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Los Angeles Times
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘Fantastic Four' review: It's hip to be square
'The Fantastic Four: First Steps' slots into summer blockbuster season like a square peg in a round popcorn bucket. Former theater director Mark Shakman ('WandaVision') isn't inclined to pretzel himself like the flexible Reed Richards to please all four quadrants of the multiplex. His staid superhero movie plays like a classic sci-fi where adults in sweater vests solemnly brainstorm how to resolve a crisis. Watching it, I felt as snug as being nestled in the backseat of my grandparents' car at the drive-in. This reboot — the third in two decades — is lightyears closer to 1951's 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' than it is to the frantic, over-cluttered superhero epics that have come to define modern entertainment. Set on Earth 828, an alternate universe that resembles our own atomic age, it doesn't just look old, it moves old. The tone and pace are as assured as the sight of the globe-gobbling Galactus, this film's heavy, marching into alt-world Manhattan. Even its tidy running time is from another epoch. Under two hours? Now that's vintage chic!
Los Angeles Times
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps' is a grown-up glow-up for the superhero genre
'The Fantastic Four: First Steps' slots into summer blockbuster season like a square peg in a round popcorn bucket. Prestige TV director Matt Shakman ('WandaVision') isn't inclined to pretzel himself like the flexible Reed Richards to please all four quadrants of the multiplex. His staid superhero movie plays like classic sci-fi in which adults wearing sweater vests solemnly brainstorm how to resolve a crisis. Watching it, I felt as snug as being nestled in the backseat of my grandparents' car at the drive-in. This reboot of the Fantastic Four franchise — the third in two decades — is lightyears closer to 1951's 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' than it is to the frantic, over-cluttered superhero epics that have come to define modern entertainment. Set on Earth 828, an alternate universe that borrows our own Atomic Age decor, it doesn't just look old, it moves old. The tone and pace are as sure-footed as globe-gobbling Galactus, this film's heavy, purposefully marching into alt-world Manhattan. Even its tidy running time is from another epoch. Under two hours? Now that's vintage chic. 'First Steps' picks up several years after four astronauts — Reed (Pedro Pascal), his wife, Sue (Vanessa Kirby), his brother-in-law Johnny (Joseph Quinn) and his best friend Ben (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) — get themselves blasted by cosmic rays that endow them with special powers. You may know the leads better as, respectively, Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch and the Thing. For mild comic relief, they also pal around with a robot named H.E.R.B.I.E., voiced by Matthew Wood. Skipping their origin story keeps things tight while underlining the idea that these are settled-down grown-ups secure in their abilities to lengthen, disappear, ignite and clobber. Fans might argue they should be a bit more neurotic; screenplay structuralists will grumble they have no narrative arc. The mere mortals of Earth 828 respect the squad for their brains and their brawn — they're celebrities in a genteel pre-paparazzi time — but these citizens are also prone to despair when they aren't sure Pascal's workaholic daddy will save them. Lore has it Stan Lee was a married, middle-aged father aging out of writing comic books when his beloved spouse, Joan, elbowed him to develop characters who felt personal. The graying, slightly boring Reed was a loose-limbed version of himself: the ultimate wife guy with the ultimate wife. But Hollywood has aged-down Lee's 'quaint quartet,' as he called them, at its own peril. Make the Fantastic Four cool (as the movies have repeatedly tried and failed to do) and they come across as desperately lame. This time, Shakman and the script's four-person writing team of Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan and Ian Springer valorize their lameness and restore their dignity. Pascal's Mr. Fantastic is so buttoned-down that he tucks his tie into his dress shirt. The scenario is that Sue is readying to give birth to the Richards' first child just as the herald Shalla-Bal (Julia Garner), a.k.a. the Silver Surfer, barrels into the atmosphere to politely inform humanity that her boss Galactus (voiced by Ralph Ineson) has RSVP-ed yes to her invitation that he devour their planet. In a biologically credible touch, the animators have added tarnish to her cleavage: 'I doubt she was naked,' Reed says evenly. 