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Genre: Superhero
Premise: As the world’s most famous family, The Fantastic Four, prepare to have their first baby, an evil giant entity known as Galactus threatens to destroy their planet.
About: A lot is riding on this film’s success for Marvel. The movie finished its opening weekend with 118 million dollars. In the much hyped DC vs. Marvel Summer battle of Superman versus Fantastic Four, Fantastic Four lost out to Superman by 7 million bucks. The two films have an almost identical worldwide box office tally, separated by just a million dollars (220 to Superman versus 219 F4). The film received a lot of surprisingly good reviews just before being released, bringing expectations up significantly. I may have allowed those expectations to cloud my judgment.
Writers: Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, Ian Springer, Kat Wood – characters created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
Details: 115 minutes long
I’ll be straight up honest with you.
I can’t get enough of this stuff.
My script analysis brain runs at a million RPMs during superhero movies now, making it hard to just let go and enjoy them. Still, I’m fascinated by these films because I know the people behind the scenes are pouring every ounce of their creative energy into them.
I know people think the opposite is true, that they’re just mindlessly churning these films out. Trust me, that is not the case. They know that the profit difference between a bad and a good superhero movie could be as much as 400 million dollars. And the difference between a bad and a great superhero movie could be as much as a billion dollars.
With those numbers, everybody is working overtime to create the best movie possible.
The problem that keeps getting in the way is that studios refuse to take real creative risks on movies that cost over 100 million dollars. And big creative risks are one of the only ways for a film to break out into something great. Instead, their risks have to stay within small-risk territory. So you’re never going to get something that’s amazing.
That’s why I love this stuff. I love seeing what the studios and creatives on these movies will do. How much they’ll push that envelope and if they’ll ever get bold enough to take a real creative risk. Cause they’re getting to that point where they may not have a choice. If people stop coming to superhero movies, they’ll have to get creative fast. So, in a way, you kind of want these things to fail. That will lead to a new era of wilder weirder superhero films.
I guess you could say that Fantastic Four took *some* risks. They came up with this 1960s aesthetic, which feels a little different than your typical superhero film. But, for some strange reason, you get used to it so quickly, that they might as well have set it in modern times.
The movie follows this “family” of superheroes – Sue Storm (invisibility), Reed Richards (stretchy powers), Ben Grimm (a giant rock), and Johnny Storm (fire powers) – on their parallel universe Earth, where they are kind of like the planet’s presidents. And the movie starts with news that Sue is pregnant.
No sooner does this happen than a female Silver Surfer shows up and warns the entire planet that her master, the gigantic galaxy-hopping Galactus, has chosen their planet to eat. That’s right. Galactus goes around eating planets.
She then disappears and The Fantastic Four chart a flight to Galactus’s home world to try and negotiate. Surprisingly, Galactus is open to negotiation. And, to any sane person, his offer is reasonable. He says that if you give me your newborn, I won’t destroy your planet. The Fantastic Four channel Howie Mandel and tell Galactus… NO DEAL!
They then go back home, break the news to Earth. For some reason, the people of earth are only mildly upset about it. Here the civilians in Superman were, hurling cans of soda point blank at Superman’s face for helping avoid a war yet they merely shrugged their shoulders at the fact that the Fantastic Four didn’t sacrifice one human life for the lives of 6 billion. Um, okay.
But don’t worry! Reed Richards has a plan! It’s called: Project Baby Swap! He’ll lure Galactus into a trap that will send him to the furthest regions of the universe with an empty baby basket. Except he miscalculates how smart Galactus is. When Galactus sniffs out the tomfoolery, it will be a battle to the end right there in New York City.
There is a LOT to talk about with this movie but I’ll start with Pedro Pascal. This dude needs to take a three year vacation from acting. He does so many jobs that it’s clearly harmed his performances. I’ve never seen a more monotone lifeless performance than Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards.
