[SPOILERS! Lots of 'em!]
I’m a lifelong Superman fan. Thanks to Christopher Reeve's portrayal of the hero, director Dick Donner, and writer Tom “Mankie” Mankiewicz, I’ve been a fan of that character since a very young age. That said, I’m also a comics fan. Do I need my movies to reflect the comics? No. All I want from a movie is: A strong story, which includes good stories for the characters individually, and for everything to make sense within the world the filmmakers have created, but also for the movie to correctly capture the spirit of the characters.
Also, it seems important to add: I’m not a believer in the “It’s Marvel vs. DC” ethos. There’s room for both on the rack and in the theaters. I like some books from each, some movies from each. I want both to succeed. I love the superhero genre. It’s an endless amount of fun to me. The only reason I’ll be comparing these two films is because they came out within weeks of each other and both played in similar thematic playgrounds regarding humanity; however, one succeeded, one did OK. Interestingly (or not), FF:FS just edges out Superman in both of its Rotten Tomatoes scores…
It all starts with a script. There are some basic Screenwriting 101 rules for film: Show, don’t tell. Characters need to have arcs (i.e., they start in one place, learn and grow throughout the film, end in another place). You need an A plot, and your B, C, & D plots should, in some manner, dovetail in a way that, in most of your better films, helps prop up the protagonist’s (the A) story.
Now, let’s get to Superman — Snyder’s take. Did I mind a Superman who was more brute and less thoughtful boy scout? No. Was I a fan of those movies? No. I felt Man of Steel was a great example of sloppy filmmaking with occasionally beautiful shots and some elevated fantastical ideas. More importantly, Snyder didn’t do a good job setting up this character to be a morally uncertain Superman (I know, many fans disagree with this, but the fact that half the audience didn’t follow that this was a morally ambiguous Superman means one thing: It’s not the audience’s fault). Snyder spent a lot of time on symbolism that in no way furthered the plot or, at times, the character, and utilized a structure that, apparently (based on the response) was far too similar to the Lester (hokey director of most of the also hokey Superman II) and Donner Superman films: Krypton to Smallville to Metropolis to fighting Zod for the fate of the world. We’d all literally been there, done that.
James Gunn, director of the newest Superman reboot and head of DC Studios, posted images of well-known and well-regarded Superman comics and stories. It bode well for his new Superman movie.
When I saw the teaser trailer, I was even more excited — Krypto the superdog seemed like a fun addition, and I was excited to see how Superman landed in the predicament we saw him in in the teaser. Little did I know that would be one of the most frustrating aspects of the film.
The Fantastic Four trailer created a different kind of frustration. While it did nothing for me personally (I was not on board with the casting), the trailer framed the movie as another action-superhero flick for the MCU. Apparently, this is what the average moviegoer wants, because nearly every person I know who saw The Fantastic Four movie in the theater was disappointed it wasn't that. Me, I had a different take: The Fantastic Four isn't supposed to be an action/superhero team. They're explorers of the fantastic! That's the whole point. That's why the leader is called Mr Fantastic, not because he's, ahem, terrific. So the trailer misled moviegoers and, for me, made me dread the film. It's never a good idea to advertise a movie as one thing and then deliver something entirely different.
Superman didn't do this. The trailer perfectly represented the film, for good or bad.
When Superman opens, we’re introduced to his world via printed text on screen. The text explains that “metahumans” (DC Comics’ poorly conceived term for superheroes since the ’80s [I think it was the mediocre Invasion! event storyline that gave us the term (along with Todd McFarlane)]) have been around for 30 years. The text continues by explaining that Superman’s been around for three years and is the most powerful of the metahumans and that he stopped a war and also just lost his first fight.
Remember the Screenwriting 101 rule “show don’t tell”? All of the above was told to us, not shown. This would’ve perhaps been fine if the film went on to show us that Superman was indeed the most powerful metahuman or that he almost never loses a fight or that the war that he stopped wasn’t really something we needed to see. Except none of this comes to pass. We never see Superman as the "most powerful" anything; he loses pretty much every fight; and that war? We did need to see it — everything throughout the rest of the movie hinges on that war he stopped!
