“Fantastic Four: First Steps” - Third time’s a charm.

I know you’re worried about Fantastic Four: First Steps. You remember the aggressively mediocre first two Fantastic Four movies featuring Jessica Alba and Chris Evans. You’ve tried to forget the atrocious reboot featuring Miles Teller and Michael B. Jordan. And you still don’t trust that the MCU has truly turned the corner back into must-watch territory. But if you saw Thunderbolts*, you’ll have more confidence that Marvel has corrected itself. You did see Thunderbolts*, right?

Honest Trailers once joked that a good Fantastic Four movie did in fact exist - Pixar’s The Incredibles. It’s funny because it’s true. But now The Incredibles has competition with an official Fantastic Four film. First Steps finally gives us a film that might just be fantastic.

First Steps starts off exactly how it should - by not showing us a thirty-minute first act featuring how the Fantastic Four got their powers. Thank you, director Matt Shakman. Instead, we are thrust into a world where the Fantastic Four are beloved and considered Earth-828’s protectors. Yes, that number is important because the primary MCU Earth is 616. Don’t worry, the multiverse isn’t a focus in this movie. And because of that, bonus...you don’t have to know anything about the rest of the MCU for this movie. You’re welcome.

In New York City on Earth-828, it’s the 1960s and looks like if Disneyland’s Tomorrowland was right. The Fantastic Four live together in their very own tower in the city and everyone knows them by their actual names (their superhero names are never mentioned during the film). Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) and his wife Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) have learned Sue is pregnant and share the news with Sue’s brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn) and family friend Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) over their weekly Sunday dinner. If this sounds a lot like Disney’s Carousel of Progress ride to you, you’ll known what I mean by, like the ride, this idyllic scene is interrupted.

Near the end of Sue’s pregnancy, a cosmic being called the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) arrives at Earth to inform humanity that her master, Galactus (Ralph Ineson), is on his way to eat Earth. Yes, I said eat Earth. In an attempt to save Earth, the Fantastic Four locate Galactus’ current location in the galaxy, then fly there to negotiate with him. Galactus demands Sue’s baby in exchange for not eating Earth and they politely decline. Just kidding - fight scene.

What I love about this plot is it’s a form of the famous Trolley Problem. Doom one life to save everyone else or doom everyone else to save one? Because the film focuses much more on family and community than on punching bad guys, the dilemma has real heft. And not just for the four superheroes, but for the people initially angry at what they perceive as the obvious choice. Once Sue explains to them why they couldn’t just sacrifice their child, they actually listen. I know, right? After living on our Earth these past few years, especially these last few months, the idea of people actually listening to reason sounds utterly preposterous.

There’s a lot more to like about this film than just the moral dilemma. After the casting and writing disaster of 2015’s Fantastic Four, Marvel Studios did what they do best, creating a bunch of well-written characters and finding quite possibly the best possible choices of actors for all of the main characters (and even the minor ones). Ineson portrays a very menacing Galactus, even sprinkling in some nuance that has us feeling the tiniest bit of sympathy for him. Garner is even better as Silver Surfer, powering her emotions and expressions throughout Surfer’s character arc, as well as through the CGI liquid metal covering her entire body.

Quinn and Moss-Bachrach both tone down the cartoonishness of their characters and play up qualities not emphasized in previous film versions of their characters. Ben isn’t just a rock-covered strongman; he’s caring and soft-hearted to friends and strangers alike. Johnny is no longer a cocky, dumb, playboy, but a mildly subdued, intelligent man eager to help out.

Then there are Kirby and Pascal, shining much more as the heads of the family than the heads of a superhero team. Reed is still the familiar scientific genius, but he’s also every dad trying to figure out fatherhood on the fly. He just uses checklists and robots to help. Sue is still the familiar protector and loving wife, but with an undertone of don’t-fuck-with-me-now-that-I’m-a-mom. You all know what I’m talking about.

