The way the comic book is written just reinforces my gripes with the movie (let me explain)
Spoilers for the movie below:
Fantastic Four (2025) was a visual feast with the best intentions, but it left me feeling slightly hollow and more disappointed with it the more I thought about it. These pages from Ryan North just make it all so clear what I felt was lacking in the movie: actual science.
The movie's change to the characters, making all of the Four cientistas, just made this more egregious. Sure, Reed invents stuff and fills up chalkboards with equations but it all feels painfully shallow. It feels like there's nothing behind the curtain because the writers don't actually care about the science behind anything.
The only actual (theoretical) science we get in the movie is the distorted light beams due to the black hole (which was pretty cool) and a quote, repeated twice, about Archimedes' theory.
What we should've got was the superhero equivalent of Ridley Scott's The Martian where the characters are showing us that besides having powers they're super geniuses by "sciencing the shit" out of everything and explaining the actual science behind it in a way that fascinates us and makes us think "damn, science is cool".
We were almost there, the transporting the entire world plan could have been fascinating. It should have captivated us. It should have felt like the machine in Contact. But it ended up feeling silly and in my opinion was poorly written.
Shakman did a great job, but this is just one of the reasons I think the screenwriters let us down. If FF 2 gets made, I dearly hope they get actual nerdy comic book writers to pitch in.
Fantastic Four (2025) was a visual feast with the best intentions, but it left me feeling slightly hollow and more disappointed with it the more I thought about it. These pages from Ryan North just make it all so clear what I felt was lacking in the movie: actual science.
The movie's change to the characters, making all of the Four cientistas, just made this more egregious. Sure, Reed invents stuff and fills up chalkboards with equations but it all feels painfully shallow. It feels like there's nothing behind the curtain because the writers don't actually care about the science behind anything.
The only actual (theoretical) science we get in the movie is the distorted light beams due to the black hole (which was pretty cool) and a quote, repeated twice, about Archimedes' theory.
What we should've got was the superhero equivalent of Ridley Scott's The Martian where the characters are showing us that besides having powers they're super geniuses by "sciencing the shit" out of everything and explaining the actual science behind it in a way that fascinates us and makes us think "damn, science is cool".
We were almost there, the transporting the entire world plan could have been fascinating. It should have captivated us. It should have felt like the machine in Contact. But it ended up feeling silly and in my opinion was poorly written.
Shakman did a great job, but this is just one of the reasons I think the screenwriters let us down. If FF 2 gets made, I dearly hope they get actual nerdy comic book writers to pitch in.
Commentaires
Reed — obviously
Jonny — Figures out an alien language using a single translated sentence as a Rosetta Stone.
Sue — Ok, emotional intelligence (which translates to political mojo off the charts)
Ben — ? He figured out Sue was pregnant, but that’s hardly enough to call him a genius
I know, I know… comic book logic. But looking at it critically, it really seems like Reed picked the people he liked best in the world to come with him, rather than the most qualified.
At least they made Sue and Jonny demonstrably MORE than just their powers, which I appreciated. But it would have been great if we’d seen something to indicate Ben was more than just a reasonably capable pilot. Heck, just a few throwaway lines about how he managed to bring the ship down safely being an amazing testament to his piloting skill would have helped. (Physical genius, rather than mental genius.)
I was good friends with several Hollywood screenwriters, many graduated from USC school of film, and were heavily tracked into the lifestyle and network of the industry. One of them was my roommate for over eight years, and we were close as could be for over twenty years without actually dating.
To give some context of what is to follow, I'm a historian, majored in history with a focus on Pacific Asian history and languages. I'm both Chinese American and Japanese American. I have a deep personal and academic knowledge of my own cultures and my field of study.
My best friend approached me one day in the living room and asked me for some help and source information on a project she was working on. She wanted to get accurate information on Imperial China and Japan during a particular era in history, in regards to contact with the West. I asked some follow up questions about the dates and locations she wanted to focus on, and began to help her with details she wanted to include. As we progressed in this, it became clear to me that there were complex questions and answers in regards to the era of the project she was involved with, and so I gave as detailed answers that could be summed up verbally, and offered to lend her some of my personal notes on timelines and notable events, people, etc. But to be accurate, none of what she was asking about was 'clear cut' and had definitive answers without context.
Now I know screenwriters don't have the luxury of a lot of time on projects, I've seen her crunch before, and so was familiar with the constraints she had to work under. The notes I offered her were basically teaching curriculum 'cheat sheets', essentially Cliffs Notes, none of which were more than a few pages in length. All in all, they involved maybe less than an hour of reading at most. Imagine my surprise when she simply tossed them to the side and said *"I can't be bothered to read any of this. Can't you just tell me what I want to know?"*
It was at that point that I realized that as an industry and part of their development process in the industry, that screenwriters are not really interested in accuracy, intellectual honesty, or subject matter verisimilitude, they really just want to be told what they are writing fits their preconceived notions about any particular field or subject. Their mindset is that they are telling a predetermined story and all the parts of the story, can be brute forced as square pegs into round holes, if they require.
I don't ever expect a screenwriter to attempt to show actual science or accuracy in any topic that relevant for plot in a Hollywood script.