Reconsidering Fantastic Four (2015)

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

By the time I saw Josh Trank's Fantastic Four I had long since had an earful of the bad press--and as is so often the case on those occasions, I found myself wondering if it was not overly criticized. At least in the more important ways the film did not strike me as conspicuously lazy and sloppy in the manner of, for example, Iron Man 2. It managed to avoid the triteness so often part of the Marvel crowd-pleasers--particularly tiresome in, for instance, the middle third of the first Thor movie. And in fact, more than many of these movies (the celebrated first Avengers movie among them), it is not a collection of action scenes strung together by the thinnest semblance of a plot (or more precisely, masses of bits of action strung together by the thinnest semblance of being action scenes, in their turn strung together by the thinnest semblance of a plot), but offers an actual story with actual characters.

As it happens, there is a lot of Trank's prior film, Chronicle, in it--bleak suburbs, gray skies, alienated kids with bad attitudes from crummy homes who mess around with powers beyond their understanding and have to deal with the consequences, all depicted in a rather grounded, low-key, small-scale way. (Reed Richards is turned from a grown-up and well-recognized scientist to a geeky high school science fair entrant, with the rest of the Four changed commensurately; while the central event in the origin story is not a space flight, but interdimensional transport to a primitive landscape, generally seen at night.) There is a bit of Watchmen, too (another film criticized far out of proportion to any actual weaknesses it had) in the conception of the heroes as damaged people exploited by the System, and specifically the military-industrial complex, covert-ops side of it, the badness of which seems to go far beyond a few "bad apples."1

As all this suggests, rather than a movie for purists, or simply a less faithful movie still attempting to be a colorful, lightweight crowd-pleaser in the familiar Marvel mold (which the previous film version of this story fit to a tee), Trank's Fantastic Four gives the impression of a movie attempting to subvert its source material, and the form more broadly--and in its earlier portions shows some promise on that level. However in the last act the movie turns much more conventional as the heroes brush aside their previously deeply felt differences to come together and battle a vengeful supervillain posing a cosmic, physics-based threat to the entire world, the day is narrowly saved, and even if we had doubts (more than doubts) about the functionaries in the dress uniforms and three-piece suits, everyone puts that behind them, while our heroes get a sweet new deal in the form of lavish facilities in Central City, and speak bad one-liners intended to get a final laugh before we cut to credits.

Alas, the final display of action and effects falls far short of what was needed to save the movie from that perspective, not helped by the fact that the scenes are so ill-lit one can barely make out much of what is going on, and that the low-key approach endures. Perhaps more importantly, the sharp turn in the narrative, expected as it may be, rings false after what came before.

Consequently the film alienates those who like the more conventional take by being so low-key and measured and dark, who felt uncompensated by the finale; while at the same time in the film's turning much more conventional in the final act, it alienates those who had been intrigued by its doing something different and more subversive. In that I am reminded of something I thought about when watching Chronicle: the tension between the big-budget, crowd-pleasing form and the narrative aspirations of necessarily smaller-scale indie filmmaking. For better or worse Chronicle just about managed to cohere in spite of them, but it also did not have the expectations aroused by its connection with the Fantastic Four, or the obligation to turn a profit on a $120 million production budget adequate to launch a whole franchise of summer tentpoles.

1. One of the more striking aspects of this is the depiction of the changed bodies of the principals, not just the Thing, but Reed, whose stretching appears grotesque rather than zanily cartoonish.

The Twilight of the Action RPG?

Looking at today's games--I have in mind here the action RPG genre--I am struck by their breathtaking graphics, their rendering of vast, intricately detailed, elaborately interactive worlds, and the lushness of the storylines that all this enables.

Still, appealing as they are visually and conceptually, I have to admit to being one of those who feels that games have lost something in attaining this new level of artistic accomplishment.

The size and intricacy and interactiveness of their virtual worlds makes gameplay far less intuitive. The player has to endure elaborate tutorials to master the necessary physical skills. Then in embarking upon their quest I suspect that only the most hardcore players can get by without a strategy guide--genuinely book-length--in hand, playing becoming an exercise in "following the manual."1

I'll admit that I've never had much patience for tutorials of this type, and that I don't even like reading the manual for things I buy in real life. But clearly I'm not the only one who feels that way--or we wouldn't have wound up in this bizarre situation where people in developing countries toil at gold farming in postmodern cyber-sweatshops.

