The one origin story I didn't know

I hadn't planned to watch Fantastic Four -- the original from 2005 -- on the Saturday night of Easter weekend. I wanted to watch the new horror? thriller? Fresh, which was supposed to be playing through the Star portion of Disney+. I don't know if it's just not playing in my region, or if the kid safe settings are preventing me from searching for a movie about cannibalism -- the last shouldn't be a factor, since it looked like some other more adult-oriented options were available. (And too bad, because I would have liked to write a post about watching a cannibalism movie on Disney+.) In any case, I couldn't find it.

As I was doing a tedious scroll through the alphabetical listing of movies, though -- for some reason thinking that maybe the search feature was broken -- I did come across Fantastic Four. All three Fantastic Four movies, in fact, none of which I've seen.

This is a pretty weird anomaly for me. 

It was obviously different in 2005, but nowadays, there just aren't many superhero movies I miss. And if I do miss them, it's more likely the second or third in a series, like when I opted out of last year's Venom sequel. I'm usually on board for at least the first movie in a superhero series, just to see if happens to be my bag.

Not Fantastic Four. I didn't see the original in 2005, nor the sequel in 2007, nor the reboot/remake/reinterpretation in 2015. I think I was considering seeing the last until the reviews were so terrible. 

While I have marveled about this -- no pun intended -- in the past, and thought it was kind of funny to keep it out there as this notable exception to my usual superhero completism, I figured I'd finally see what Fantastic Four was all about on Saturday night.

Now, I should say that I do know a fair bit about the characters -- their names, their powers, the actors who played them. Enough of that has creeped in by osmosis that the movie didn't feel foreign to me. 

I did not, however, remember what their origin story was, and that it involved the characters going to space and being blasted by gamma rays.  

There were a number of interesting differences I noticed between a superhero movie made 17 years ago, before the MCU had started, and one made today. 

For one, I was shocked at how short it was. The running time is listed as 105 minutes, but there are nearly ten minutes worth of credits. The film was in its big climactic showdown before I had a chance to get comfortable on the couch. (And that showdown reminded me of one of my original favorite superhero movies, Superman II, as it occurs at street level in a city -- only the heroes outnumber the villain here, whereas the reverse is true in Superman II.) After Morbius, that's two straight superhero movies that ran shorter than two hours -- almost unheard of.

Then of course I couldn't miss how white it was. Ioan Gruffud, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans and Michael Chiklis are all white, as is Julian McMahon as Doom. The movie does feature Kerry Washington as Ben Grimm's blind love interest, so at least there's that. By 2015 they'd realized they needed to be more inclusive so they cast Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm. (And as a sign of further enlightenment, they don't worry about the fact that he's a different race than his sister, played there by Kate Mara.)

Then there's the comparatively poor usage of Alba, as giving women proper agency was not much of a thing in 2005. Yeah, she can turn invisible and she can control some sort of energy field with her hands, but really, she's more of a pretty face and a sex symbol than a character to be proud of. Part of it is Alba's bad performance; she really doesn't bring anything to the role. But she's wearing a low-cut outfit that features her cleavage in nearly every scene, and the movie doesn't shy away from the titillation factor of Sue Storm needing to be naked to take full tactical advantage of her invisibility. We don't see anything of course, but we see Alba in her underwear a couple times, or quickly moving to shield her nudity from someone.

It's hard to put myself back into the headspace of the superhero world we lived in then, when the MCU was still three years off, and when the only superhero franchises of note were Batman, Superman, Spider-Man and X-Men. So while Fantastic Four might have been fine for 17 years ago, it's a bit limp by today's standards, even with a few fun performances and decent special effects. 

Just to honor my modern completism, I may continue on and watch the other two existing movies, in part because I understand something interesting might happen at the end of Rise of the Silver Surfer (no spoilers in case you care about such things but also have not seen the movie), and I'm always interested to see how they handle things like that. 

Then again, there are still three Spider-Man movies I haven't seen -- the last with Toby Maguire and both with Andrew Garfield -- so I guess I will have to have the philosophical debate about which superhero completism has more value to me. 

Or, I could just, you know, watch other types of movies and take a break from superhero movies for a while, at least until Doctor Strange comes out, which I think might be a lot more gratifying.

This post had nothing to do with Easter, but it's going up on Easter. So, happy Easter.