It took Marvel years to finally get back the movie rights to the team they call their “first family,” and then they had the bad luck to release THE FANTASTIC 4: FIRST STEPS two weeks after James Gunn’s SUPERMAN. It won’t matter in the long run, but right now you can’t miss the similarities in its approach: it’s light and stylized, it’s old timey, it skips over the origin story and gets right to it. It feels like a restart because it’s set in a different reality than the MCU and it’s the sixties – theirs has some flying cars, a race of mole people and possibly less racism. I believe they also got baby monitors and fist bumping early over there.
So in many ways it feels fresh for a Marvel movie. The retro-futuristic designs are very appealing, and it’s always nice when they have one that’s a visual experience. But I’m sorry to say it’s not nearly as fun or as funny as SUPERMAN, mostly a glossy surface with nothing but air beneath. I remember the idea of these characters from the 2005 movie – here are those ideas again, looking less embarrassing (love those turtleneck sweater uniforms!) but really not exhibiting much more depth than before. (read the rest of this shit…)
A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE is something rare and kind of lovely: a big franchise genre movie that uses those expensive trappings for something modest, simple and beautiful. As the title implies, it takes place right before and during the initial onslaught of super-hearing monsters from space that eat anybody who makes a sound, quickly causing the fall of society and leaving a smattering of by-necessity-non-verbal post-apocalyptic survivors. We get those monsters, some tense set pieces, some clever ways to deal with them, some (I believe) new information about how they work and how mankind first reacted. But really it could be almost any disaster scenario, because what’s great about it is that it spends this day of almost certain doom with a protagonist who was already about to die anyway.
