The Fantastic Four: First Steps

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The third new Marvel movie of the year. You can really tell that writer’s strike slowed things down for a minute.

The first thing I will say is that 2025 demonstrates that the claims about superhero fatigue aren’t correct. What people are tired of[1] is not superheroes, it’s having to keep track of nearly infinite interweaving threads to understand what’s going on in the next movie. So this summer where you have Superman that is the first movie of a new DCU continuity with no history to care about, and now Fantastic Four set on an alternate world by themselves without any of the stuff we’ve been aware of for the past 17 years[2]… this is a thing that people want.

Anyway. It was honestly pretty great?

First of all, this is the most believable Reed Richards I’ve seen in a very long time. He’s the same character I’ve lauded from Ultimate Fantastic Four who was always going to be evil, yet they found a way for him to be believably not evil. (As opposed to the generic comics answer of “he’s not a bad guy because he’s a good guy.”) And Pedro Pascal can apparently continue to play genre characters until the cows come home.

As for the rest of what’s going on… the world feels lived in. I would happily watch a series of shorts based on the several years they’ve been around, fighting their Red Ghosts and their Mole Men and their Wizards and oh please oh please oh please their Paste Pot Petes. I’m not sure in a world with just one superhero group I can believe they would be considered the world’s guardians, but I’m willing to let it slide.

Sue was amazing, Johnny was just a smidge underdeveloped (but that’s what sequels are for), and Ben’s essential sadness was nailed without anyone ever saying “Gee, look how sad (or worse, angry) Ben is!” I cannot imagine what someone coming to these characters for the first time would have thought, but I think it would work?

Oh, and the look of the movie was extremely stylish. Retrofuturism they say, ie what people in the past thought the future would look like. I’d still be fine if it looked that way right now, instead of the way it does look. Which is basically the same, only more drab in most places. So that part was also pretty great.

Lastly, the plot. You know what? The plot wasn’t the point. Introducing the characters was the point, and with that understanding of what’s going on, I really think they picked the right plot. Not an origin story, not a generic “here’s someone they’ve fought before.” Instead, a really big fight with really big characters, who I hope return some years from now in a sequel.

Third time in a row this year that I’m excited to see the next movie. Sometime in the midst of the quantumania of madness era, these started feeling like chores, and I didn’t even notice until now, when they do not.

[1] And here, die-hard fan though I am, I will include myself at least a little bit.
[2] god help us

Jurassic World: Rebirth

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Probably at some previous point, I understood that Jurassic World referred not just to the park, but to the fact of the dinosaurs having gotten loose and now they live here too, like it was the Jurassic all over again[1]. Anyway, they made a trilogy on that theme, and now that Chris Pratt has made enough money, they decided it was time for more Marvel alums to get in on that sweet, sweet dinosaur cash.

Here, therefore, are the things you should know about Jurassic World: Rebirth.

  1. There’s nothing “rebirth” about it. It’s still the same dinosaurs from the same consistent series of movies at the same consistent starting point as it was for every prior sequel. Furthermore, it doesn’t even feel like it’s meant to be a franchisal rebirth. This told a complete story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and no real hooks for sequels starring the same characters.
  2. It’s a little bit of a rip-off of a loving homage to several movies. I can see Jurassic Park 3 in there (with the sailboat family shoehorned into an otherwise straightforward snatch and grab plot), a decent chunk of Aliens (if Newt’s family had survived along with her, and to be fair that may cancel out JP3), and a whole lot of those old GI Joe 5-episode miniserieses they’d put out every year where the Joes and the Cobras are chasing parts of, for example, a weather control machine.
  3. There was no compelling reason to make this movie. Other than “give me some cash”, it doesn’t have a story that needed to be told. That sounds worse than it actually is, the story was fine, extraneous things can often be fine. But it was extraneous more than it was fine, you know?
  4. With that caveat: it was also fun. Possibly because I cannot accept what the writers posited the world to be like 30 years after the rise and fall of InGen, the dinosaur-cloning company. Those character inhabiting that world are all, “meh, I’ve seen dinosaurs, and mostly they’re boring murder machines, so who cares if they go extinct again, or that they ever existed in the first place?” Whereas I will probably never lose my childlike wonder for them, and they keep on looking pretty great in these movies. Thanks Steven Spielberg.
  5. The less said about the pointless “what if we make mutant dinosaurs?” subplot, the better, Pretend it never happened, and you have a better movie. Because wow, it adds nothing and is probably the thing that most made me consider whether the movie was necessary, a la point 3. If you have a subplot that would have been your main plot except you flubbed it entirely? That’s a bad sign.
  6. …but it was still fun, and I do not regret having seen it. The movie was not ruined for me, I just selectively edit a handful of the dinosaur characters to be something just as useful for the service needed in the plot during those scenes, but not pointless and dumb at the same time.
  7. I do a little bit regret not seeing Superman instead. But only a little bit.

