I saw FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS yesterday, and prior to crafting a review for the movie-blog I decided to mediate on why I found myself less than captivated with the movie, even though it's a general improvement on the standard MCU product.
One problem is that of all the previous adaptations of the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR have been unable to put across the unique blend of action, pathos and imagination found in the comic book, with the possible exception of the 1967 FANTASTIC FOUR cartoon, which was largely a straightforward recycling of the original stories. Though the FF was the conceptual flagship title of Marvel Comics, the property was owned for several years by 20th-Century Fox, and thus was outside the grasp of the Disney-owned MCU during its formative years. Disney's acquisition of the FF franchise in 2019 finally made it feasible to integrate the FF into the current universe. Because for the last five years most MCU movies and television shows have become creatively constipated and generally unprofitable, some fans held out hope for STEPS to be a game-changer. At present STEPS' box office won't even come close to the billion-dollar mark of last year's DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE, so it's not going to alter the MCU's downward spiral in terms of popularity. It's possible that STEPS will enjoy aesthetic prominence, though, given rumors that the company plans to go forward with an Avengers-FF crossover and possibly a STEPS sequel after that.
While I've not followed any of the publicity statements by director Matt Shakman or the movie's four credited writers, it seems obvious that they all sought to choose a particular SF-idiom not found in previous adaptations. In my 2023 essay THE EXCELLENT SEEDS OF HIS OWN DESTRUCTION, I expatiated on two idioms that had influenced the science fiction genre since its formulation in the late 1800s, calling them, informally, "gosh-wow" SF and "philosophical SF." The new names in my title. "pulpy" and "talky," are not meant to be any less informal, but they're a little more direct in encapsulating distinct forms of narrative appeal. "The pulpy" appeals to sensation and emotional melodrama, while "the talky" appeals to ideational concepts. Some critics automatically prefer the latter idiom, as per the nostrum that "science fiction is a literature of ideas." Yet not all ideas are good just because they share a didactic approach, any more than all sensations are good because they share a sense of immediacy.
In the SEEDS essay, I argued that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, as well as other Marvel raconteurs to a lesser extent, tapped into the two rough idioms of science fiction because they all had been exposed to those idioms in the 1950s through the proliferation of SF cinema in that decade, and they sought (as their chief competitor DC Comics did not) to convey both idioms to their young readers. The Marvel creators were not the first in comics to do this. But when they crossbred the SF idioms with the superhero genre in the 1960s, they created a self-sustaining mythology-- one that the MCU managed to adapt for cinema, to some extent bringing things full circle.
The Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR was the most fully developed blend of the two idioms, allowing the quartet of heroes to vary their adventures from high-tension battles with supervillains to meditative reflections on man's place in the universe. But because Shakman and company chose to launch STEPS with their take on the highly praised "Galactus Trilogy," they clearly chose one idiom over the other-- and thus failed to capture the rich dichotomy of the original comic book. I know that during my viewing I found myself pulling back from all the homages to 1995's APOLLO 13, which was fine for a mundane film about space-exploration but became draggy within the context of a superhero franchise film.
No comments:
Post a Comment