It’s more than just a little odd that this Superman movie chose to tell us these important things with little white text floating on the screen when it had far more interesting visual options available: The robots we meet who live in Superman’s fortress could have detailed all of it via the interesting visual tech in Superman's Kryptonian fortress. If not that, the various reporters we see on giant televisions across Metropolis could've been reporting on who and what a Superman is via a special report on the war he stopped. Or the many reporters we spend far too little time with at newspaper The Daily Planet could've been writing articles, posting on social media, and/or making Lex-Tok videos about him. I wonder how it might’ve played out if Gunn had thought of utilizing some or all of that…
Which brings us to The Fantastic Four: First Steps: In the movie’s first 5 minutes, it does exactly what I was just detailing...and does everything Superman attempted to do with the text but chooses to do so in a visually exciting “This Is Your Life” riff, with the Ed Sullivan-like Ted Gilbert (Get it? Gilbert instead of Sullivan?) that takes advantage of, while introducing, the film’s engaging 1960s space-age aesthetic.
We learn through Gilbert’s voiceover all about The Fantastic Four while actually (Gasp!) seeing them performing feats and discovering new worlds within their own (like the underground world of The Mole Man, a character whose portrayal is one of the few disappointing things about this film) and taking a tour of their futuristic space-age 1960-something world. It’s everything the Superman movie did in boring text but in striking visuals, with a fun narration accompanying it.
When the Superman movie is done explaining everything about Superman, we meet Krypto, who’s fun in his first appearance, but, for me, became tiresome by the time he saved Superman for the 3rd or 4th time later on. And I say this as a dog lover who’s only ever had rescues (Gunn's apparent inspiration for the design of Superman's canine sidekick) in his life.
Following that, we meet those Superman robots in his fortress, the first of which explains that they are “merely automatons,” implying they have no emotion, only for the newest robot, 12, to emote her excitement in the very next second. Already, the film is feeling discombobulated within its own world.
We’re then thrown into a fight that Superman still doesn’t quite win (probably because he seems completely unable to use more than 1 power at a time — a common error in both live action and animated Superman takes). It’s a push at best. During this fight, Superman shows empathy for the endangered people of Metropolis, but he doesn’t exactly seem like a fighting strategist — in terms of fighting style, he’s not much less of a brute than Snyder’s Superman was. And certainly no smarter at this point.
As the film goes on, we get a lot of action sequences. Want to see Superman fight a kaiju monster? You got it! Why did Lex Luthor have one? How did he know that electric energy made it grow? And what bearing will it have on the plot? There’re no good answers to any of those questions. As a “distraction” for Superman, whilst Lex breaks into the hero's Fortress of Solitude, something more plot-driven would’ve served both Superman the character and Superman the film far better.
Speaking of the fortress: Superman has a whole gaggle of sentient robot helpers (The technical term for a group of unfeeling robots is actually a Zuckerberg, but I like “gaggle”) but no alarm? Sure, Lex and pals tricked the sensors and walked in, but once Luthor and company started tearing up the joint, and killing robots, why wasn’t some, oh, I dunno, high frequency ultra-sonic super-signal automatically sent out to Big Blue himself?
As Lex Johnny Depps The Man of Tomorrow’s fortress (which, I guess, is better than Amber Hearding it!), Superman was stuck fighting the big kaiju monster. This kaiju fight would’ve been a great opportunity to prove all of the things written on the screen at the start! Now’s your chance, Gunn, show me that Superman is the most powerful metahuman (bleh) on the Earth! Let’s see him defeat the kaiju, stop the purported heroes who show up to kill it; now’s the time—show Superman being the strongest, until recently undefeated hero that you told us he is! Show me something more than him saving a squirrel and a little girl. Show me him not landing on his back over and over and being showed up by a bunch of 3rd-stringer heroes from the comics! You know, the way The Fantastic Four movie does in those same first 5 minutes described above.
