'Fantastic Four' is an Adequate, Live-Action 'Incredibles'

Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the late aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.

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News Stuff:

Richard Linklater’s latest, Blue Moon, has a trailer:

Damn, Margaret Qualley is in everything lately. She’s becoming the female Pedro Pascal. From Happy Gilmore 2 to Linklater. That’s range. Here’s the synopsis:

On the evening of March 31, 1943, legendary lyricist Lorenz Hart confronts his shattered self-confidence in Sardi’s bar as his former collaborator Richard Rodgers celebrates the opening night of his ground-breaking hit musical “Oklahoma!”.

Pedro Pascal Seems to be in the Midst of a Smear Campaign

Lately I’ve noticed a curiously high number of posts about Pedro Pascal supposedly soothing his anxiety by getting handsy with women. The stories all seem thinly sourced (if at all) and usually come from slop accounts I don’t follow. I didn’t know much about it, but the whole thing feels a lot like the Blake Lively and Amber Heard smear campaigns (the former of which seems to have drawn in a post on this very newsletter).

Luckily Kat Tenbarge is here with the explainer. The Pascal story seems to trace its origin to pro-JK Rowling accounts (Pascal having rightly called her a “heinous loser”), and may involve folks angry over that and/or his criticism of Israel (plus the usual clout chasing and algorithm manipulation drafting on whatever is popular).

According to viral videos on social media this week, actor Pedro Pascal pretends to soothe his anxiety by groping the women around him—his Fantastic Four costar Vanessa Kirby, his friend Sarah Paulson, and Willem Dafoe’s wife, to name a few. There are memes and incriminating footage from red carpets. But none of it is true. […]

The basis of the allegations against Pascal isn’t true, and none of the women he’s been accused of groping have said so themselves. Kirby has even said the opposite. What’s happening to Pascal across these viral posts is a smear campaign, one spearheaded by bigots against a celebrity whose inclusive stance directly challenges their beliefs. [Source]

As we learned with Lively, any time you start seeing a curiously high number of posts bashing a specific celebrity, it’s worth questioning why. For the too-online among us, these weird little astroturfing campaigns have started to take on a recognizable flavor. It apparently doesn’t take much to manipulate recommendation engines these days. It seems to be a phenomenon downstream of one that we’ve previously discussed: The Numbers Are All Fake.

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Fantastic Four: First Steps

With The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Marvel has seemingly achieved the impossible: releasing an MCU film that doesn’t tie into or excessively reference other MCU films. That may have more to do with The Fantastic Four being a separate property owned by Fox until Fox was acquired by Disney in 2019 than with the creative choices, but I promised myself that I wouldn’t spend the first three paragraphs of this review discussing the finer points of corporate mergers, as has become standard with superhero movies more broadly and with attempts to reboot The Fantastic Four in particular. The larger point is that Fantastic Four: First Steps manages to get through all of its runtime without any of the characters discussing what the Avengers might be up to right now, which easily puts it above Thunderbolts* and Captain America Brave New World.

True, the film does begin with a title card reading “Earth 828,” suggesting that this is merely one reality in an infinite multiverse of IP media projects, but whatever conceit they concoct to ensure that none of these characters fangirl about Tony Stark during the runtime is fine by me. I can get onboard with the multiverse conceit if it’s used to ignore continuity rather than enforce it. One title card? Great!

The film that follows is so close to a live-action remake of The Incredibles that Disney would probably sue themselves if they were separate companies. Fantastic Four: First Steps begins in 1960-ish, or at least the retrofuturistic Earth 828 version of it. This gives the production designers license to restage their own idealized version of the early sixties: Earth tones, conversation pits, circular fireplaces, and everyone looking crazy cozy in soft turtlenecks and baller tweeds. What a proper country we used to be in this alternate universe! (I watched some Mad Men DVD commentary recently in which they were discussing that one of the keys to creating what they considered a realistic vision of 1960 was to have characters who didn’t all look exactly like trendy magazine shoots from 1960. They had characters whose styles were informed by the 50s, the 40s, and even the 30s, depending on their age and hipness, which is more true to reality, in which not everyone is perfectly au-courant. But this 60s world where everyone is super hip and perfectly mid-century works great in a comic book reality).

This fictional world is, as I said, basically lifted whole cloth from The Incredibles. The suits look just like Frozone, and Paul Walter Hauser even plays Mole Man, who is pretty much The Underminer to a T (not that I’m ever going to complain about more Paul Walter Hauser). The Incredibles probably lifted their own look from some older version of Fantastic Four that I’m not aware of, but again, not going to get into a whole thing about it. The larger point is that it mostly looks cool, and it’s refreshing to see an MCU movie that cares this much about the look and world-building—a far cry from Joss Whedon’s flat, overlit sitcoms. Gone too is much of the soy dialogue, replaced by an alternate universe mid-century optimism and can-do spirit. The film takes place entirely a non-satirical Bob’s Big Boy reality that it maintains assiduously. Which is nice, even if First Steps never gets much beyond feeling nice.

As we begin, the Fantastic Four are already world famous. A team of astronauts led by Reed Richards (the ubiquitous Pedro Pascal), his wife (Sue Storm, played by Vanessa Kirby), her brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn), and Reed’s best friend Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) have returned from a perilous space mission having been exposed to cosmic rays that altered their DNA and turned them into superheroes. As we learn In a breezy montage, they’ve since used their powers of super stretchiness (Reed), telekinesis (Sue), flaming… uh… flight (Johnny), and super strength and hardness (Ben) to protect the world from various baddies, including genetically modified super-orangutans, one of whom Reed punches off a crane out into the ocean (nice visual). Their heroism has since been marketed and commodified, complete with a corny cartoon so popular that salty New Yawk types have taken to shouting Ben’s catchphrase (“It’s clobberin’ time!”) when he’s just trying to stroll the streets in his sweet Brooklyn Dodgers hat.

They’re celebrities, everyone loves them, they’re just a little bored and fractious. Again, if you’ve seen The Incredibles, you’ve understand the setup. The inciting event for the story is Sue Storm finding out that she’s about to have a baby, thanks to a modded-out retrofuturistic pregnancy test—presumably the first time in 37 movies that an MCU title will have “offscreen urination” as one of its parental guidance keywords.

The gang are all celebrating the fetus when a massive meteor shower takes shape in the skies above the city. Out of which glides a shimmering valkyrie, seemingly composed of molten mercury, played by Julia Garner (great casting choice for a character who has to look spooky using only her eyes). She is Silver Surfer, of course, a character even I know despite never having been a weird sub-literate comic book virgin. She has arrived on her bitchin’ 60s longboard with a message: their planet has been marked for destruction, by the mysterious entity known as Galactus, who is very big and voiced gravelly by the inimitable Ralph Ineson, of The VVitch and The Green Knight fame (whose voice is so singular that it kind of only works in comic book and supernatural stuff).

Resistance is futile, their fate inevitable, and they should spend their now-numbered days porking their hog wives and appreciating their dumb wiener kids and whatnot, Silver Surfer advises. She’s actually kind of dignified about it. Nice lady, under the circumstances.