Begin Again: SUPERMAN andFANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS

With Superman, writer-director James Gunn tries restarting the DC cinematic universe with the third attempt at this original hero in the last twenty years. To do so, he reimagines a colorful world with several superhero plot lines already in progress. He figures audiences can get up to speed without belaboring origin stories all over again. So here we are, three years into Superman’s career as a hero. David Corenswet brings the right golly-gee jawline to the upright iconography of the hero and aw-shucks humility of his bespectacled Clark Kent disguise. He’s already entangled in a romance with newspaper colleague Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and embroiled in a one-sided rivalry with billionaire Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). He has a friendly-but-frosty relationship with some other heroes knocking about his corner of the universe: Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), and Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi). There are robots and giant monsters and portals to parallel universes and cameos form upcoming spinoffs an lots of glowing gadgets and opportunities for vivid, cartoony, splash-panel spectacle. There’s even lots for Krypto the super-dog to fetch. It’s all done in a coherent Gunn style, tonally more Suicide Squad than Guardians of the Galaxy, but recognizably in wide angles and blocky frames, overflowing with his smirking sincerity and hurly-burly earnest pop culture spirit. The result is a zippy, zany comic book eruption of excess. The movie’s chaotic and overstuffed, but with its heart in the right place. 

It really does care about the totally authentic goodness of its Superman, and lets the conflicts rise up organically out of a world that’s not built to take goodness seriously or even believe in it. There are puffed-up corporate interests and snarling foreign dictators and slimy pundits and rival do-gooders and they’re all jostling for the kind of authority and attention that Superman gets just by being himself. There’s something pure and lovely about that. Even as Gunn is less interested in the character as a symbol or an idea, he’s more interested him as a person who's a vision of how to do your best to be a force for good in a world falling apart at the seams. In doing so, he succeeds in making a big, bright movie full of likable characters, but as the scenes hustle by and supporting characters flit in and out and the movie hurtles through scenes of digital destruction, I found myself thinking it’s all a bit much. A little deadening digital destruction goes a long way. I’ll take a slow-mo shot where Superman swoops down and stops a little girl from being hit by debris over dozens of minutes of punching robots and super-beings every time. 

Coincidentally Marvel is also going back to one of its earliest comics for their latest superhero movie. It, too, is the third attempt in twenty years at getting these characters right, and eschews an origin story to just get down to business. Fantastic Four: First Steps starts four years into their heroism. They live in a retro-futurist alternate universe that looks like its just upstream from a Jetsons aesthetic. There the stretchy scientist Mr. Fantastic (Pedro Pascal), his sometimes-invisible wife (Vanessa Kirby), flammable brother-in-law (Joseph Quinn), and rock-monster best friend (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) are celebrities for defending the planet from all manner of comic book threats. There’s a charming rapid-fire montage that opens the movie blitzing us with glimpses of enough villains and action sequences to fill a few movies. Instead, it settles into a weirdly low-key family drama intercut with apocalyptic stakes, but keeps up the rapid-fire CliffsNotes style, racing through exposition and slaloming through plot lines and complications other movies might spend a whole run time developing. The whole movie has a feeling that it’s trying to make up for lost time. 

The period-piece sci-fi aesthetic gives the movie a fine visual look, and gives the midcentury comic book its best outing on the big screen. (Though arriving so late puts it deep in the shadow of the far superior Incredibles movies, which got to the look, and a Michael Giacchino score, better and first. ) The actors are all likable enough, and inhabit the familiar dilemmas of their characters without given the chance to really stretch out and play to those dramas. We do get to some extremely comic book sequences, though, including an invisible woman giving birth in zero-gravity while her brother shoots lasers at a space woman surfing behind their spaceship as it slingshots around a black hole. It caused me to reflect on the days when comic book movies were afraid to even use the costumes from the illustrations on screen. Now they’re doing spectacular sci-fi looniness without batting an eye. This one paradoxically goes all in on these enormous fantastical ideas while keeping the movie incredibly small. 