Yup. The FF covers the same exact ground, in visuals and that voice over, so much faster and so much better. That film’s intro tells us and shows us they are the most powerful beings on this Earth. It shows them saving citizens from evil people, creatures, and apes. After that, much like the Superman movie, we’re brought into the personal lives of the characters.
In The Fantastic Four movie, every single line, every single scene props up the rest of the story and the journeys of the characters. I wish I could say the same for Superman….
In Superman, we get a scene at newspaper The Daily Planet where we learn absolutely nothing about Superman’s secret alter ego, Clark Kent, except that it exists. We do learn that Lois Lane knows his secret I.D. — how? When? These are not things we’re told. However, not long after, we do get to watch Lois interview Clark/Superman about that war he ended, in a scene that, while telling us why Superman does “good,” also seems to do nothing but show us that Lois is very definitely smarter and sharper than him, something that never does the plot any good. It certainly doesn’t explain to us why she’s dating him. She doesn’t even seem to love him and indicates as much later on.
Meanwhile, in The Fantastic Four, we watch 2 of those 4 heroes having a stressful evening after their Ted Gilbert Show experience, one of them discovering that she’s pregnant, the other in need of iodine as a result of some world-saving that must’ve occurred off screen. This entire scene reveals to us the personalities of these 2 characters, plus introduces an important plot point: A baby is on the way.
The other 2 of the 4 are in the kitchen; the brief interaction is fairly (and purposefully) mundane right up until everyone present learns of the baby that’s due. All of this, however, shows us that the portrayal of the 4 in this movie is, clearly, not going to be like the previous movies — this Fantastic Four is not a group of live-action cartoon characters. They’re real people, with real foibles, problems, boring nights at home, and true excitement about personal life events.
Over in the Superman movie, I still have no idea why Superman is apparently regarded as a great hero and purportedly looked up to by nearly the entire world. (Although, not really that looked up to, as the world's population turns on him faster than a speeding bullet from Lex's gun into the skull of one of Superman's pals [we'll get to this later].) See, I’ve been told these things, and a few characters have reiterated them, but I’ve yet to actually see anything that proves or supports any of it. Superman lost the kaiju fight — twice (once to the kaiju, the 2nd time to the aforementioned other heroes that showed up) and nobody really seemed interested in helping him when he landed on his back, save for our future gunshot victim. So now more of that info from the opening text is beginning to not really track.
With all of the most basic early-on setup out of the way, let’s get to the meat of this thing: Across the rest of the Superman movie, we’re given a bunch of action sequences, many of which have nothing to do with the main plot (along with the kaiju is the river in Luthor’s Negative Zone, oops, I mean Phantom Zone, oops, I mean pocket universe), the only good sequence in the movie wherein 3rd-stringer Mr Terrific defeats an army regiment, and eventually a fight with Superman’s opponent from the start of the movie (whom, again, he can’t seem to defeat without luck). And I’ve only barely mentioned our comically immature, whiny, obnoxious Lex Luthor whose means of “defeating” Superman is via an online campaign and by screaming at people who are controlling Luthor’s "muscle" (the being we later learn is a Superman clone) in nearly the same exact way villainess Ayesha and the Sovereigns did at the start of Gunn’s own Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 with their arcade game-style ships. By the end, Luthor tries to run away from Superman — but only after he shot a guy point blank in the head in a scene that had absolutely no place in an often silly Silver Age-style film that wants to be for the whole family (and, very inappropriately, was suddenly not) — showing us that he’s not only a whiny jerk, he’s also a pathetic coward.
A cowardly Luthor? This is supposed to be a villain we love to hate? A character I’m expected to believe is bold enough to defeat the “most powerful metahuman on Earth”? He’s a jerk and, worse, acts like the kind of puerile jerks normally reserved for the silliest ’80s movies! (“Superman, if you can’t ski down the K12 and win the talent competition, you’re a bigger p—y than your dog!”) Now, I'm sure there are purposefully some real-world presidential/tech bro-Musk parallels here, but, perhaps because this is fiction, I never felt there was a real reason to fear this idiot, outside of the fact that, if you work for him, he's gonna be a total d**k to you.
