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. 

Gladiator II

Gladiator II ties itself in knots to place its hero, Paul Mescal's Hanno, on the same path to the colosseum as his predecessor Maximus, as played by Russell Crowe. The latest from 86-year-old Ridley Scott is a belated sequel that he (somehow) found the energy to film in the year following Napoleon, another of the director's enormously detailed historical epics. In terms of pure storytelling, David Scarpa's screenplay twists and turns around a shallow dynastic intrigue that seems rather obvious given this sequel's photostat plotting. Although charming in a five-a-side sort of way, Mescal isn't quite able to channel Crowe's strange, tractor beam turbulences; those arresting eyeline tremors that physically communicate a mind seesawing back-and-forth between temperance and explosive violence. Similarly, Connie Nielsen's performance as Lucilla, the daughter of former emperor Marcus Aurelius, is a shadow of her preceding act. The actress now flat and robotic where previously her Lucilla had registered as guarded but still extremely cunning. 

This lack of gravitational pull from two of the most important characters, as well as the aggressively blunt storytelling employed to get a gladius in Hanno's hands, means Gladiator II is a subordinate experience in comparison to the 2000 film. But that's not to say that Scott isn't having or transmitting fun. Like his twin Alien prequels, Gladiator II represents an opportunity to reappraise concepts and sequences that never made it into the parent piece, often because of budgetary rather than qualitative concerns. So while Prometheus allowed the director to reclaim Giger's pyramid designs, this second Gladiator inherits costly colosseum battles built around massive African beasts and duelling, burning battleships encircled by sharks. An arena battle involving a rhinoceros doesn't just deliver on the broad strokes of Sylvain Despretz's twenty five year old storyboards (images of which were tucked away in the special features of two-disc DVD sets for the first Gladiator), it also reproduces the unusual little details that Scott himself etched into his Ridleygrams. This fascination with macabre match-ups also allows for Hanno to be subjected to hand-to-hand combat with hairless baboons, rendered here as muscular teeth and claw that wouldn't shame Scott's pitiless Alien: Covenant. 

Gladiator II's vision of Rome is denser and dirtier as well, journeying beyond repeatedly re-dressed bedrooms and flat, computer-generated vistas to really stick its nose into the filthy stalls or subterranean tombs that are threaded into this ancient city. This vivid, lively approach to antiquity is best expressed by Denzel Washington as Macrinus, Hanno's ambitious, arms-dealing slavemaster. Washington's role could very easily default to a rehash of Oliver Reed's curtailed Proximo: an entertaining, storied actor for the less experienced leading man to bounce off or commiserate with. Macrinus' role in proceedings does overlap somewhat with Proximo's but, again, this sequel goes in directions that the previous film could not. Reed's untimely death meant that Maximus' master could not become an antagonistic presence in the Spaniard's life. Not so here. Macrinus is an actor, able to present whichever image his audience expects. So, with pompous senators, Macrinus pretends to be a rich gadabout. When in the company of real power, his servility may ratchet up slightly but it is always tempered with a ruthless focus. In all things Macrinus strains to appear useful; instantly solving problems that he himself has cultivated. The closer he creeps to the throne, the more venal and bloodthirsty he becomes. At his peak he's endangering maidens and galloping away from pursuing heroes like a serial villain. Washington's is a wonderful performance, one that combines the actor's Shakespearean bona fides with a more modern-presenting flamboyance reminiscent of an entitled, record label mogul.