'It was probably a stellar polymer.' Typically, this threat would trigger a madcap fetch-this-gizmo caper (as it did in the original comic). Shakman's version doesn't waste its energy or our time on that. Rather, this a lean showdown between self-control and gluttony, between our modest heroes and a greedy titan. It's at the Venn diagram of a Saturday morning cartoon and a moralistic Greek myth. The film is all sleek lines, from its themes to its architecture to its images. The visuals by the cinematographer Jess Hall are crisp and impactful: a translucent hand snatching at a womb, a character falling into the pull of a yawning black hole, a torso stretched like chewing gum, a rocket launch that can't blast off until we get a close-up of everyone buckling their seatbelts. Even in space, the CG isn't razzle-dazzle busy. Meanwhile, Michael Giacchino's score soars between bleats of triumph and barbershop-chorus charm, a combination that can sound like an automobile show unveiling the first convertible with tail fins. There is little brawling and less snark. No one comes off like an aspiring stand-up comic. These characters barely raise their voices and often use their abilities on the mundane: Kirby's Sue vanishes to avoid awkward conversations, Moss-Bachrach's Ben, in a nod to his breakout role as the maître d' on 'The Bear,' uses his mighty fists to mash garlic. Johnny, the youngest and most literally hotheaded of the group, is apt to light himself on fire when he can't be bothered to find a flashlight. He delivers the meanest quip in a respectful movie when he tells Reed, 'I take back every single bad thing I've been saying about you … to myself, in private.' Yes, my audience giggled dutifully at the jiggling Jell-O salads and drooled over the groovy conversation pits in the Richards' living room, the only super lair I'd ever live in. The color palette emphasizes retro shades of blue, green and gold; even the extras have coordinated their outfits to the trim on the Fantasticar. Delightfully, when Moss-Bachrach's brawny rock monster strolls to the deli to buy black-and-white cookies, he's wearing a gargantuan pair of penny loafers. If you want to feel old, the generation of middle schoolers who saw 2008's 'Iron Man' on opening weekend are now beginning to raise their own children. Thirty-seven films later, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has gotten so insecure about its own mission that it's pitching movies at every maturity level. The recent 'Thunderbolts*' is for surly teenagers, 'Deadpool & Wolverine' is the drunk, divorced uncle at a BBQ, and 'First Steps' extends a sympathetic hand to young families who identify with Reed's frustration that he can't childproof the entire galaxy. Here, for a mass audience, Kirby gets to reprise her underwatched Oscar-nominated turn in 'Pieces of a Woman,' in which she extended out a 24-minute, single-take labor scene. This karaoke snippet is good (and even a little operatic when the pain makes her dematerialize). I was as impressed by the costumer Alexandra Byrne's awareness that even super moms won't immediately snap back into wearing tight spandex. (By contrast, when Jessica Alba played Sue in 2007's 'Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer,' the director notoriously asked her to be 'prettier' when she cried.) This reboot's boldest stride toward progress is that it values emotionally credible performances. Otherwise, Pascal aside, you wouldn't assemble this cast for any audience besides critics and dweebs (myself included) who keep a running list of their favorite not-quite-brand-name talents who are ready to break through to the next level of their career while yelling, 'It's clobbering time!' Still, this isn't anyone's best role, and it's a great movie only when compared to similarly budgeted dreck. Yet it's a worthy exercise in creating something that doesn't feel nostalgic for an era — it feels of an era. Even if the MCU's take on slow cinema doesn't sell tickets in our era, I admire the confidence of a movie that sets its own course instead of chasing the common wisdom that audiences want 2½ hours of chaos. Studio executives continuing to insist on that nonsense deserve Marvel's first family to give them a disappointed talking-to, and send them to back their boardrooms without supper..
