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alexanderchee:

jealousxo:

I’m assuming everyone has heard about the ways in which the Fantastic Four movie fails. I agree that the movie feels messy and lacks focus. In its genre, next to bigger, slicker, funnier movies like The Avengers, it seems shrimpy and lacking. This is not a perfect movie. It squanders a lot of its promise, not capitalizing on big budget visuals and special effects. The most interesting effect (the high-tech interdimensional travel) is revealed within the first half-hour and is repeated ad infinitum throughout the movie. But I want to stand for this movie, because in many ways, it’s the most progressive film of the summer, certainly the most progressive in the genre of big budget superhero flicks.

1) Queerness: From the Ben/Reed dynamic to the literal transformation the characters undergo, this movie is all about queerness. It’s about the radical. It’s the art of finding your humanity in the face of your own monstrosity. This movie gets at the ugliness a lot of queer people feel when they’re just discovering their own deviation from the norm. A group of fit, attractive, beautiful people are inexplicably transfigured into something inhuman. They are then weaponized. This narrative around who is and is not human, what is and is not life, is at the heart of this movie. I’ve already talked about the Ben/Reed dynamic at length, but I’ll reiterate by saying: Ben is madly in love with his best friend. It’s the way he looks at Reed when they’re boys and it matures into something a lot like heartbreak when he sends Reed away to fulfill their dreams. Their reunion is terrifying and their dissolution is shattering. Their friendship is glorious and hella queer. I wrote about it here: http://jealousxo.tumblr.com/post/126271199071/fantastic-4-as-the-queer-movie-of-2015

2) Sue Storm: Susan Motherfucking Storm gets to be a whole person. Or rather, she gets to focus on her work, being a bad ass scientist. She is briefly batted about as a love interest, but she settles on neither Reed nor Victor. She is shy, aloof, a little awkward. But she isn’t quite Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Her work centers on pattern recognition, and this becomes an actual character treat, even manifesting in her love of music. She is a little somber, because she has to be. She’s an orphan adopted from Kosovo, and she’s had a hard life, but she knows she’s also been blessed. LIKE, WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME A WOMAN IN A SUPERHERO FILM WAS ALLOWED TO BLOSSOM AS A COMPETENT HUMAN BEING THAT DIDN’T INVOLVE MURDER. Sue shows us a different kind of strength, a different way to be the sole woman in a family of men. 

3) Humane blackness: This movie provided us with a clear and believable portrait of a brilliant black man trying to raise two brilliant but very different kids. Johnny Storm is a hothead, smart but torn between living his life on his own terms and living his life on the terms his father set out for him. Their dynamic is so seldom one we get to see played out on the big screen: black men with compelling desires that don’t involve sports, gangs, or butlers. Was the dynamic anything new? Franklin’s conflict over completing the project that he knows will lead to destruction of another world just for a chance to maybe fix his kids was palpable. Johnny’s anger at his father and eventual resolution with his family was good to see. Name another movie where two black men were central characters and got to be full, rounded human beings. I’ll wait.

4) Dr.Doom the anti-colonial: Once Victor got stuck in the other dimension, he became one with it, in many ways appropriating a childish interpretation of the way Native Americans lived. What else were we to take of the sole dark figure walking across an empty plain as green energy pulsed and radiated all around. But he allowed himself to be carried back in order to enact his revenge. Yes, on some levels, his vengeance was about being left behind, but certainly Victor had been against the acquisition of resources from the other world to save Earth. In this way, the narrative was strictly anti-colonial, right? The people of Earth (white pointy faced man) wanted to take the resources from the other world and to weaponize the humans transformed by that world–Victor wanted them to leave his world in peace and set about ensuring that peace with lots of destruction. I think the movie was aiming for a morally ambiguous battle. They wanted us to say, yeah, don’t take that world’s energy to save our own, but also don’t destroy Earth. I don’t think they executed this theme well, but I do love that they at least touched on the theme of colonialism. It’s a conversation worth having, and I don’t think enough people are discussing this really important issue. Dr. Doom says at one point, “It’s too late. The Earth is dying.” And here they are trying to repeat the same cycle with a world that has literally kept Dr. Doom alive by infusing him with its energy–Dr. Doom is that world’s avatar, it’s protector. Imagine if the Native Americans had been able to conjure up an extra dimensional gate in order to protect themselves. Also, hello, the slave narrative? The government tried to turn the Fantastic Four + Doom into slaves?

So there are you have it. Four ways I think the movie succeeds that sets it apart from other superhero movies.

This is the first I’ve heard all of this, and now I’ll admit–I’m interested.