In fact, the worst thing about this movie…. IS THE FANTASTIC FOUR. They’re all boring! How do you make The Thing boring? He’s an awesome character. Here, he’s always tired, like a gassed bodybuilder after a 3 hour workout (“Oh, you want me to pick up this car?” He says, half-heartedly to a group of schoolchildren. “Sure, okay, I guess.”). Then there was the baby drama, which felt like it belonged in a 90s sitcom starring two dads, one named Jesse, the other named Balky, rather than in a 2025 superhero movie.
The closest they got to a compelling superhero was Johnny Storm because at least he had a fun storyline – he fell in love with the Silver Surfer chick.
But from a screenwriting standpoint, they made a critical error early in the screenplay. They created a family WITH ZERO CONFLICT. Since when has there ever been a family without conflict? What a bizarre choice. But, even worse, IT WAS A BORING CHOICE. Cause we meet this family and they all like each other and chum around and that’s not why we come to movies. We come to movies to see conflict resolved. There was no conflict with this family! That alone made it nearly impossible for the movie to succeed.
And here’s the kicker: It almost did succeed.
Why?
Cause, for the first time since Thanos, Marvel had some badass villains! Galactus was a badass! I loved him. I can’t remember the last time a villain with gravitas entered any superhero film. This guy felt like a legitimate threat. Whenever his eyes lit up, I got scared goosebumps.
And Silver Surfer Chick was badass too! I loved the sadness within her. Her action scenes were fun to watch. I wanted her and Johnny to get together. I found myself rooting for her a lot.
Maybe this is why Marvel doesn’t make more badass villains. Because they’re afraid of what’s happened here, which is that the villains outshone the heroes.
One thing that The Fantastic Four taught me, though, is the value of setups and payoffs in these big movies. Again, you don’t have a lot of leniency in your creative choices with these scripts. The higher forces give you nowhere to go but in the most obvious directions.
You can combat this, however, with strong setups and payoffs. Setups and payoffs, as simple as they are to do, create this feeling of cleverness whenever they’re executed. In other words, they make a movie feel smarter than it is. In many ways, it’s your last line of defense in making these big generic movies feel satisfying.
For example, there’s this nice late moment where Johnny Storm decides to sacrifice himself to help push a struggling Galactus into the teleportation zone so he’ll be sent to the furthest regions of the universe. Johnny’s plan is to push him in, which means he’ll have to go as well. So he’s shooting towards Galactus and, at the last second, the Silver Surfer bumps him off his path and sacrifices herself instead.
The movie gave these two – Johnny Storm and the Silver Surfer – five scenes together setting up their complicated relationship and Johnny’s attempt to turn the Silver Surfer, which she had, up until this point, resisted. That was the setup. So, to see her finally come around, to the point where she sacrificed herself for him, was a great payoff. And it felt good!
It was a reminder, though, of just how frustrating this movie was. It had these little flashes of greatness but then it would destroy them with these major character or structural errors. This family was sooooooo boring. And then, for the majority of the script, you had the dreaded “waiting around narrative.” That’s where all our heroes do is wait around. Which DESTROYS story momentum – that they had to wait around for Galactus to show up.
All of this steeped on top of, probably, the most special effects driven movie I’ve ever seen. I’d be surprised if there were even half-a-dozen tangible things on screen. It looked like every frame was created in a computer. And that drives me nuts.
The Marvel Universe is in a really tough spot now. The Fantastic Four did okay. But it’s not going to create a rabid fanbase for more Fantastic Four films. And the reason that’s relevant is because they’re supposedly building these next two Avengers films around Reed Richards being the new Tony Stark.
Oooooooh boy will that be interesting. We’re talking about one of the most charismatic characters ever put on screen being replaced by a piece of cardboard – a piece of cardboard, by the way, who will be shooting seven other films at the same time as Avengers, turning his cardboardy performances even more cardboardy.
For hardcore Marvel fans, this film should be satisfying. Anybody else, though, is going to forget this one within a week.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If your movie is built around a group of heroes, I would highly advise building SOME FORM OF CONFLICT into that group. While there is probably a good movie somewhere that’s based around a group of people who have zero issues with each other, it’s extremely rare.