[1] But mainly the Cretaceous, not I suppose that this is important to their larger point.

Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury

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I have played not one but two games! Well, okay, I finished Bowser’s Fury yesterday, and didn’t finish Super Mario 3D World at all plus last played it months ago, but I for sure have enough data to make a fair review of the bundle.

First, the one I did not finish. Super Mario 3D World is basically the same game as Super Mario World, the one from the ’90s I think? SNES era, anyhow. You wander around a track from level to level, and then complete the level to unlock forward progress.

I mean, yes the graphics are better, and the levels are more 3D wander around instead of side scrolling, plus there are different things in each level to collect, so maybe it’s like a combination of Super Mario World and Super Mario 64? And also there are new-to-me conceits, like a cat suit for climbing walls, and a white raccoon suit they give you if you fail a level like 5 times in a row, that makes you invulnerable to everything but lava or infinite falls, and helps you with those too. So it’s pretty forgiving, at least until like three levels from the end, where they introduced a rolling log mechanic that I find impossible to adapt to, and came close to running out of lives over. So that’s why I’m stuck. All the same, I can visualize what is left of the game well enough to be satisfied with what I’ve written here.

Bowser’s Fury, on the other hand, does not have any lives, and is actually almost its own thing. The deal is, Bowser Jr. who you may remember as a mini boss in some prior games, shows up asking Mario for help, because his dad has grown massive and is way way way angrier than usual. So Mario runs around a giant lake collecting things that help him defeat Bowser and clean up all the crazy oil slicks laying around. It is less like Super Mario Sunshine than this makes it sound, but that game was certainly on my mind a lot. Eventually, you finish going everywhere and win, which I did. Hooray!

It also has a second player mechanic similar to Cappy in Super Mario Cappy[1], which would be great to play with the kids except that Bowser Jr. can also control the camera angle, which makes it a miserable experience instead. Maybe when they’re older?

If you like Mario games, these are certainly two more of them. Bowser’s Fury is shorter, but also, I think, better.

[1] I forget the real name[2], but it’s the one that debuted with the Switch and has a talking hat that guides you around. You’d think I would have reviewed it, but nope. I finished, but finishing left like 50% of the game unexplored, so I wanted to play more before reviewing it, but then… didn’t. You’d be surprised how often something adjacent to this happens to me.
[2] My wife informs me it’s Super Mario Odyssey.

Boys from County Hell

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Imagine a small town. The kind everyone of a certain age who lives there wants to escape from, and within a rounding error of nobody ever actually does. Imagine the young men and women of that certain age, yearning for freedom. Imagine they’re in Ireland, and their town’s claim to fame is Bram Stoker tourism.

Now imagine there’s a cairn in the middle of a field, and legend says someone, or something, is buried under it. Something you wouldn’t want to run into at night, if you take my meaning. Also, the land is being sold for development, and one of our Boys from County Hell sees helping on the construction of that development as his ticket out, even if it means knocking over a few old stones, you know?

Once all the setup was finished and the main action commenced, I simply could not stop feeling the influence of Shaun of the Dead. Yes, vampires instead of zombies, but between the exotic UK accents and the slapstick absurdity and the occasional gore… yeah, there’s no way it wasn’t an inspiration. I daresay this is… well, it’s not a successor at all. I liked it, but come on. Shaun is just one of the best. And I don’t think they were going for homage. But I daresay the movies are having the same conversation with the audience, and this one is worthy of being in that conversation.