Atlantic
10-07-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
How Hollywood Taught a Generation to Fear the Bomb
Back in the late 2000s, I was teaching a class on nuclear weapons to undergraduates who had mostly come of age after the fall of the Soviet Union. As I tried to explain what it was like to grow up worrying about a sudden apocalypse, a student raised his hand and said: 'What were you so afraid of? I mean, sure, nuclear weapons are bad, but …' And here he gave up with a puzzled shake of his head, as if to say: What was the big deal? I paused to think of a better way to explain that the annihilation of the world was a big deal. People who grew up during the Cold War, as I did, internalized this fear as children. We still tell our campfire tales about hiding under school desks at the sound of air-raid sirens. Such things seemed mysterious, and even irrelevant, to my students in the 21st century. And then it occurred to me: They haven't seen the movies. During the Cold War, popular culture provided Americans with images of (and a vocabulary for) nuclear war. Mushroom clouds, DEFCON alerts, exploding buildings, fallout-shelter signs—these visuals popped up in even the frothiest forms of entertainment, including comic books, James Bond movies, and music videos. The possibility of a nuclear holocaust was always lurking in the background, like the figure of Death hiding among revelers in a Bosch triptych, and we could imagine it because it had been shown to us many times on screens big and small. Ensuing generations have grown up with their own fears: Terrorism, climate change, and now AI are upending life across the globe, and nuclear war might seem more like a historical curiosity than a concrete threat. But at this moment, Russia and the United States each have roughly 1,500 deployed strategic warheads, many of them on alert, with thousands more in their inventories. This is an improvement over the madness of the Cold War, when the superpowers were sitting on tens of thousands of deployed weapons, but the current global stockpile is more than enough to destroy hundreds of cities and kill billions of people. The threat remains, but the public's fears, along with the movies that explored them, have faded away. Americans need new films to remind new generations, but Cold War–era movies are not just relics. The horrors they depict are still possible. From the August 2025 issue: Tom Nichols on the president's weapon Less than a decade after the Trinity test and the atomic bombings of Japan, filmmakers were tapping into public anxieties about a nuclear-arms race. At the end of the 1951 classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, a handsome alien named Klaatu tells the people of Earth that other civilizations in the galaxy have decided that humans cannot be trusted with the power of the atom. He explains that these civilizations long ago agreed to give control of their military power to unstoppable robots programmed to eradicate aggressors without mercy. Earth, Klaatu says, must agree to this arrangement or be destroyed. 'We shall be waiting for your answer,' he says politely, and then takes off in his spaceship, leaving the gobsmacked earthlings staring into the heavens. This grim ultimatum was aimed at moviegoers who had just lived through World War II. Their children, the Baby Boomers, would get their first exposure to nuclear fears through monster movies and popcorn flicks that would later air regularly on television. In the 1954 horror feature Them!, nuclear explosions in New Mexico (the site of the Trinity test) irradiate a nest of ants, turning them into man-eating giants. Them! suggested that radioactive monsters had been unleashed by nature as a kind of revenge on mankind for playing with nuclear fire. 'We may be witnesses to a biblical prophecy come true,' a government scientist warns. Other thrillers followed this formula, including the 1954 debut of the original king of the monsters, Godzilla, who was awakened by nuclear testing. By the mid-1950s, the superpowers had created thermo nuclear arms, which dwarfed the power of previous atomic weapons. Both the original Godzilla film—produced in Japan less than a decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and the 1956 version released in the States (with a performance by the actor Raymond Burr spliced in for American audiences) are somber and even daring for the time. They depicted victims of radiation sickness and featured a shocking ending: The scientist who invents a way to destroy Godzilla commits suicide rather than let his knowledge be used to create another superweapon. As the Boomers grew up, the number of nuclear weapons skyrocketed, with estimates of about 5,000 warheads in 1956 and then a peak of more than 70,000 in the 1980s. Nuclear conflict became an extinction-level proposition. Depictions of nuclear war became more serious and disturbing, breaking Hollywood conventions about happy endings. For many in the Boomer generation, On the Beach (the 1957 novel and 1959 movie) became a touchstone because it