Fantastic Four: First Steps

I’ve just seen The Fantastic Four: First Steps for the second time. I’m happy to confirm that it doesn’t put a single foot wrong. It could be taken as a masterclass in how to translate revered properties from one media to another.

Perhaps surprisingly, I was more emotionally taken-in by the schmaltz, melodrama and sentiment the second time through, when I knew what was going to happen, than the first time, when I didn’t. Or perhaps that isn’t surprising: perhaps comics are by definition twice-told tales and you can only be properly sad about the death of Snow White once you know that she is going to get better. (It’s probably not giving too much away to say that, yes, a major character dies, yes, I was sad, and yes, they do get better.) Sue’s speech to the angry crowd about how all the people of the world are one big happy family; and Reed’s confrontation with Galactus (“You will not take my planet and you will never take my son”) are corny as heck and succeed for just that reason. 

The film has, of course, a lot of visual and narrative call-outs to the comic book; but the film works fine if you don’t spot them. Sofa-buddy, who despite stringent efforts on my part has never read an FF comic, thoroughly enjoyed herself. But that’s the wrong way to think about an adaptation. We don’t watch a dramatisation of Middlemarch and wonder if Nicholas Bulstrode is an easter egg for sad George Eliot fan-girls. Mark Shakman has used an extensive repository of characters and concepts and forged them into a stand-alone work.

The Incredibles, which was until now the best Fantastic Four movie, began in media res with the family as established heroes, and made extensive reference to previous adventures and bad guys that the audience knew nothing about. Underminer and Bomb Voyage have no existence outside of the movie script, where every true fan knows that the Mole Man, the Red Ghost and the Mad Thinker appeared in Fantastic Four #1, #13 and #15. There is a flashback to the Fantastic Four fighting one of Mole Man’s monsters, which is a pretty explicit call-back to the very very first Fantastic Four cover. Arguably those of us who can identify the Super-apes and know who the Puppet Master is are getting a worse aesthetic experience compared with the general audience who just feel themselves being bombarded with an excess of creative brainstorming.

(Granted, I am assuming that Joe Public’s prior knowledge of the Fantastic Four derives from the not-as-bad-as-people-make-out 2005 movie. A Batman franchise would be on much safer ground assuming that J.P knows who the Joker and the Riddler and even Commissioner Gordon and Dick Grayson are. But perhaps I am wrong: geek culture has been substantially mainstreamed in the last twenty years.)

From the opening caption, the movie positions itself as a tribute to Jack Kirby’s vision of the FF. If Stan Lee’s main contribution were the (extremely good) words in the speech bubbles and caption boxes, then we would have to say that Stan has been substantially erased from this re-imagining. None of the team really sound as they do in the comics. HERBIE the robot, introduced in a 1977 cartoon and the last contribution Jack made to the Marvel Universe is a taken-for-granted fixture. He has a role somewhere between R2D2 and a high-tech vacuum cleaner, but manages to hardly ever be annoying.

There is nothing wrong with a Fantastic Four fan hoping that a Fantastic Four movie will stay true to the Fantastic Four comic. No-one has forgiven 2007’s Rise of the Silver Surfer for depicting Galactus as a cloud of purple space gas (of the kind V’Ger probes generally hang out in the middle of). One can follow the studio's train of thought: having persuaded us to believe that the angel of death is a naked guy on a flying surfboard, you can’t also convince us that the Deity is a big purple guy with a funny hat. But fandom let out a collective sigh when the answer to the question “How are they going to do Galactus?” turned out to be “They aren’t even going to try”. The franchise died on the spot.

The desire for “Comic-Book Accuracy” is almost always focussed on superficials: if Galactus is not purple then he is #not-my-galactus. But very frequently the films which dispense with surface detail are the ones which have best understood their source material. The Stallone Judge Dredd looked a lot like a 1980s issue of 2000AD but had bugger-all to do with the character and wasn’t even that good an action movie. The 2012 Karl Urban version made no attempt to emulate the look and feel of the comic, or indeed the details of the backstory, but basically seemed to “get” Dredd. [1]

With the exception of Ben none of the characters in this movie really look or sound a great deal like the comic book characters do. I couldn’t think of Pedro Pascal as “Reed” or Joseph Quinn as “Johnny”. But what the movie unquestionably takes from the comic is the team dynamic. Reed and Sue are Mum and Dad, Ben and Johnny are the quarrelling younger brothers who are nevertheless devoted to each other. There is the smart, emotionally reticent one; the older, taciturn one prone to bouts of temper; the younger, hot-headed one; and the sensible motherly one. Superpowers are consistently less important than personalities. Granted, Galactus is in the end defeated with flame, force-field and clobbering; but not before Reed has come up with an extremely far-fetched scientific deus ex machina, which, after a huge build-up, completely fails.

Galactus is not a cloud of purple gas. He is huge and speaks with a deep voice. His armour has a purple tinge. He is darker than his comic book counterpart, with a gothic undertone. Perhaps he knows that his onlie begetter also begat Darkseid. Something about his ship recalled HR Giger’s Alien. He also  emulates the Borg: a huge, impersonal, force that lumbers through space assimilating worlds. He is plugged into the ship with a gigantic cable, but when he reaches New York he pushes over skyscrapers and glowers down at the Statue of Liberty. This rather reduces the Cosmic God to the status of Godzilla or the Staypuft Marshmallow Man, but it looks tremendous.