So, breathe a sigh of relief. First Steps is the Fantastic Four movie we’ve been demanding for decades. You can finally forgive 20th Century Fox Studios for mangling the franchise. You can also forgive Marvel Studios for the flood of forgettable and subpar content they fire-hosed at us after Avengers: Endgame. Now, you can look forward to the next MCU movie now that trust has been restored. And you can go watch Thunderbolts* because the box office sure looks like many of you didn’t see it.

Rating: Worth every penny, even if you’re still mad at Carousel of Progress always breaking down.

“Nosferatu” - Let bygones be bygones.

Movie theaters are not the best places to take a nap. There is a screen with bright light reflecting off it, loud noises often emanating from all around the room, and other people around you. On the flip side, it is a dark room, with very comfortable temperatures, and, in some theaters, plush seats that recline and heat up. For me to doze off during a movie in a theater, I usually have to be really tired or the movie has to be incredibly boring or uninteresting. While I didn’t fall completely asleep during Nosferatu, I threatened it many times.

That’s not to say Nosferatu is a truly boring movie. It has plague rats, jump scares, a damsel in distress, a creepy vampire, and Willem Dafoe. On paper, that’s the opposite of boring. Yet I found myself fighting to keep my eyes open at multiple times. And I wasn’t that tired from a normal day at work.

I think the main problem for me is Nosferatu is a throwback film to a very bygone era that I’m not interested in revisiting. The original Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror was a German silent film appearing in 1922. That’s not a typo. Today’s Nosferatu is a remake of a literal one hundred-year-old movie. And the remake isn’t a reimagining so much as it’s a straight remake, just with that newfangled sound technology to capture actors actually speaking. Or screaming. There’s a quite a lot of screaming.

I’m not exaggerating when I say this new Nosferatu feels like it was made one hundred years ago. Many of the film techniques - like straight shadows of hands and silhouettes to elicit terror - are reused to great extent. Much of the film is either straight black-and-white or using filters that wash the color out so much it might as well be black-and-white. And so much of the movie is shot in near darkness. Look - I get it. Not being able to see what’s happening induces fright, but for me it also induces heavy eyelids.

The other problem is the story is missing an element to tie everything together. The vast majority of the original film’s story (stolen from Bram Stoker’s Dracula) stays intact. Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) and Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) Hutter are recently married and trying to build a life together. Thomas is sent to Transylvania to assist Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard) in closing on some property in the German town Wisborg where the Hutter’s live. As a younger girl, Ellen had been stalked by Orlok and Orlok’s goal in moving is to take full possession of her. While Thomas is away, Orlok is able to haunt Ellen’s dreams again, causing strife with Friedrich and Anna Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin), the Hutters’ friends who agreed to house Ellen while Thomas is away.

The story continues with Thomas’ harrowing escape from Orlok’s castle, Orlok’s voyage on a ship to Germany where the entire crew dies and the ship wrecks in Wisborg’s port, and Thomas enlisting the help of Dr. Siever (Ralph Ineson), Friedrich, and Professor von Franz (Dafoe) to hunt down and kill Orlok. What’s missing from the original story in this remake is Ellen never discovers a book on vampires (one that Thomas originally finds in Orlok’s castle) that informs her how to rid the town of Orlok. This is a key thread through the original story because it provides discovery for both Thomas and Ellen and becomes the reasoning behind their actions. In the remake, von Franz exposits all vampire knowledge to the other men, but never to Ellen, so Ellen has zero agency through the entire film. Like how Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark has no bearing on the fate of the Nazis, we could remove all of the non-vampire men from Nosferatu and the story would still end the same way - with Ellen and Orlok’s final consummation. The difference is Ellen is an unwilling participant this time around and that’s pretty boring.

I want to stress that Nosferatu is not a bad movie. I can appreciate how much effort went into it to capture the feel of a one-hundred-year-old movie. I enjoyed the performances from the actors, particularly Dafoe and the always amazingly terrifying Skarsgard. I could have done without the bombastic sound threatening to split my skull at times, but I get why it was done that way. It’s just none of those things were enough for my interest to sink its teeth into and keep my eyelids from having a mind of their own.

Rating: Ask for five dollars back in today’s money.