wasn't about monsters or aliens, but about people facing death from the fallout of nuclear war. From the January/February 2013 issue: The real Cuban missile crisis In 1964, two years after the Cuban missile crisis had pushed the world to the edge of the nuclear abyss, Fail Safe and its black-comedy twin, Dr. Strangelove, presented audiences with the nightmare of accidental nuclear war, a fear that appeared on-screen with more frequency as nuclear weapons—and the means to deliver them—became more varied and complicated. In Fail Safe, Moscow is about to be destroyed by errant U.S. bombers when the Soviet premier tells the U.S. president (played by Henry Fonda) that no one is to blame for what is obviously an electronic error. Fonda rejects this absolution: 'We're to blame, both of us. We let our machines get out of hand.' After Moscow is obliterated, Fonda orders the nuclear destruction of New York City as atonement, hoping to avert full Soviet retaliation. Like many Cold War kids, I saw these movies on TV in later years. They had a particularly powerful grip on me, once I realized I was being raised on a bull's-eye: My family home was next to an Air Force nuclear-bomber base, a target that the Soviets would destroy in the first minutes of a war. Fail Safe disturbed me so much as a boy that I bought the book in college to see if the novel ends as bleakly as the movie. (It does.) Years later, I assigned the book to my students. Their reaction to the ending? 'The president can't do that!' To which I responded: 'Are you sure?' Nuclear war made routine appearances on the small screen, sometimes as allegories on Star Trek and The Outer Limits. No one did more to bring nuclear issues into living rooms than Rod Serling, whose pioneering show, The Twilight Zone, sometimes explored the consequences of living with the bomb. One episode, 'The Shelter,' showed neighbors turning against one another when informed of an imminent nuclear attack. Another, 'Time Enough at Last,' included a classic Serling twist: After a bookworm emerges from a lunch break in his bank's vault to find the world incinerated, he happily sits down with a stack of books—and then accidentally breaks his only pair of eyeglasses. Serling was also responsible for perhaps the biggest gut punch of '60s cinema: the ending of Planet of the Apes. Loosely based on a satirical French novel, the script, by Serling and Michael Wilson, follows an American astronaut (Charlton Heston) after his ship crashes on a planet where a civilization of talking apes rules over mute humans. At the movie's end, which departed from the book's, Heston escapes his captors, makes his way to a barren beach, and discovers the ruins of the Statue of Liberty. Realizing that he's on an Earth turned upside down by nuclear war, he becomes delirious with rage. 'You maniacs!' he wails, pounding his fists into the surf. 'You blew it up! Oh, damn you! God damn you all to hell!' The scene then fades to black and the credits roll, with only the sound of waves lapping at the beach. When I showed these final minutes to young students, many of them were as stunned as audiences had been in 1968. Some students admitted that they were unsettled, and even moved, by the simple tableau of Heston weeping in front of the last symbol of an extinct civilization. In the 1970s, audiences were becoming harder to shock, but the black comedy A Boy and His Dog (1975) did just that, and became a cult film. Don Johnson roams a nuclear wasteland in the far-off year of 2024, accompanied by a telepathic talking dog, as he searches for food and sex. Johnson finds both. He lets his dog eat the girl he thought he loved but who, in the end, tried to betray him. A Boy and His Dog warned that civilization is a facade, and that we're one war away from becoming depraved brutes. I left for college in the late '70s, thinking I would major in chemistry. But the Cold War was heating up again, and I decided to study the Russian language and Soviet affairs. During the drive from Massachusetts to New York City for graduate school on a late-summer day in 1983, I heard the news that the Soviets had shot down a civilian South Korean airliner, killing hundreds. ('Tough day to start studying this stuff,' my father said in the car.) Ronald Reagan was in his first term; the Soviet Union was led by a former chief of the KGB, Yuri Andropov; and nuclear-arms negotiations with the Soviets were floundering. To many young people, nuclear war felt more imminent than at any other time in our lives. It apparently felt that way in Hollywood too. The first half of the '80s produced a battery of films about nuclear war, but none had the impact of a made-for-TV movie that premiered on November 20, 1983. About 100 million people —more than 60 percent of the TV-viewing audience that night—tuned in to ABC to watch The Day After, about the horrifying impact of nuclear war on small-town Kansas. The film 'left me greatly depressed,' Reagan wrote in his diary. ABC followed the broadcast with a discussion among the astronomer Carl