The Fantastic Four: First Steps

The best use yet of the multiverse crutch that big screen Marvel has deployed to prop up waning interest in their main timeline, director Matt Shakman's The Fantastic Four: First Steps could, perhaps, be understood as a period piece - one firmly located in the 1960s, the decade in which Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's creation was first published. There are deeper wrinkles to this kind of framing though. Most obviously, there exists technology completely out of step with even our current reality: faster than light space travel (tuned in such a way that it handily avoids any issues associated with time dilation), sentient robot friends that run on massive cassette tapes, and transforming vehicles that defy gravity. The alternative twentieth century of First Steps diverts from our own in seismic, socio-political ways as well. This version of retro-futurism skews utopian with, seemingly, very little poverty or racism in evidence. The Cold War appears especially cool as well, with all countries happy to work together when global threats rear their head. The entire planet, apparently, having united under the flag of Mister Fantastic's Future Foundation then. Nobody even smokes. 

Typically, these kind of corrections in blockbuster entertainment reek of bowdlerisation, with the past - no matter how turbulent - transformed into the equivalent of an amusement park attraction; scenery that allows the props and wardrobe departments licence to play around with otherwise untouchable aesthetics. In Shakman's film though this unabashed idealism, for an America that has never existed, plays well specifically because First Steps' closest Marvel stablemates are so mired in the circuitous machinations required to account for dozens of characters and prior instalments. This fresh break allows the film a science fiction-presenting identity of its own, an advantage not often available in these increasingly complicated phases. In comic terms, First Steps then is the miniseries printed on glossy paper to the main continuity's well-thumbed ballast. The film also displays atypical gender roles - that extend beyond Shalla-Bal (rather than Norrin Radd) hanging ten - that feel rooted in the wider work of The Fantastic Four co-creator Jack Kirby, if not specifically the writer-illustrator's original run with these characters. So, Pedro Pascal's Reed Richards is less forthright and more absentminded than expected while Vanessa Kirby's Sue Storm is positioned as the better leader in peacetime before proving herself to be a great physical threat when the group finds themselves battling a cosmic juggernaut. 

While not necessarily reflective of Sue Storm's shyer, sixties characterisation, there are notes here that feel more in step with Kirby's seventies work for DC, specifically the quick-thinking but vulnerable Mister Miracle and his powerhouse partner Big Barda. A central couple that compliment rather than contradict each other then. Where Kirby feels less represented though is the the grinding technologies of Ralph Ineson's towering Galactus. Rather than the crackling, psychedelic machinery that Kirby dreamt up, or even the massive gaseous cloud seen in 2007's Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, this comic accurate world eater sits at the centre of massive, whirring engines that physically pulverise the planets marked by Julia Garner's gleaming herald. It's difficult then (for this writer at least) not to think of other, predominantly animated, over-industrialised landscapes: the enormous, clattering underworld that ensured that the punishment of Sisyphus was eternal in DIC Audiovisuel and Tokyo Movie Shinsha's Ulysses 31 or the abstract, apocalyptic physiology of the planet Unicron from The Transformers: The Movie. All examples feature mechanisms so gigantic and all-encompassing as to be maddening. This mind-warping scale is also present in more rapid sequences of First Steps, the best of which intercuts the birth of Sue and Reed's child on a crumbling rocket with The Silver Surfer giving chase through the chop and churn generated by a black hole. 

Tame Impala - End of Summer

Samia - Pool (Live)

Hedorah by Manabu Yashiro

Tyler the Creator - Stop Playing with Me

Black Sabbath - Supernaut

Thunderbolts*

Director Jack Schreier's Thunderbolts*, the film's screenplay credited to Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, briefly hits its stride when the team of discarded henchmen find themselves trapped in the memories of Lewis Pullman's Bob, a depressive amnesiac who has been experimented on by whichever secret society is currently propping up the Marvel universe's version of the United States. Rather than the conscious vivisection haunting Wolverine over in Fox's defunct X-Men series, Bob's hang-ups centre around a family home so abusive that the decorum demanded by a PG-13 rating means the film is compelled to interrupt Julia Louis-Dreyfus' Valentina before she can describe something truly horrid when debriefing her shadow-casting creation. Once the title troupe have trespassed on these intrusive thoughts though, stray elbows are allowed to be thrown at and connect with the rotten paterfamilias battering his wife and child with fists and invective. Perhaps this moment sings because the presence of Florence Pugh's Yelena instantly organises Thunderbolts* as something of a sequel to Black Widow, a film packed with morally destitute fathers? A shame then that Yelena's own deadbeat Dad, David Harbour's Red Guardian, hangs around proceedings like a bad stink. Any lingering goodwill for this swollen super-soldier, presumably, having more to do with Harbour's overprotective turn on Netflix's Stranger Things than the character abandoning his adoptive daughters to a child trafficking ring in a previous instalment.

