting he was a bit of an Isaac, in the choice Galactus forced on the Fantastic Four, then a bit of a Moses, visually, and then a bit of a Messiah. To be frank, in the climactic scene where it appears as though his mother had sacrificed herself for him (and I did note that it was Sue who found the power to push back Galactus more effectively than the superpowered men, and that it was another woman, i.e. the Silver Surfer, who helped push him back in, not uncle Johnny, so that’s something) I was impatiently going, ‘Come on then, magic space baby’ and wondering how much of the onscreen baby was a real baby and how much was VFX enhanced. Also, poor whatever other part of that universe you shoved the Devourer into.

So, you know, I was not in the moment.

Other things I rolled my eyes at: even though it’s an alternate Earth with some alternate countries, the US is the major power and everything revolves around New York (even though the presence of Mark Gatiss reminded me it was probably filmed in a British studio, and Spain featured prominently in the credits.) Most of the rest of the Earth’s population had been fanboy/girling the Fantastic Four, then they turned on them for not giving up the baby or defeating Galactus. (Main takeout: Fantastic Four, you had a month to come back to Earth, and you didn’t work on a line to take!?) But then! When Reed asked, they all gave up the use of power for the greater good.

The ‘science’ was absurd. I also got rather annoyed with Johnny deciding he could personally do a Rosetta Stone on the Silver Surfer’s words, because Reed was busy/he had a thing for her. (Did we have to see she was a blonde white lady originally to really get that she had a kernel of humanity?) Were there no linguists on that Earth? Is everyone on that Earth other than the Fantastic 4 stupid? Certainly nobody other than the Fantastic 4 deserves a flying car! Or a rocket. They wisely used as little as possible of Mr Fantastic’s stretchiness.

I was left cold by H.E.R.B.I.E., I didn’t find it cute that I didn’t understand 85 per cent of his utterances. I don’t think I knew the guy playing Johnny from anything (resting face: grimace.) Pedro Pascal was fine as Reed, and pretty deft with the humour, but maybe not quite as charismatic as he could have been (Kirby’s Sue won some arguments by the sheer force of Kirby’s charisma.) I quite liked Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s performance as Ben, the frustrated chef, the loyal friend and the hater of the ‘It’s clobbering time’ catchphrase.

Stay for the mid-credits scene, then you can skip the post-credits scene.