The ginormous intergalactic villain Galactus (Ralph Ineson’s voice rumbling the subwoofers) wants to gobble up Earth, sending the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner, cool with an eerie shimmery stillness and metallic intonation) to herald his impending arrival. We get a tossed-off reference to a Galactus cult forming, and crowds debating making a sacrifice to him, and the whole movie operates under this cloud of world-ending stakes. But the movie is content to leave that as the backdrop to the shot-reverse-shot predictability of its leads talking strategy and family dynamics. Solutions seem to arrive easily for our characters, side-characters are cut to glorified cameos, and, though the weight of the word hangs heavily on their shoulders, complications become backup plans in a blink. The movie’s in too big a hurry to get to the next thing, even by the end of the movie when it’s still just setting up promises that it’ll hopefully pay off next time. If there’s anything in the movie that most feels like typical Marvel Cinematic Universe routine, there it is. What’s here is just enough to count as a movie, and just charming enough to make these likable characters again, and just busy enough to feel like we’ve had the kind of blinking lights and flashy colors that make popcorn go down easy. But it is also relentlessly manipulative with an imperiled infant (and a shockingly shoddily composited one, at that) used as shorthand for us to care instead of investing in building depth for the plot’s complications and implications. Maybe the next movie can find a story instead of a collection of things that happen. 

Running on Empty: CARS 3

Pixar has been coasting downhill for the better part of a decade, only 2015’s double header of Inside Out and The Good Dinosaur stopping a slow but steady slide from the heights of Toy Story and WALL-E. Now they’ve reached a new low with Cars 3, their least interesting and least entertaining film yet. Although the animation remains top notch – gorgeous detail, convincing colorful design, and with tons of personality in its characters’ expressions – there’s so little going on as to be bewilderingly boring. I realize this is a movie for children, with easy lessons and simple characters, and on that level – pleasingly pleasant and essentially harmless – it’s still better than most of what passes for family entertainment from competitors like Illumination who show up with a third of the imagination and a fourth of the budget. But Pixar made a name off rich and involving films that were truly all-ages entertainment. They didn’t condescend to children in the audience or pander to the adults with them. In film after film they found ways to engage and entertain any demographic. Even Cars – an easy-going big city/small town parable – and Cars 2 – a zippy blast of an around-the-world spy story – had busy, buoyant, creative visuals and energetic voice work. Now, though, this third entry in a franchise about a parallel universe populated exclusively by anthropomorphized vehicles, just feels tired. 

There’s a sense of exhaustion as debut director Brian Fee and a collection of screenwriters tow out a thinner, smaller, slower, duller, less inspired version of what’s been done before. Once more, charming red racecar Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) is faced with a challenge involving his racing career. This time it’s a problem of obsolescence. He’s getting older. Winning races against younger, faster, sleeker modern cars (like a black-and-purple one voiced by Armie Hammer) is increasingly difficult. Faced with the prospect of embarrassing himself through poor performance on his way to a retirement endorsing mud flaps for a smug rich patron (Nathan Fillion), he decides to train hard and make the next season his best. He wants to finish on his terms, and in the winner’s circle. This attempt to do for these characters what Toy Story 3 did for the aging toys backfires, mostly because these movies have never been about the emotional resonances of their automotive natures. They are cars with human problems, acting out sports’ movie tropes with their big windshield eyes and bumper mouths, driving through an imaginatively designed world that is just like ours, but cars. We aren’t meant to contemplate their life cycle or anything deeper about the world than its surface pleasures and narrative appeal or else the whole thing falls apart. Here, it drives dangerously close to that edge, sometimes teetering.

Sure, there’s a sweet live-your-dreams plotline, as Lightning gets help from a sporty yellow trainer (Cristela Alonzo) who has him on treadmills and doing tire exercises. He wants to be the racer he once was, and along the way learns she wants to be a racer, too. So they help each other, and it’s very nice and wholesome. But the thin comeback story leaves little room for interesting new sights. The first film introduced the world, which was fun, and the second continued exploring all manner of new eye-boggling car-Earth detail (the Italian bay full of blinking boats, the compact cars in tiny Japanese parking garage hotels, and so on). This one is content to serve up a demolition derby with muddy clunkers and otherwise just drive in circles in the places where we’ve been without the energy to concoct interesting new characters or continue to explore the old ones. Everyone but Wilson and Alonzo register as cameos, and the racing scenes, while intricately detailed with scrapes and sparks, flashes of shiny paint and rumbles of burning rubber, have only a token amount of suspense. The movie is stuck in low gear, content to be just good enough, familiar sights and direct lessons. It’s most disappointing coming from a company that used to be – and hopefully can again be – so much more.

