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. 

Flesh and Blood: NAPOLEON

I wonder how many people know that the saying about history repeating itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, is a paraphrase of Karl Marx? Or how many know that he was talking about Napoleon and Napoleon’s nephew’s respective coups? Regardless, the quote was on my mind during Ridley Scott’s Napoleon because the film is at once a large-scale epic of combat and tragedy, and a scrambling farcical comedy of interpersonal pettiness. It seems to be arguing that history isn’t just repeating. It’s always tragedy and farce playing out simultaneously. The one feeds the other; the wheels of time spin forward with the push of the pathetic egos of petulant leaders. Scott’s been on this kick for a while, melding the historical scope of his Gladiator or Kingdom of Heaven with the messier stuff of small, fallible human foibles. This preoccupation must’ve started bubbling up with his brilliantly, bleakly absurd 2013 drug-war thriller The Counselor, and he’s continued to ramp up both the humor and the pathos in films more—medieval Rashomon with a bitter satiric edge, The Last Duel—and less—broad schtick ensemble chaos House of Gucci—successful. His Napoleon is among the best of these, balanced on dual intertwined through-lines of its subject’s tactical brilliance and pathetic personal drama.

He has in Joaquin Phoenix a perfect co-conspirator for this tone. The actor brings a sniveling underdog quality that’s both charmingly pompous and irritatingly arrogant, and never far from wallowing in self-pitying psychological myopia. He stalks the frame like a glowering child, with a posture that’s somehow simultaneously hunched and puffed-up. He speaks with the half-swallowed bark of a man so deeply insecure he needs to stomp up and down the halls of power convincing himself he belongs. Rarely is swagger so needy. His Napoleon is a man of unchecked ambition and bottomless insecurity. The film takes him from his days as a young solider, through his unlikely rises and falls through the ranks to eventually become Emperor of France, and then sees him straight through his exiles and death. Dramatic scenes are cut like comedy, while the battles are big and booming, bloody and legible. Track the tactics and the players with Scott’s camera and you see the triangulation and bloodthirsty brilliance of the battlefield. (Cannonballs smash through horses. Swords slash through jugulars. Bodies plunge bleeding into the ice.) Then we swoop through the palaces and backrooms where the real intrigue is the scheming and intrigue of power-hungry men (a slew of fantastic character performances) and their unrepentant appetites. When Napoleon churlishly retorts, “I enjoy my meals” as a way of rebuffing accusations of his piggishness, we see the unfurling of an ego and the melding of the personal and political. He never has enough. Later, he’ll fume at an English representative, “You think you’re so great because you have boats!” like he’s a tantruming teen.

He's scary and funny and altogether uncomfortably human. Napoleon’s key romantic entanglement with wife Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) is shot through with some legitimate tenderness and complicated feelings. But it’s also sloppy and pathetic with heaving, fast copulation and sweaty cuckoldry. His position of imperial power is constantly undercut with his complicated interpersonal ironies—even the famous painting of his coronation, replicated here in flesh and blood, is triangulated with the undercurrents of jealousies and rivalries and unspoken power plays in every darting glance. He’s a man of great power, and great damage, with little control over his immature id. When he at long last has an heir, he holds the crying infant while we hear the rumble of cannon fire in the distance. The personal and political intertwine with foreboding for the future. In each twist of his personal life, we see a reflection of the consequential reign of terror he inflicts on his country. In the scariest, funniest scene, he goes scrambling, tumbling down a flight of stairs mid-coup before returning with the military behind him. He barely collects himself before, staring at representatives from behind drawn weapons, he offers, “Now, then. Shall we vote?” Out of such slights, the world turns, and people die.