Skepta - Victory Lap (Live)

Lorde - Green Light (Live)

Malenia, Goddess of Rot by Igor Sid

Nine Inch Nails - As Alive As You Need Me to Be

Teddybears - Punkrocker (feat. Iggy Pop)

Superman

Writer-director James Gunn's latest dissection of costumed heroism opens with a broad-chested, Joe Shuster illustration of a Golden Age Superman springing to life to flex his muscles and pop the paltry chains that encircle him. As an opening note it's not quite as grandiose as Richard Donner parting velvet curtains before blasting off into space but, again, we're being asked to consider the totemic might wielded by those original Action Comics. Almost immediately following, once some cryptic expositional text is out of the way, we're thrust into a losing battle for Krypton's last son with Lex Luthor, played by Nicholas Hoult, orchestrating this airborne one-on-one from a command room that mixes overlit standing desks with the cranks and dials seen in animated, Fleischer shorts like The Mad Scientist, or Electric Earthquake. Throughout, Luthor screams at the spittle-flecked underlings controlling his slave superhuman, with the madman using the kind of fighting game input notation that you might expect to find seated beneath an ASCII art heading on GameFAQs. 

So, despite a bleached post-processing that resembles a lifestyle magazine that has been left to curl in Earth's yellow sun, Gunn's film, in casting a net wide enough to include minor (or simply old-fashioned) DC characters like Bob Haney and Ramona Fradon's Metamorpho, betrays an adoring sort of fluency for this material. One that goes beyond the expected deification of Christopher Reeve's caped adventures or violent, satirical comics that were published in the 1980s and put the zap on one Zachary Edward Snyder. David Corenswet's frequently astonished Superman, fresh from being tossed about above Metropolis, takes another pummelling a few beats later when he submits to being interviewed, in-character, by his girlfriend, Rachel Brosnahan's Lois Lane. Even with a waist-coated wardrobe that recalls the vague era of the seventies, if not the specifics of Margot Kidder's 70s-does-30s wardrobe, Brosnahan's Lois is a chimeric creation who brings to mind the small screen royalty of the wider Warner Bros kingdom: the high-pitched register of Courtney Cox's Monica Geller or really any of the leading women in Amy Sherman-Palladino's Gilmore Girls (Brosnahan's breakthrough role in Amazon's The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel courtesy of the very same writer-director-producer). 

All of which is to say that this Lois is not just written to be intelligent but also principled and atypically argumentative. She's challenging for a character like Clark who, blessed with an ability to shrug off gunfire, is far more forthright and binary in his thinking. You see, Gunn's Superman examines him from a perspective of the supreme, unyielding altruism present in the character's earliest, domestic abuse-thwarting incarnation. The Biblical strain placed on this big screen character by the patchwork screenplay of the 1978 movie lingers here only to be dismissed, conclusively, by a piece that relentlessly positions everything that is great about Superman being the result of him being raised by adoring, older parents rather than the expectations mapped onto him by alien prophecy. Gunn's film also correctly identifies that the rise in fascism, corporatism and authoritarianism that we are all experiencing is, essentially, the same as that which faced a Lithuanian immigrant back in the 1930s. So, like Jerry Siegel before him, the writer-director doesn't chicken out on the implications of a working-class man possessed of a Godly power and the difference they can then make in the lives of everyday people. 

Superman is able to travel incredible distances to help the struggling people of this planet, so he does exactly that. In this instance that means interfering in the US-backed invasion of Jarhanpur by all-encompassing belligerent, Boravia. Although there's a whistling aside about the two countries being situated somewhere in Eastern Europe, the parallels between this film's images of Arab civilians dressed in rags being shelled by white troops kitted out like futuristic storm troopers and the ongoing genocide in Palestine are not just obvious but unmistakable. Rather than unthinkingly side with the expansionist interests of his adopted nation, this Superman intervenes on behalf of the oppressed, demanding pause from the frothing Boravians. Gunn has previously used the fictional countries of the DC comics universe when making contentious points (see The Suicide Squad) but this instance goes far beyond a permissible canvas on which to stage repulsive, gross-out gags. The writer-director now offers up instead a proletariat messiah committed to protecting the weak from moneyed bullies and the soaring, magical sight of Isabela Merced's Hawkgirl - in a sequence which may well be intended to echo the moment that a Thanagarian child, in the throes of retribution, chose to stave-in Lex Luthor's skull from Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's The Dark Knight Strikes Again - lifting a bloodthirsty dictator up into the air then, rather than listen to any of his blustering apologia, letting him plunge screaming to the ground below.

