Issue #92: It's The End of the World 🧨

Happy “Zohran Mamdani is the Mayor-Elect” to all who celebrate.

This week, Cate on the MCU’s best film in years: Fantastic Four: First Steps. Then, Zosha on Kathryn Bigelow’s controversial new nuclear thriller, A House of Dynamite.

At 37 films and counting, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has already shown innumerable signs of wear and tear. Since 2019’s Avengers: Endgame — and to be fair, a global pandemic — audiences have found themselves faced with little more than diminishing returns at the box office under the stewardship of Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige. But Fantastic Four: First Steps is an interesting counterpoint to the franchise’s recent creative slump. 

On a 1960s inspired Earth-828, the Fantastic Four find themselves torn between the Silver Surfer, the planet-devouring Galactus, and the newest and youngest member of their little family: Franklin Richards — the infant son of Mr. Fantastic and Sue Storm. 

On first watch, it’s a sincerely refreshing foil to the studio’s ongoing superhero canon. Enabled by its “Earth-828” designation (as opposed to Earth-616, the “Sacred Timeline”) the movie has the freedom to step away from the glossy, over-CGI’d world fans have inhabited for the better part of two decades. Its retro-futurist aesthetics and bright and shiny production design give the film its own visual landscape to play in. This is a world where PanAm is still in operation, the superheroes are astronauts, and the Space Age never ended. A visual delight, the film is a comic book come to life in all the best ways. Colours are both muted and brilliant, hair is bobbed and coiffed, eyeshadow is as blue as you’ve ever seen, and all the architecture is straight out of Tomorrowland. Think, The Incredibles with less red and more blue. 

The entire main cast is a delight, especially Pedro Pascal as Mr. Fantastic. His tightly wound terror about parenthood screams for a Lexapro prescription that may not yet exist in this timeline. Ebon Moss-Bachrach gives a wonderfully expressive mo-cap performance as Ben Grimm, especially given that his character is covered in orange rocks. I suspect it’s because they’ve managed to build him a browbone, in addition to a beard. Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm is charming and capable, without the unearned arrogance that Chris Evans brought to the role back in 2007. And Vanessa Kirby’s Sue Storm is… a mom. That characterization may be reductive, but not by much. Especially not when laid next to the franchise’s previous fixations with motherhood. Because despite its progressive sheen, Fantastic Four: First Steps is accidentally retrograde in all the worst ways. 

The thing is, Kirby does a truly wonderful job. Though I frequently find myself distracted by her immovable beachy waves and preferred shade of platinum blonde, she has some beautiful moments here that reminded me why I fell in love with her all the way back in 2016 on The Crown. In the film’s opening moments, the slow transition she makes from shock, to disbelief to happiness after taking a pregnancy test — all in the span of 5 or so seconds — is something to behold. As is her angry outburst later in the film when she realizes what will be asked of her and her newborn son. The trouble is that these moments are all (reasonable! expected!) responses to motherhood. Add the later cliché of hidden strength discovered in service of a young child, and we’ve hit the trifecta. 

And to be clear, there is nothing wrong with a female character exploring stories about motherhood. What irritates here is that Sue isn’t given very much else to do. Theoretically she’s the founder of a UN-equivalent (the Future Foundation) that has achieved world peace. But we don’t even really get to see very much of that. As the Smurfette in this ensemble, her character trait is “girl.” Her story relies on trope after trope (smurfette principle, mystical pregnancy) and calls on her to filter every experience through the lens of “family.”

It didn’t go unnoticed when Black Widow declared that her infertility made her “a monster” in Avengers: Age of Ultron. And Wandavision earned 23 Emmy nominations and 3 wins for its 9 episodes about a witch who enslaved an entire town because she wanted to live with her two imaginary children. That same witch became the villain of Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness when she resorted to the MCU’s version of black magic to find her way back to them. In this film, Shalla-Bal (Julia Garner) becomes the Silver Surfer in order to spare her world from Galactus and save her daughter. And at the precise moment that Sue gives birth to Franklin, she literally turns invisible. Could the metaphor be any more on the nose?

On Earth-616, mothers are monsters. On Earth-828, they are self-sacrificing to the point of invisibility and erasure.

Fantastic Four: First Steps is overall, a mostly fun and enjoyable movie. I had a blast the first time I saw it and I watched it twice more to write this essay. I can honestly say that I think it’s the best entry into the MCU canon in years. But every revised viewing left me with a bit more trepidation about the politics it thinks it’s espousing. The thing I love most about movies is that they are tiny time capsules that reflect our values back at us. We get the movies we deserve because we make the movies we believe in. Here we’re given pseudo-progressive retro aesthetics where women are little more than mothers, coupled with future technology that commands the resources of the world “for the greater good.” It’s regressive nostalgia for a better time that never existed. And it’s hard not to map that onto the values of the tech oligarchy currently exploiting much of the planet. 

Because, technology might bring us closer to the future. But is it the future we want?