Demigods and Monsters: PERCY JACKSON: SEA OF MONSTERS

The quickest way to communicate the feeling of Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters is to call it a Harry Potter film with half the budget, simpler plotting, less investment in nuanced characters, and on a smaller scale. The second in a popular series of children’s novels by the amiable Rick Riordan, this movie follows 2010’s Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief in adapting the adventures of Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman), demigod son of Poseidon, student at Camp Half-Blood, and the Chosen One of the story’s mythology. Circumstances conspire to send him off on adventures to save their magical world with the help of his two friends, a scared-but-courageous boy (Brandon T. Jackson) and a bookish, intelligent girl (Alexandra Daddario). (Sound familiar?) This movie finds Jackson on a quest that leads a group of his demigod friends into contact with a small collection of appealingly fake CGI monsters including a clockwork bull, a furry cat thing with a scorpion tail, and a deep sea Sarlacc, among others. We only see one at a time, of course. They don’t have Harry Potter money to spend.

There is nothing so wrong with Sea of Monsters that I can’t say they didn’t try, but there’s nothing so right that it’s easy to like. It certainly brings the monsters, bland and unconvincing though they are. The plot puts Camp Half-Blood, which is visually uninspired and feels as interesting and tiny an environment as an especially modest summer camp, in danger after Luke (Jake Abel), a villain from the previous feature, breaks through a magical protective force field by poisoning the tree from which it emanates. The leader of the camp (Anthony Stewart Head taking over for Pierce Brosnan as the top half of a centaur) decides to send the best demigod student (Leven Rambin) after the Golden Fleece, which we’re told will heal the tree. But Percy’s clued into a prophecy that makes him think he should be the one to find it, so off our main characters go – new character, a teen Cyclops (Douglas Smith), in tow – traipsing through simple secondary quests (find this God, use that Olympian object, escape this trap) that eventually lead them into combat over the object they so desperately need. Along the way, they’re constantly explaining Greek mythology to each other. You’d think these demigods would’ve learned something about it at that camp, but at least one of them has an app for that.

The movie is standard derivative fantasy creature feature stuff, but it’s all so chintzy, simplistic, and flatly expositional that it was hard for me to find much of a reason to get invested in the fantastical (but sadly none too fantastic) happenings unfolding on screen. I appreciated director Thor Freudenthal (of Hotel for Dogs and the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid movie) taking such a brightly colored approach with calm camera work and unashamed embrace of the material’s cornball, bargain basement blockbuster mythos. I mean, someone has to be making this generation’s Beastmaster or something, right? The kids around me in the surprisingly packed showing last night seemed to enjoy themselves, some gasping in recognition at characters I barely recognized from the first film and giggling at some of the mildly amusing one-liners. There was even one kid who loudly exclaimed “It’s Castle!” when Nathan Fillion turned up in one scene playing Hermes. Fillion’s always a delight, here even getting a slightly amusing wink to his cult classic TV show Firefly’s gone-too-soon status, but he’s out of the picture before you can say “cameo.”

Speaking of welcome presences, Stanley Tucci pops up as a sad and distracted Dionysus who speaks exposition and has the kind of not-as-witty-as-the-screenplay-thinks dialogue that only someone like Stanley Tucci could make palatable. But that’s also a role that only floats around the margins of the movie. For the most part, we’re stuck with the talented young actors in half-convincing scenes of Gods and monsters. As written by screenwriter Marc Guggenheim, they are nothing parts, simply one-note characterizations: conflicted hero, comedic relief, sympathetic tag-along, smarty-pants, good-hearted rival, wise mentor, and snarling villain. (Maybe the books, unread by me, are better in that regard.) It doesn’t help that someone left a lot of dead air around every line reading, as if the characters are patiently waiting for each other to stop talking before chiming in. Even an early scene in which one character interrupts another feels off. No one on screen seems to display much energy or enthusiasm, but maybe I was just projecting my own feelings on that point. I went into this sequel neither resenting nor remembering much about Percy Jackson the first and left in much the same state of mind about the second.