It all leaves me wondering if the gaming experience in this genre did not start to decline a few console generations ago, when the sophistication of the design had grown beyond its bare-bones beginnings (as with gameplay consisting mostly of seeking out random battles so one could level up), but not yet passed beyond that level of accessibility and manageability beyond which a game stops being fun. (Some time around the release of Final Fantasy 7, perhaps?)

What do you think?

1. Online few seem to admit to this kind of reliance--but they also belittle anyone who does admit to this, which leaves me doubtful.

On the First Person Point of View

Looking at popular fiction today it certainly seems that the first person point-of-view is more popular than it used to be, and one might wonder why.

Certain highbrow critics (I won't name names, but I've reviewed the work of at least one of them here, and not that long ago either) would have us believe that this is because third-person omniscient is "passé."

Such remarks say more about them than they do about fiction today--their Modernist prejudices, not least their love of unreliable narrators and ambiguity for its own sake.

It also reveals another failing of this type of critic: their utter obliviousness to and disinterest in the more practical aspects of the writing life--which seems to supply the real reasons why we are getting so much first person writing, two in particular:

1. Given the preference for "dramatic" rather than "epic" storytelling (I'm using the Goethe-Schiller terminology here), and the emphasis on being "relatable" above all, they are understandably looking to foster an intimacy that will make the reader identify with the narrator. Not a new technique, just one stressed more than it used to be.

2. The old problem of telling and showing. "Show, don't tell" remains the pat advice of those who don't actually write to those who do--and is followed much, much less often than we are led to believe, for good and obvious reasons. One is that, as compared with showing, telling is much easier to read--which is enormously important in today's market. It is also much easier to write--which matters all the more given the expectations increasingly placed on writers (low pay rates, longer books, lots of hours devoted to publicity, all without their getting to quit the day job save in a few, fortunate cases).

The result is that unless one really regards Flaubert as their Penelope (and ready to spend five days agonizing over one page in the manner of the man who gave the world Madame Bovary), setting aside all concerns but pure literary craft, they will, in spite of the conventional wisdom (truly conventional but never wise) serve up much more "tell" than "show."

But in fairness there's often a certain sleight-of-hand involved, and that's exactly what the first person point-of-view permits. Because of the pretense that we are in the narrator's head, directly listening to their voice, their telling looks a bit like showing--and most of those flogging the old "Show, don't tell" saw let them off the hook.

Review: E. Philipps Oppenheim's The Double Four

As The Double Four opens country squire Peter Ruff is summoned to Paris to meet with the mysterious old woman heading the titular organization, with which he has previously been deeply involved. At the meeting he finds the leader on her deathbed, from which she tells him that he is to be her successor--a charge he is reluctant to accept, though it is also clear that he has no choice in the matter. Afterward he is promptly set up in London as grandee Baron De Grost.

Over the course of the story we never get a comprehensive image of just what the origins, purposes and activities of the Double Four are, but it is quite clear that it was at least in part a notorious criminal organization, that it has since distanced itself from such activities, and that its primary concern is now espionage. By and large, this espionage seems to be conducted on behalf of the alliance of Britain and France, against Germany, and it is this which occupies Ruff's time--in particular, his successive battles with German agent Bernadine, the Count Von Hern.

The luxurious atmosphere, the genteel but ruthless and ultimately deadly duel between Ruff and Bernadine, are classic Oppenheim--and so are the plentiful melodrama, hokey plot twists and right-wing propaganda of yesteryear. Less familiar to me was the book's structure. A collection of short stories turned into a cut-up novel, the book is not just loose, but essentially episodic--between the first and last tales Ruff and Bernadine fighting out some issue to a conclusion, and then the book simply returning to them at the outset of the next battle. In fact, the order of several of the stories in the middle could have been rearranged without the reader's experience being compromised.

The fact that the book does consist of so many short bits was initially a bit jarring, so much so that I was tempted to charge them with being more thinly sketched than they should have been. (Like every other reader of my generation, I suppose I've simply--for better or worse--become used to taking my spy fiction in doorstop-length doses.) Still, it was a light, quick read with a pronounced retro interest, perhaps not so satisfying as The Great Impersonation but also suffering from less of that book's weaknesses as well.