A House of Dynamite wants to scare you, though you might not know that for certain in its opening minutes, as we watch a lieutenant in the military (Anthony Ramos) on the phone with a loved one. It’s not going well, but that’s OK; it’s just the same shit on a different day. Until it isn’t: the plot kicks in to gear thousands of miles away, with Capt. Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) on shift in the White House situation room, receiving an odd rundown of news and an alert from an early-warning-radar detecting an unidentified ICBM launch headed straight for — well, somewhere, U.S.A. Suddenly, everyone — from Walker to that prickly lieutenant up at Fort Greely — has 16 minutes to coordinate their defense, or else risk losing an American city to a strike from an unknown foe. 

That’s a lot of long sentences to say: A House of Dynamite is a 1950s-esque apocalyptic thriller, supposedly running through the response book of what happens if someone launches a possibly nuclear missile at the United States. To heighten the effect, the movie keeps pulling back as it plumbs through circles of decision making: We start with our Fort Greely grump and the situation room, all on a conference call with their higher ups. Then we get the higher ups, your STATCOM generals (Tracy Letts); the Deputy National Security Advisor filling in for his boss on the worst of all days. And then we pull back again to relive more or less the same window from the secretary of defense (Jared Harris) and the president (Idris Elba). 

The walls of House of Dynamite do not stop at the calls, though they center around them. Part of its deal is that it wants to drill home how accessible this all is, how much it’s an average day, complete with bummer phone calls, wives on work trips, trips to the pediatrician. Nothing about any of these wider windows gives us much character, but House of Dynamite doesn’t have a lot of character beyond them either. Mostly what it has is an idea and an unwillingness to think very highly of its audience. 

See, the U.S. has mounted its defense and those tactics failed. All that military might and still a missile is making its way to a major U.S. city, probably Chicago. And this failure is more or less accepted early on; for all we watch these pivotal 16-20+ minutes repeat over and over again, there’s pretty much nothing that gets floated as a secondary line of defense. Despite Harris shouting “that’s what $50 billion buys us?!” there is also someone who solemnly says “there is no plan B” after a single defensive tactic.  

I’m not here to be the accuracy police, but the problem with House of Dynamite lies in how it wants to merge human drama with real, cold facts, and does so by largely just eliding actual process. Especially as the movie wins acclaim for being a “horror movie” whose tension and precision lands so hard because of its “nerve-racking plausibility,” I think the story has to actually feel true. Which unfortunately House of Dynamite roundly does not. I get that what A House of Dynamite wants is to methodically clear the more directly related and informed people out of the way to make its way to that third ring, where the actual decision is in the hand of a man handed the nuclear codebook by a nervous-looking Marine and the Electoral College. But it’s a story that takes the failure of its system for granted — literally, in the case that counter-attacks on ICBMs do not have a 61% success rate like the movie says, nor would the U.S. ever launch only two of them and then throw its hands up and decide to declare nuclear war on three countries without knowing who sent the missile.¹

From the jump, people on the job in various situation rooms of all places are sent into enough panic that they can’t focus on protocol. Majors get jittery when they flip through to find the proper response from the manual; Walker gets walked through why the Pentagon might need names and socials of everyone in the room (in case they get bombed and need to compile a list of the dead). People everywhere are entitled to their very human emotions, but House of Dynamite seems to take this fragility for granted; a lack of imagination to ponder a world where competence is the baseline. Aaron Sorkin would never! By the time we snake our way around to the president of the United States we’ve watched pretty much everyone, no matter their position, stop in their tracks totally rattled. 

There’s a sense throughout House of Dynamite that the air we’re going for is “polemic,” a smugness that fogs the focus like a smudge. It’s 12:00 on the Doomsday clock — do you know who your president is? (Look unfortunately I do.) House of Dynamite wants its audience scared, and it will undermine its own drama with cheap corner-cutting to get it there. It’s a deeply American movie and yet also strangely uninterested in America as just part of the world — sure, the U.S. ICBM defensive tactics failed, but you’re telling me it flew over Canada and they just didn’t try anything? I really don’t say any of this to buy into some American exceptionalism, but rather to illustrate that House of Dynamite fails, repeatedly, on its own terms. Each time we reset the clock there’s a promise of more depth, more context, more humanity. It’s a story that’s built to feel intimate in scope and massive in implication. But every time it rolls back, we’re hit by how limited the mind of this film is, only capable of shallow characters and simplistic stakes. Despite the ticking time bomb, its only real flex is inertia. The prospect of this film should be terrifying — instead it’s cowardly. 

How do AI robots get trained? With an army of humans. How I learned to stop worrying and love my shitty life. A chat with Gay Talese. In search of ruggedness, feat. Teddy Roosevelt and Pee-Wee Herman. How the team behind Zohran’s video strategy pulled it all off! A good review of The Mastermind. An ever more elegant look at the perverse racial politics of One Battle After Another.

If you’re looking for another podcast to add to your rotation, take a listen to one of the latest episodes’ discussion on HBO Max’s new original television show, It: Welcome to Derry. The conversation features Cate herself(!) chatting about what ‘whelmed and overwhelmed about the season’s first episodes. Feel free to tell us if you like it!

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Zosha + Cate <3