In Jack Kirby’s original conception, the Silver Surfer was an alien being, presumably created by Galactus, with no human emotions until the Thing’s blind girlfriend Alicia shows him that humans are OK. Stan Lee’s inept retcon (now irreducibly part of the character) was that he had once been Norrin Radd, a dissident hippy on the planet Zenn-La. Norrin Radd made a devil’s bargain that if Galactus spared Zenn-La he would find him alternative sources of food. Lee also decided that Galactus used to be a human called Galen, the sole survivor of the planet Taa: to his great credit, John Byrne salvaged this terrible idea by placing Taa in the universe before the Big Bang. Kirby seems originally to have envisaged Galactus and the Watcher as having a common origin. 

Norrin Radd/The Silver Surfer is permanently in mourning for Shalla Bal, the girl he left at home, particularly when Galactus exiles him to earth for siding with the human race. The “Comic Book Accuracy” obsessives have, of course, wet their pants because in this movie it is Shalla Bal who sacrifices herself and becomes the Silver Surphress. I am afraid that all too often “Comic Book Accuracy” is a coded way of complaining about diversity and inclusion in movies [2]. But in the context of the movie, the change of gender makes excellent sense. The Surferette is still a silver skinned alien on a flying surfboard. The sequences in which she chases the Human Torch to the edge of the atmosphere, pursues the FF’s spacecraft into a neutron star, and zips round the world blowing up Reed’s science installations, do a very good job at transferring the physics of Californian wave-riders to outer space. She is still the angel of death, announcing to the human race that the Devourer is coming from them: and she still, at the last possible moment, develops a moral conscience. The idea of the Surfer and the dynamism of Kirby (and Buscema’s) artwork has been "accurately" translated to the cinema. 

The fact that she doesn’t look exactly like the comic book character plays to the films’ advantage: in all of her scenes I felt that I was encountering a new, unfamiliar character: I was uncertain what this Silver Surferina would do next. (By contrast, I was completely unable to connect Tenoch Huerta’s Namor in Wakanda Forever! with the Submariner of the comic books: I don’t say that I wanted to or needed to, but I couldn’t. It seemed comedically incongruous when he shouted out “Imperius Rex!”) 

In the original Galactus trilogy, on which this movie is partly a riff, the Silver Surfer changes his mind about the human race after encountering the Thing’s blind girl-friend Alicia Masters. In this version, the Thing has an implicit lady-friend, a Yancy Street school-teacher named Rachel, but she’s only a minor part of the plot. It makes excellent narrative sense for it to be one of the team to have a quasi-romantic interlude with the Surfer. In the original story, it was Johnny who saved the universe, ascending to Galactus’s spaceship and stealing the Ultimate Nullifier from under his nose. Johnny’s diplomatic encounter with the Savage She-Surfer arguably retains aspects of both ploy elements.

There are a lot of other things I could say about the movie. It is interesting that it majors so heavily on Franklin, given that director Matt Shakman was also behind Wandavision. (Agatha Harkness originally entered the Marvel Universe as Franklin’s nanny.) I have said for many years that the Fantastic Four is an old-fashioned story rooted in its time-period and any movie version needed to be set in the 1960s or even earlier; [3]: but the Jetsons retro-future was an inspired solution to the difficulty. It is full of visual in-jokes and asides: the Future Foundation flag flying on the moon; the brief view of an un-named writer and an un-named artist drawing monsters for “Timely” comics; the footprint in the dust on Galactus's base the running-gag about the in-universe Fantastic Four cartoon. 

The first hundred issues of the Fantastic Four, and the first Galactus/Surfer story in particular, represent a kind of sacred scripture for comic book fans. This movie doesn’t simply transcribe them to the screen (what would be the point of that?): it is a fresh, new thing by someone who loves Reed and Sue and Ben and Johnny— but especially Jack — almost as much as we do.

[1] Similarly, gender-swapped all Black naturist productions of Hamlet are frequently faithful to Shakespeare in a way that aging Englishmen in hose with posh accents simply aren’t. 

[2] You see, that guy was right: 100% of everything I write about movies is not about anything apart from the culture wars, ever.  I do not mean to imply that the person who says “I didn’t think it worked for Doctor Manhattan’s plan to involve a nuclear explosion; I wish they had stayed with the giant squid” or “I don’t think the Joker ought to be the one who kills Batman’s parents: it really has to be a nameless thug for the story to work” is necessarily a culture warrior: only that the phrase "comic book accurate" is frequently found in sentences along side "woke garbage", "Disney shill" and "liberal groomer". This is also true of the unqualified phrase "bad writing". When someone says “It’s not about race or gender, it’s about bad writing” it’s about race and gender.

[3] I would also like to see a Golden Age Superman movie, in which the hero leaps over buildings, punches slum landlords and sends gangsters to the electric chair. 

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