Sorry, but, as villains go, I can’t imagine a scene of a whiny Darth Vader or one who runs away like a coward when he sees Luke Skywalker coming. Or a scene where The Joker just gives up ’cause Batman crashed through a window. Those guys are bad guys I can respect. At several points throughout the Superman animated series of the ’90s, that show's Superman and Lex Luthor had a variety of confrontations, often with Luthor goading Superman, screaming at him, confronting The Big Blue Boy Scout by going right up to him, nose to nose, and banking on the fact Superman wouldn't have the guts to knock him down. For a human with no superpowers to do that, well now, that’s a villain I can respect! But one who mutters childish jokes under his breath and acts like a twelve year old bully, is nothing more than an idiot. I don’t respect it in my president, I’m not going to respect it in my movie villains.
Over in The Fantastic Four, everything becomes part of the bigger story. The baby that’s coming becomes a divide between the heroes and the throngs who worship them across Earth because it could save them from the destruction of a being named Galactus, who wants said baby. The super-team’s refusal to give up their baby for the sake of the Earth makes them hated. (Much like the storyline in Superman.) However, firstly, that anger is earned, and, two, the FF movie turns around and handles it with maturity: Using the optimism of the period portrayed in the movie, the FF’s “mom,” Sue Storm, confronts this divide, explaining to angry people why the baby is not being given to the villainous Galactus and why they must work together. It’s a similar lesson of caring and humanity that Superman 2025 tries to cover but is unable to do so due to the film hero's lack of maturity and the plot’s inability to stay on point.
In Fantastic Four, even the choice to give us a female Silver Surfer is relevant to the tale — the story is about family, and she lost hers in a sacrifice, similar to the one Sue is being asked to make. And, also, it allows her to empathize and connect with Sue, making the movie’s climax a sensible arc to the Surfer's tale. In Superman, half the characters didn’t even matter. If you excise Perry, 3 of the random reporters that we met briefly in the Planet, much of Luthor’s crew, the 3rd-stringer heroes (Yes, even Guy, arguably a 2nd-stringer, who I’d miss, ’cause I frickin’ loved him), and half the action sequences, you literally would not affect the main plot.
Gunn’s not great with plot. Nicole Perlman wrote the first drafts of Guardians of the Galaxy, and her strength in giving us arcs and a clear throughline shows. The ability to weave in character growth while pushing the plot along seems to be a struggle for Gunn who is, in my estimation, a brilliant director, one who understands the visual capabilities of the medium of film far better than most. However, his next two Guardians movies, as entertaining as they were, struggled with things like plot and character growth: The 2nd movie literally stops the entire story to give each character moments of personal development; the 3rd one awkwardly intertwines the overly melodramatic (why no, that's not redundant!) tale of hero character Rocket over the course of about 40 minutes while the movie’s main plot struggles to get going (and to be funny in contrast).
While Fantastic Four favorite Ben Grimm doesn’t have much of an arc (his arc is literally that he grows a beard and yells his catchphrase), he’s still an important part of the team who gets some emotional beats along the way. Over in the Superman movie, Lois Lane seems less important than Jimmy Olsen to Superman’s story and seems to regard him like a child, which, to be fair, he tends to act like for much of the film.
Gunn, who's always been a director that knows how to give us striking visuals, portrays a mostly boring Metropolis, a blah pocket universe that almost makes Marvel's Ant-Man flop "Quantumania" look compelling in comparison, and seems to think that odd extreme close-ups of Superman and 3rd-stringer Hawkgirl (formerly a first-stringer in the incredible Justice League cartoon series), the latter of whom screeched into the camera, made the whole affair look like a bad live-action superhero series one might’ve seen on Nickelodeon in 1998.
Meanwhile, Fantastic Four director Matt Shakman doled out an entire Earth that felt like something we’ve never seen (before but could have) and a Galactus who seemed to jump right out of early FF comics of the 1960s.