The Power (2021)

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A bad sign: I watched a movie, and then completely forgot to review it. Like, completely. I’m not sure that’s ever happened before, with the caveat that, arguably, I’d have no way to know?

The Power[1] (which I watched probably in late May; early June at the absolute latest) is most superficially about rolling blackouts in London in  the early 1970s, which I think were a real thing but do not have sufficient interest to research. So there’s this nurse fresh out of nurse school who is assigned to an infant ward at night, because the power will be out and they cannot be moved or something. For some reason, the details are hazy. So anyway, creepy hospital at night with no power, clearly this is my jam,

Then, weird things start happening. But are the things real? Are they possession? Prankster coworkers? A ghost? The strength of the movie, on paper at least, is in the second act’s tension when you cannot be sure what’s really happening. In practice… it never quite gelled for me. And it definitely didn’t stick with me afterwards!

To save you the trouble, yes there’s eventually clarity on what is going on, and why.

[1] I hate when this happens, but there are actually two movies with that name that came out in 2021. This is the one with the nurse, not the one with the gangster.

Fountain of Youth (2025)

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Archaeologist Harrison Purdue[1] had two children, neither of whom became archaeologists. Natalie Portman is an art museum curator, and John Krasinski is a… fortune hunter, maybe? Adventure seeker? Art thief? Anyway, he’s extremely dismissive of his sister for being boring instead of whatever he is, but nonetheless, he needs her help to fulfill a dying billionaire’s well-funded wish to, um, not die, by finding the Fountain of Youth.

On paper, it seems like it should have everything needed to be pulpy fun. Mysteries to solve, ancient conspiracies to unravel, lots of interested parties getting in each others’ ways. Even without the nod to the name, it should be a clear contender to usher in a new archaeology-adjacent franchise, in the wake of Indiana Jones winding down. But it just…. doesn’t work.

All of the individual pieces I mentioned above work and are fine. Maybe they even come together well enough? It’s hard for me to say with any certainty, probably because I was distracted by the acting. I’ve never seen Krasinski worse, and I usually consider him to be pretty solid; hell, he’s why I wanted to watch the movie. And he’s directed himself to good effect before, so I don’t think I can blame it on lack of direction either. But his character was bombastic and generally unlikeable, which is not the place you want to be, for this kind of movie. Worse, he constantly declaimed things, in a way no real person would ever do, like what you might expect to see in a high school production of Macbeth, but not in something people would pay to watch.

Portman was fine, and believe me, I know she’s worked through bad direction in the past. I’m pretty confident she could have been better, though, based on experiences with her elsewhere. But also, her character choices were just… implausible. If you think I’m talking about the kid, I am mostly talking about the kid, yes.

Thus, I turn to Guy Ritchie. I understand he has a good reputation, but I don’t think I’ve seen anything he’s made. …a brief pause ensues… Upon research, I’ve seen his Sherlock Holmes flicks, the ones with Robert Downey Jr, and nothing else. I deemed them pretty good, so, yeah. No idea at all what went wrong here, but the mustard, she has not been cut.

[1] Get it?

Communion (1976)

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Horror movies in the ’70s sure had a lot of names. IMDb says the original title was Communion, the title card called it Holy Terror[1], but the search terms and the podcast called it Alice, Sweet Alice. Which is not without its charms, to be sure, although the girl being like 12 or something makes it iffier.

So, there’s this girl Alice, and she’s not not a psychopath. Withdrawn because she’s unhappy with her parents’ divorce is a way to look at it, but most withdrawn kids don’t dress in feature-concealing transparent plastic masks and terrorize basically everyone around them, but especially their kid sisters portrayed by babby Brooke Shieldses. It doesn’t help matters that, rightly or wrongly, Alice perceives that everyone likes her sister in equal measure to how much they apparently dislike her.

Naturally, therefore, babby Brooke Shields winds up dead. And suddenly the movie becomes a giallo, in which the cops and Alice’s absentee father try to solve the mystery of who killed Alice’s sister, and why it was Alice. It was interesting, because I’ve never seen a US ripoff giallo, at least not since I knew enough to recognize one. Also, it was pretty good, and frequently pretty disturbing!