Too Wise to Woo Peaceably: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

Some of the appeal of Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing comes from the story of its making. Exhausted from writing and directing the blockbuster capstone of the first wave of The Avengers movies, Whedon gathered up a group of his actor friends and threw what amounted to a Shakespeare party at his house. In modern dress, they acted out Much Ado and had such a fun time doing it, they've now invited the whole world to watch. It obviously didn't come together quite so simply or spontaneously, but it might as well have looking at the finished product, which feels so breezy and simple with undemanding black and white digital cinematography, a homey backdrop, and sense of actorly camaraderie. All involved are on a clear labor of love, and to that extent it’s a fun bubbly reenactment.

I think of Whedon as a writer first, director second. In everything from teen vampire slayers to superheroes to the Bard himself, every bit of his career reveals him to be a man in love with words, how and why people say them and what those choices can reveal and dramatize. It makes sense, then, that every choice he makes here is geared towards showing off the original language of the play. As near as I could tell, aside from some abridgment, he keeps the original text of the play, his actors' additional glances and gestures entirely nonverbal. The black and white look and matter-of-fact approach to setting - Whedon's camera regards the setting as one would one's own home, disinterested and familiar - strip away any interest in focusing on the mise-en-scene. Here it's all about the words, loud, clear, and classic.

Plucking the play out of its Elizabethan context and placing it largely unedited in modern day California is a process not without wrinkles. Little details like characters gesturing with a smart phone when talking about a letter or referring to a holster as a scabbard are easily self-explanatory, but the plot itself is an awkward fit in modernity. After all, the delicate social comedy of Shakespeare's plotting in Much Ado rests on notions of patriarchal honor, arranged marriages, and a dispute over the nature of a female character's virginity, concerns which I assume are of much less of an issue in today's society. This is where I found it easiest to think of the adaptation as the exercise that it is. Viewed through a three-sided prism - Shakespeare, and cinematic comedy both screwball and romantic - the film becomes a three-ring salute to silliness at its most literate and lovely. If the film plays like a sunny party that flirts with darkness before turning out fine in the end, that's because it's precisely the soufflé the play is already baked into. The characters move through the play flitting to and fro trailing quotable bon mots behind them.

 A main reason we, or at least I, don't mind returning to see a new staging of old material is to see how new players approach the old characters. Here the material seems, if not fresh, then at least tricky and invigorating. As Leonato, the host of this party, Clark Gregg, lately Agent Coulson in the Avengers franchise, brings a charm and gravity to the proceedings, inviting his guests to stay, sup, and woo under his roof. As the couple whose hate just might turn to love, Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof bring broadness to their performances as Beatrice and Benedick, a big play-to-the-balcony prickliness that's pleasing. As Claudio and Hero, the couple who are negotiated together after some trickery, Fran Kranz and Jillian Morgese bring a dewy glamour. They're fine poles around which the film rotates.

All, from Sean Maher's Don John and Riki Lindhome's Conrade to Ashley Johnson's Margaret and Spencer Treat Clark's Borachio, are fine, but let me single out Nathan Fillion's delightfully underplayed work as the constable Dogberry. He's the only actor in the whole production who made me snicker consistently with each line, helped, of course, by linguistic contortions provided him in the source material. Fillion takes a typical Shakespearian clown and gives him the beautiful dignity he might deserve, which makes him all the funnier in the process. It's a fine bit of interpretation and a standout performance in a film of nice interpretations. Dogberry, indeed, may be the most important character in the play. He comes along to keep things funny at precisely the moment the main storylines have begun to veer into territory that seems, for the moment, irretrievably dark. As scholar Anne Barton writes in her introduction to the play in The Riverside Shakespeare, the constable "reassures the...audience that comedy remains in control of the action, even when the potential for tragedy seems greatest."

The deliberate slightness of Whedon’s filmmaking heightens the "nothing" of the title. The whole thing is a froth that's not entirely helped by the indifferent approach to modernizing a dusty set of social norms. Still, Shakespeare is an awfully hard playwright to mess up. Even if one were to spend time burdening his work with post-modern curlicues from a stylistic bag of tricks, the sturdiness of the material would surely hold to some extent. There's a sparkle of genuine affection - for the material, for the production, and amongst the cast and crew - that lights up the screen here. The beautiful smallness of Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing simply allows it to feel most fully like the after-superhero mint it was for him and now to a mid-summer audience that I suspect may receive this feature most gratefully.