So why didn't The Fantastic Four connect with audiences like Superman did? Well, in my opinion, there are several reasons. 1. There's only one Superman. And comics fans have been clamoring for a good Superman characterization for a few decades now. This one was, after all, pretty close to getting him right. 2. Marvel seems to still think they're bulletproof — I believe releasing a movie like Captain America: Brave New World, an underwhelming, goofy mess that put me in mind of straight-to-video action flicks starring elderly '80s action heroes, might be part of it: The box office for that was strong, but Thunderbolts, a superior movie with a far stronger overall cast that followed it, bombed hard. FF, as a result, struggled. Apparent word of mouth gave The FF legs and allowed it to crawl to a decent worldwide box office, but it wasn't exactly a big splash. 3. Underestimating the kind of pop-culture touchstone Superman is, and has been for closing in on 90 years now, was a major miscalculation. 4. As mentioned, the trailers seemed to imply that “First Steps” was a superhero action movie, but it’s not. It never even tries to be. The Fantastic Four: First Steps is actually an old-school sci-fi story about old-fashioned sci-fi themes of humanity and love for your fellow man; again, things the Superman movie childishly touches upon but can’t seem to really say anything about. Marvel tried high-minded sci-fi with The Eternals, and that didn't work out (in part because of a sloppy script), but anecdotally, and by reading comments on various YouTube reviews of TFF:FS, I can tell you, people were bored. And, sure, if you're expecting The Winter Soldier and instead get Duncan Jones film Moon, um, yeah, you're likely to be disappointed. (Although, come on, Moon was excellent!)
TFF:FS is a story about the 4 characters having to confront problems none of them have ever confronted before, and perhaps truths about themselves they don’t want to see, all couched within a story about learning to empathize with your fellow man (in the broadest sense; meaning, I’m including broads. [I’m so sorry. I couldn’t resist.]) — to widely varying degrees among the 4 heroes, for sure. It would’ve been nice if the Superman movie had done the same. Heck, the film doesn’t even end its story about the world hating Superman. Sure, it implies a sort of ending with the story in the Planet revealing Luthor’s true endgame, thus discrediting him, and there's a news person who says something about it, but I was expecting Superman himself to close that loop, especially considering Gunn's odd choice for the suit design: That is, I figured the S-shield logo was going to evolve by film’s end. You know, in order to prove to humanity he’s not just some strange visitor from another planet, that he’s one of them, he tamps down the military lines on the suit, removing them, softens the symbol from the comics’ “Kingdome Come” S-shield (which I think was indeed used to indicate his distance from humanity if I’m remembering that story correctly) to the traditional one, and we end up with the suit Superman is mostly recognized for.
However, in the end, it seems that wanting a Superman movie that actually reflects the Superman from the comics, a guy who’s empathetic and smart, who can show vulnerability and command a room, a guy essentially wearing just a frickin’ circus strongman suit, because, y’know, why the heck not, is just never going to happen again. Yet, somehow, against all odds, The Fantastic Four, in all its Jack Kirby cosmic insanity, is there to fill that void! Folks, and fans, should take another look, this time accepting that it's low on action, because it's not an action movie. Yeah, Marvel went ahead and gave you the Jack Kirby, 1960s-style, thoughtful explorers you'd asked for 10 years ago...and you missed it because you were so busy going gaga over Green Lantern Guy giving some random soldiers the finger. Which is a real shame, in part because Marvel's not likely to top it any time soon.
(Post Script: It’s got nothing to do with anything, but also: Giacchino’s TFF:FS score is a dang-blum banger. And while David Fleming and John Murphy’s Superman score was serviceable, it occasionally felt distracting, never mind that I don’t quite understand the idea of using an electric guitar cover of “Jonathan’s Death,” from John Williams’ Superman ’78 score, as a main Superman theme or to pretty much never use the part of the Williams score that all but “says” the name Superman! Go listen to Giacchino's "First Steps" score; you won't regret it.)