The Too-Fantastic Four

 

I have now watched the new Fantastic Four movie for myself. 

The Fantastic Four mean a lot to me. They were my entrance to the Marvel Universe back in the “Silver Age.” I might have had FF#3. I was immediately addicted. 

The secret to the great success of Marvel is that Stan Lee understood the rules of the genre in which he was working: the hero legend. DC never did. I credit this to a proper Jewish education.

These heroes were real people with problems. There were references to real places.

The film fails because it does not understand the genre.

It is not just that they tinkered with the FF we knew and loved, by giving Reed Richards a different build and a moustache, or by swapping sexes on the Silver Surfer. Although that was bad enough. They also, gratuitously, had The Thing grow a beard halfway through the film. Another example of messing with the iconography. Heroes are semi-divine beings, and the iconography is important. You do not make Paul Bunyan’s ox pink. You do not make Santa Claus wear blue.

But more fundamentally, the plot line messed with the form.

The plot of the FF movie had spontaneous female emotion, on the part of The Invisible Girl and the Silver Surfer, triumph over both male reason (Reed Richards) and male strength (Galactus). This subverts the genre. It might work in a fairy tale, but this is a hero legend. In a hero legend, the hero triumphs by either strength or strategy. Not by stomping his foot and looking cross.

But to be honest, this is a bit beside the point. The film had lost me well before that, by about halfway through. Because special effects are now a dime a dozen, they are boring and destroy the willing suspension of disbelief. Every movie looks the same, and who cares? I am reminded of some solid writing advice from Mark Twain: “If you thunder and lightning too much, the reader stops hiding under the bed by and by.”

The movie lost my interest immediately when it blasted off into space. I felt insulted. It was not “superhero fatigue,” but special effects fatigue. It would still be wonderful to see a good movie made of the Fantastic Four. One that dealt with the characters, as the original comics did, or as the Joaquin Phoenix “Joker” movie did. This is what made the Fantastic Four special, and is the secret of the hero legend: when you can almost believe they exist in your own real world.