Finally, the Jetsons are joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe
dir: Matt Shakman
2025
There was something fundamentally goofy about this flick which meant it was never going to really make a lot of sense in any context, in any alternate reality.
And my deep love and admiration for all things Pedro Pascal should be well known and appreciated by now. Delighted as I am that he’s getting all the work in all the films doesn’t mean that there are times when I wonder whether he’s right in the role. It feels blasphemous saying that it feels a bit like he’s miscast in this.
Shame shame shame I should be paraded through the streets of King’s Landing (not naked though, because however much I deserve to suffer, the denizens of King’s Landing do not) for saying such. It’s possible he’s not the only one. It’s possible they’re all miscast. It’s so hard to tell, sometimes.
But does it matter? Probably not.
It seems especially redundant to make such a flick when the greatest version of the Fantastic Four has already been made, and it was called The Incredibles, and no amount of money or dreamy stars attached to a project is ever going to change that. Sure, they tried before, they’ve tried booting, rebooting, sequelling, re-sequelling and yet nothing seems to take.
Still, they keep trying because $$$
This is set in the 1960s, which is… okay I guess. That it’s an alternate dimension to regular Marvel Earth doesn’t really make any difference, because I’m sure they’re going to find a way for it to not matter that they’re living in the past or in an alternate reality.
It means that the kinds of people who say that they wanted to do something new or exciting in terms of the setting, the look, the feel of the flick can just rip off plenty of imagery from The Jetsons or any other Mad Men - Silver Age - Space Age imagery in order to give it a look they desperately want to call “unique” but you know it’s not because it’s all so painstakingly familiar. I don’t begrudge them that; I like that look. It’s cool, it’s funky, it’s retro-futuristic somehow and yet it's like a sitcom we never watched from back in the day.
The fundamental parts of this flick that maybe seem to matter is that there is a giant guy who is billions of years old, who’s even older than the universe, as in, he’s from a previous universe, and all he does is fly around and eat planets, and the other important issue is that Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) is having a baby. You wouldn’t think these things are connected, but then you’re not a genius Hollywood screenwriter, are you? No, you’re not, even though there were four of them on this flick, so they could possibly have made some space for you, but no.
This giant being called Galactus intends to eat the planet. No, seriously, he’s not there to rule it or just wreck it or fuck it like human self-centredness has been doing for centuries; he wants to gobble it up, because he’s just ever so hungry.
At first when he’s depicted I thought he was the size of… I dunno, as big as the moon. As big as a planet? But later when he turns up to New York, he’s like Godzilla size, so, maybe he changes size based on mood, temperature, whether he’s been drinking or not, lots of factors. At least, to eat / fuck a planet, you’d think he’d have to be as big as a planet, maybe. Does he put on weight after eating a planet, like most people do after Christmas, or does he have a post-planet num nums workout routine to keep those gigatonnes off?
But, you’re going to love this, at one point he says to the heroes that he won’t eat their planet if they let him eat the baby.
Can you believe this shit? Can you believe that someone wrote that down, probably on their laptop, emailed it to the producers, who printed it out, kissed it, then said “everyone else in the world, stop writing, because you’re never going to top this?”
I can, mostly because I just thought of it, mostly because I just wrote it down. That’s how it works, you come up with brilliant ideas, and then people come along and screw them up by not believing in your vision.
The world in which these Fantastic Four people live is so strange, and in some ways fascinating, because these four people (really, just one, being Reed Richards) rule the world. Richards is so brilliant that the whole world wants his inventions and whenever he asks for something the world collectively does it. Calling it a benevolent technocratic dictatorship would seem to be going too far, but it’s not far off from that.
It's baffling because it’s clearly a world where 99 per cent of people agree with whatever the fuck it is that supergenius Reed Richards tells them to. It must be the calm voice of authority that he uses, or the silver side bits of his hair that implies Dad Always Knows Best. He’s never shown smoking a pipe or chastising Sue for not doing enough cleaning (like in the actual comics back in the day), but there must be some reason everyone defers to him.
At one point he tells people globally to stop using electricity so much, and they do it. He needs all the world’s resources to build a bunch of things in order to transport the whole planet somewhere else (which sounds really feasible and not at all difficult), and they all go “Yes, Sir!”
And still Galactus is coming. I wonder if the solution, the super high tech solution to their problem is going to involve someone, something having to be pushed into a trap or a cupboard or maybe just a really big box, maybe just at the last possible second on some timer?
You’ll be amazed, but then again maybe not. I watched much of the back end of this flick with my mouth slightly agape, in that I could not believe I was seeing what I was seeing, even for one of these kinds of flicks. We are all well beyond caring about this comic book stuff except when they do something new with things, and there’s not really anything new or even newish here, but there is a gobsmacking amount of bad ideas.
Maybe there’s something of an interesting dynamic, a point of conflict when the heroes are given the option of giving up the baby to save the planet and they’re muttering under their breath “not our baby” and the rest of the world is like “yes, your baby, how is it even a question, 7 billion lives versus 1 baby?” I mean it’s the literal endpoint of the utilitarian argument “what if you could save all the lives but had to sacrifice one little baby?” and of course these suckers decide “nuh uh, not our baby”.
Someone else’s baby? Maybe. But not your own. Sue says to an angry mob that she’d happily sacrifice herself to save the world, but not her baby, oh no not without my baby. The mob hears this, and is chastened, relents, goes about its business, goes home.
Instead of yelling “let’s sacrifice them both!”
I didn’t really feel anything for any of the characters here or any of the shenanigans that they got up to. The whole story, and the whole way it’s delivered I have seen too many times before, and it’s almost irrelevant whether I’ve seen it done better or not. It just does not resonate.
Pedro, all reigned in, not able to give off the vibes he gives off in other roles, seems like an awful fit for this character, for this flick. He is a sharp fucking blade, and they made him dull for this movie.
I could say that about a lot of the other aspects of the flick that didn’t work that well for me, which is most of it. The plot requires so many dumb things (said by really smart people) to be taken on faith as being brilliant that I just couldn’t do it anymore, people. I have my limits.
Maybe it’s a better flick than I’m giving it credit for, but it certainly didn’t feel that way when I watched it
5 times the only good images in it they borrowed from Interstellar anyway out of 10
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“Your planet is now marked for death. Your world will be consumed by The Devourer. There is nothing you can do to stop him, for he is a universal force, as essential as the stars.” – it’s about bloody time, what’s taking him so long???” - Fantastic Four: First Steps
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