Sagan, the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, the writer William F. Buckley Jr., former Cabinet Secretaries Henry Kissinger and Robert McNamara, and Brent Scowcroft, the once and future national security adviser. The 80-minute session, in front of a live studio audience, was conducted with a seriousness long gone from TV in the 21st century. Sagan argued that the arms race was like being in 'a room awash in gasoline, and there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has 9,000 matches. The other has 7,000 matches. Each of them is concerned about who's ahead, who's stronger.' Scowcroft firmly disagreed but added, with evident sincerity, that he had 'great respect' for Sagan's judgment. Not only did these panelists treat one another cordially, but they also assumed that the public was capable of following their complex discussion. That same month, Testament had hit movie theaters with scarcely any special effects and no dramatic shots of missile launches or mass incinerations, as in The Day After. Instead, the quiet film depicts a California suburb, spared a direct nuclear hit, slowly succumbing to radiation poisoning and starvation. In the span of three weeks, in prime time and on the big screen, Americans witnessed two vivid interpretations of the horrors of nuclear war: one explosive and terrifying, the other corrosive and elegiac. In 1985, I was 24 and finishing a graduate thesis on NATO options after a hypothetical Soviet attack in Europe. One night in Boston, where I was studying at Harvard's Russian Research Center, I sat down to watch a BBC movie titled Threads. The film is so gruesome and relentlessly coldhearted that it makes The Day After seem almost optimistic. The brief scenes of urban destruction in Threads are less disturbing than the film's prediction of what life would be like after a modern world is destroyed. When the main character, Ruth, gives birth alone in an abandoned farmhouse months after the nuclear attack, the camera does not look away as she chews through her daughter's umbilical cord. Later, the young mother must trade sex for dead rats to feed herself and her child. By day, I studied nuclear-war details such as 'equivalent megatonnage' and 'overpressure.' Threads supplied haunting, ghastly images of what those concepts would look like in the real world. I turned off my television, and I did not sleep that night. Testament, The Day After, Threads, and WarGames —which bridged Boomer and Gen X tastes by making computer hacking the trigger for a nuclear crisis—all debuted within 16 months of one another, signaling a wave of anxiety and a desire to process it collectively. And then it was over: Reagan and the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed a landmark nuclear-arms treaty in 1987. Two years later, the Germans tore down the Berlin Wall. A month after the wall fell, Gorbachev and Reagan's successor, George H. W. Bush, declared the end of the Cold War. Over the ensuing 36 years, filmmakers have found other public anxieties to fuel their stories. Plagues and climate change are now common themes. In the 2011 reboot of Planet of the Apes, the inversion of apes and humans happens not because of nuclear war but because of a faulty pharmaceutical experiment. The 2008 reimagining of The Day the Earth Stood Still has Klaatu warning earthlings about ecocide rather than an atomic menace. The 2023 film Oppenheimer, about the father of the atomic bomb, made nearly $1 billion at the box office and won the Oscar for Best Picture. But Oppenheimer is a talky period piece, an exploration of a man and his mind, with only a flash-forward warning about doomsday tacked on to the ending. No panel of luminaries debated nuclear issues in prime time because of Oppenheimer. This year's Mission: Impossible features a Fail Safe callback, but it deploys nukes to raise the stakes for Tom Cruise's heroism, not to question the value of their existence or portray the carnage they create. The director Kathryn Bigelow will soon release a movie, set in the present, about a surprise missile attack on the United States. Bigelow, who also directed the realistic military dramas Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker, told me last year that she was alarmed by the lack of public debate on nuclear peril. My hope is that her next film can serve as a modern-day Fail Safe or The Day After, and spur the kind of discussion that was inspired by those earlier movies. Some of these recollections might seem like nostalgia, but I do not miss the Cold War. I'm happy that Americans are growing up without daily reminders that everything we know and love could vanish in a flash of light. But is it possible to have a meaningful discussion about nuclear weapons without being a little frightened? As Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy's ambassador to the United Nations, remarked after the Cuban missile crisis: 'Perhaps we need a coward in the room when we are talking about nuclear war.' And perhaps we still need movies about nuclear war to scare us into talking, and remembering.