[1] My personal favorite

Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends

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Last year, I played a game, and I was trying to finish it 100%, only I had misunderstood a part of the early game, and ended up skipping out on a lot of information that only showed up every seven days game time, so now at the end of the game it was a lot of pointless busywork to get to the several pieces of info I needed to finish. Which would still have been okay, because kid friendly games are hard to come by, but then I started playing some Mario stuff instead, and it never happened, and now Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends has fallen off of Gamepass, which means it will never happen, but unlike a lot of games I played enough to form an opinion of but then never finished, at least I’m here writing a review of it.

The deal is, you’re a robot who makes (or maybe more appropriately, serves) sushi, and you’ve been hired by this old mayor to make his town popular. Half of the game is, every evening you open your restaurant and tell your sushi-making machine to start, er, making sushi, which you then try to match to what your patrons are in the mood for. They give you money and acclaim, if you do well at this. Then in the other half of the game you use the money and acclaim to buy things. Furniture, ingredients, costumes, that kind of thing. But you also are trying to make friends with all the people who live in town and newcomers as the town grows, because doing so will allow you to unlock newer, cooler things to buy as well as letting you delve into the (improbably, sushi-based) mysteries of the town’s origins.

Anyway, I did all of that, but didn’t quite get all of the possible sushi recipes, because some of them were locked behind a traveling sushi chef who visits once a week, but I didn’t start talking to her until pretty late in the game, because I didn’t know when or how to find her at first. Oops.

It was pretty fun, though towards the end even before this sushi chef fiasco, it started to feel more like work than fun to unlock the last few bits of relationships, mysteries, etc. I think maybe a lot of games do that, towards the end. Which is a pity.

Shift

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Not especially long ago, I read Wool, in which Juliette Nichols finds, and then exceeds, her limits[1]. The second book of the trilogy, Shift, goes back to the very beginning to provide several hundred years’ worth of context about Juliette’s silo and everything that surrounds it.

It’s hard to say anything more, due to massive spoilers. But I can think of a few things. First, the elephant in the room. I am on record for believing that the story I watched on TV and [mostly believing, at least] that I read in that first book did not require a specific apocalyptic backstory. It was enough to know that an apocalypse had occurred, and all that was necessary was to look forward. Having read the second book, with precisely the apocalyptic backstory under discussion… I 95% stand by my original assessment. I firmly believe a good, compelling story could have been told with nothing more than a handwaved “and then we nuked each other”, for example.

However, I would be remiss if I did not say that the apocalyptic backstory that has been provided is pretty damn compelling itself. Yes, there’s a little too much love triangle subplot that I’m not wholly sure added anything emotionally, and could structurally have been solved via different means, but that’s not really the point. The point is, necessary or not, the story of how Juliette found herself, wool in pocket, at the precipice of a much wider world than she could have imagined and yet so much narrower than the reader might have? It’s a good story, and I’m glad to know it.

[1] In most of the potential ways that could be taken.

 

Violation (2020)

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It is difficult to talk about, and in fact difficult to want to talk about, Violation. This is not only, and perhaps not primarily, due to the subject matter. It is not only because I don’t want to accidentally reveal virtually any spoilers, although that may be the primary reason. It’s not only because I’m still not entirely certain what happened, although I’m not.

See, the movie is presented completely out of order of events. There are two sisters, one in the final death throes of her marriage, one moved to off the grid and learning how to be a survivalist. Over the course of events, which were legitimately difficult for me to piece together not because they were out of order so much as because they were fragmented so badly that it was difficult to tell where any given moment might fit even in retrospect, and not only that, whether any given moment had actually happened; over the course of those events, I was saying, a violation of trust occurs, with the result being the slowest burning, most intimately shot revenge story I’ve ever seen. I mean intimate in almost every sense of that word, but I will focus on the facts of how small the cast is and of how nearly every scene is shot in close frame, suffocatingly close. It’s almost impossible to separate the act of viewing the events from the events themselves. I’m used to a comfortable distance, as an audience member, and it was absolutely impossible to achieve that distance.

I am impressed by this movie, and I should probably watch it again, only I find that I don’t want to. It’s just too raw.