John Murphy and David Fleming - Last Son

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Usagi Yojimbo by Alexye

Faye Webster - Kingston (Live)

Hannah Frances - Falling From and Further

Jurassic World Rebirth

Find in Jurassic World Rebirth two competing plot lines. The first is premised on the kind of pitch-think that sees a real movie star, like Scarlett Johansson, hired to take up an enormous amount of one sheet real estate and play a mercenary hunting for blood samples on an island packed with tooth and claw. The second, and less obviously showy strand, concerns itself with an injured and extremely divorced father attempting to keep his tween and teen daughters, as well as a layabout boyfriend (and eventually a tag-along pet who's the spitting image of Cera from Don Bluth's The Land Before Time), alive after they are shipwrecked in the exact same neighbourhood. So while the more experienced players can set up rope harnesses to descend into Pterosaur lairs or blast hand-held shock guns at thrashing sea creatures, the civilians that are along for the ride, the Delgado family, are able to have separate (and far more entertaining) sequences built around a terrifying jungle expedition. 

Set an enough amount of time following Jurassic World Dominion that the new normal proposed by that fossilized stinker - that mankind must learn to co-exist alongside prehistoric beasts of every stripe - has been jettisoned in favour of an equatorial containment that has dinosaurs only able to thrive on the tropical islands where they were genetically engineered in the first place. Rebirth then, despite the more expansive language used in its title, is far more interested in following up concepts and ideas present in the Park-era, Michael Crichton-adapting instalments. Directed by Gareth Edwards with a returning David Koepp on screenwriting duties, Rebirth underlines this conceptual shift with an ailing Apatosaur being scraped up off the tarmac in New York while tardy commuters grumble. Unlike the more striking, camouflaged examples that appear later in Rebirth, this dinosaur has the flat, grey texture of a lower resolution ancestor and the drooping clumsiness of Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur. It is, as it dies, marked as both technologically primitive and archaeologically outmoded. 

Although not the totality of a piece that still clings to the misguided notion that audiences demand fresh, mutated creatures and expert contrivance to get themselves engaged (see also: Alien: Romulus) Rebirth is best when the audience are allowed to luxuriate in the company of dinosaurs who are behaving more like curious animals in search of their next meal. A first act sortie involving a massive and highly prized Mosasaurus apportions space to a pack of streaked Spinosaurs who swim in her wake, gobbling up leftovers. Despite Jurassic Park III's big bad being relegated to a scavenger picking up after the real apex predator, this more crocodilian take on Joe Johnston's featured theropod allows Edwards' film to not only correct now discredited takes on antiquated beasts but also to indulge himself in Spielbergian conceits that reach beyond that director's Jurassic predecessors. Briefly, we're in Jaws territory with hurried chatter about astronomical taxonomy and wincing inserts of human blood lapping at uncharted shorelines. Even better still is a creeping interlude in which the sodden Delgado family attempt to retrieve a raft from underneath a slumbering (but not sated) Tyrannosaur, a sequence dreamt up by Crichton for his 1990 hardback but left out of the original Jurassic Park feature. 

Alexandre Desplat - Mosasaur Attacks Yacht

PinkPantheress - Illegal (Live)

Libra, Equilibrious Beast by Satria Putra

Olivia Rodrigo - Just Like Heaven feat. Robert Smith (Live)

Pulp - Common People (Live)

TV on the Radio - Wolf Like Me (Live)

Elio

The function of an animated film like Elio, co-directed by Madeline Sharafian, Turning Red's Domee Shi, and Coco co-director Adrian Molina, very much seems to be one of affirmation; specifically a message to its young audience (and perhaps a chiding to the less attentive adults within earshot) that all children deserve to feel not just safe but absolutely adored in their home. Pixar's latest then treads similar ground to Disney stablemate Lilo & Stitch - recently promoted to live action status with much of its indigenous identity chipped away - in that a child can become so lonely that the only person who is capable of understanding them lies not just outside the family but might, in fact, be an extraterrestrial silk worm. Elio, voiced by Yonas Kibreab, is an orphan living with his childless, Air Force Major aunt who, after having wandered into a museum exhibit about the Voyager probes, becomes obsessed with the idea of contacting somebody else out there in the void of space. 

Any dangling insinuation that the endless night above us might roughly equate to the afterlife in the mind of a naïve youngster isn't explored here but the kinds of self-aggrandizing fabrication that provide shallow comfort for that same child are everywhere. Contacted by a peaceful federation of lounging aliens, Elio plays along with their assumption that he is Earth's galactic ambassador, eventually agreeing to broker a deal with Brad Garrett's warlike Lord Grigon, while a suspiciously well-behaved clone stands in for Elio on Earth. The latter entertains because its gooey military base antics prickle (presumably) inadvertent memories of Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers while Grigon, the sourpuss father to Elio's unearthly friend, gets to physically demonstrate the idea that absolutely everything - even bespoke power armour bristling with pistols - pales to nothing when judged against the health and well-being of your child. As with co-director Shi's Turning Red, Elio also looks to be taking further cues from Dr. Slump and Dragon Ball era Akira Toriyama, which is to say Pixar's film is packed with bemused but elasticated figures tinkering around with their obsessively detailed gadgetry. 

Tekken 3 by Vitaliy Shushko