The Age
08-06-2025
- Business
- The Age
Like Frankenstein on steroids, Musk and Trump both created monsters
Sometimes you're better off letting the children fight. That was President Donald Trump's callous wisdom on looking the other way as the Russians and Ukrainians continue to kill each other. But it might better be applied to Trump's social media spat with Elon Musk. It's hard to think of two puer aeterni who are more deserving of a verbal walloping. Their venomous digital smackdown fulgurated on their duelling social media companies, flashing across the Washington sky. In March, Trump showed off Teslas in the White House driveway and bought a more than $US80,000 red Model S. Now, he says he's going to sell it. Thursday was the most titillating day in the US since the sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, when a spaceship landed an alien to warn human leaders to stop squabbling like children, or the aliens would destroy Earth. On Friday, Trump tried to convey serenity. 'I'm not thinking about Elon Musk,' Trump said aboard Air Force One. 'I wish him well.' But Trump then jumped on the phone to knock Musk, telling ABC's Jonathan Karl that Musk has 'lost his mind' and CNN's Dana Bash that 'the poor guy's got a problem'. Trump had to know that would be seen as a reference to the intense drug use by Musk, chronicled by The New York Times. As Raheem Kassam, one of the owners of Butterworth's, the new Trumpworld boite on Capitol Hill, assured Politico, 'MAGA will not sell out to ketamine'. The Washington Post reported on Friday: 'Across the government, the Trump administration is scrambling to rehire many federal employees dismissed under DOGE's staff-slashing initiatives after wiping out entire offices, in some cases imperilling key services such as weather forecasting and the drug approval process.' On Truth Social on Thursday, Trump threatened to take away government contracts that have handsomely enriched Musk even though, as Leon Panetta pointed out on CNN, 'some of those contracts, particularly on SpaceX, are very important to our national security.' Musk tried to tie Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, offering no evidence. He shared a post on Epstein that said Trump should be impeached. Trump reposted a message from Epstein's last lawyer, saying the smear was 'definitively' not true.
Sydney Morning Herald
08-06-2025
- Business
- Sydney Morning Herald
Like Frankenstein on steroids. Musk and Trump both created monsters
Sometimes you're better off letting the children fight. That was President Donald Trump's callous wisdom on looking the other way as the Russians and Ukrainians continue to kill each other. But it might better be applied to Trump's social media spat with Elon Musk. It's hard to think of two puer aeterni who are more deserving of a verbal walloping. Their venomous digital smackdown fulgurated on their duelling social media companies, flashing across the Washington sky. In March, Trump showed off Teslas in the White House driveway and bought a more than $US80,000 red Model S. Now, he says he's going to sell it. Thursday was the most titillating day in the US since the sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, when a spaceship landed an alien to warn human leaders to stop squabbling like children, or the aliens would destroy Earth. On Friday, Trump tried to convey serenity. 'I'm not thinking about Elon Musk,' Trump said aboard Air Force One. 'I wish him well.' But Trump then jumped on the phone to knock Musk, telling ABC's Jonathan Karl that Musk has 'lost his mind' and CNN's Dana Bash that 'the poor guy's got a problem'. Trump had to know that would be seen as a reference to the intense drug use by Musk, chronicled by The New York Times. As Raheem Kassam, one of the owners of Butterworth's, the new Trumpworld boite on Capitol Hill, assured Politico, 'MAGA will not sell out to ketamine'. The Washington Post reported on Friday: 'Across the government, the Trump administration is scrambling to rehire many federal employees dismissed under DOGE's staff-slashing initiatives after wiping out entire offices, in some cases imperilling key services such as weather forecasting and the drug approval process.' On Truth Social on Thursday, Trump threatened to take away government contracts that have handsomely enriched Musk even though, as Leon Panetta pointed out on CNN, 'some of those contracts, particularly on SpaceX, are very important to our national security.' Musk tried to tie Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, offering no evidence. He shared a post on Epstein that said Trump should be impeached. Trump reposted a message from Epstein's last lawyer, saying the smear was 'definitively' not true.
