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Fantastic Four

A second Earth looming over the first from orbit, with energy arcing between them

Avengers: Every Setup That Matters Before Doomsday

by Hutch Morzaria November 14, 2026

written by Hutch Morzaria

Doctor Doom catches Thor's hammer one-handed — Doom catches Thor’s hammer in the July trailer.

Avengers: Doomsday opens on December 18, and I’ve spent the last few months rewatching the films and shows that feed into it. That’s more than twenty posts, and nobody should have to read all of them before opening weekend, so this is the shortcut, my Avengers Doomsday guide to the setups that matter and what each one’s going to mean in December. It runs over five pages. This page is the three people who’ve carried Captain America’s shield, because the trailers have made that impossible to ignore, then it’s Doom and the multiverse rules, the mutants, Loki and Shang-Chi, and finally Thor, Wakanda and the Guardians. Start with the July trailer if you haven’t seen it, it’s two and a half minutes and I’ll be coming back to it a lot.

Three Men Have Carried the Shield

Steve handed the shield to Sam at the end of Endgame, and almost everything since has been a long argument about whether that was the right call. But the real starting point is The Winter Soldier, where Steve burns S.H.I.E.L.D. down in the third act of a film most people remember for the lift fight. The film presents that as the only available option, which isn’t the same as it being right, and what grew in the hole is more or less everything. Bucky’s road starts there too, and it’s the longest thing anybody’s built in this franchise. The character who couldn’t speak in 2014 is on the roster for December, expected to hold his own in the largest cast Marvel’s ever put together.

The farmhouse from the Steve Rogers teaser.

Which brings me to Steve himself, because Marvel’s first teaser back in December 2025 was all about him. A motorbike pulls up at a farmhouse, a hand opens a drawer with the old suit folded up in it, and then Steve’s sitting holding a baby, smiling, and the title card says he’ll return. There’s no fight, no shield in anybody’s hand, nothing that looks like a mission. And he’s in the footage since, long-haired and bearded in a dark bomber jacket, grinning at about 1:57 of the July trailer and turning up again at 0:16 of the thirty-second spot, in the same scene as Sam and Scott Lang. So he’s clearly not just a cameo in a flashback, and how that squares with the old man on the bench at the end of Endgame is something I’m happy to wait for. What I notice is how little of that first teaser’s about action. It’s about what he walked away to, and that’s going to be what’s at risk.

Sam, Walker and the Cap Joke

Sam’s the Captain America who had to earn it, and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier spends six episodes making him do that. I said I couldn’t see how a man without the serum does what that shield requires, I said it should’ve been Bucky, and I’m holding most of that because the physics hasn’t gone anywhere. Getting Isaiah Bradley’s name into the Smithsonian is still the best ending that show produces, though, and Brave New World moved me further than I expected. It keeps putting Sam in rooms rather than fights, which felt like the film hedging in 2025 and looks a lot more deliberate now. Sam was never going to be Steve with a different face. And if you’re going up against Doctor Doom, being good in a room might be the skill that counts.

Sam Wilson in the Captain America suit beside Shang-Chi and Ant-Man — Sam Wilson in the suit, with Shang-Chi and Ant-Man.

Three battered Captain America shields leaning against a concrete wall in a dim hangar — The original, the current one and the disgraced one.

Then there’s John Walker, the Captain America most people have forgotten they were meant to have an opinion about. The best moment in that whole series is still Walker in the public square, taking the serum and killing a surrendering man with the shield in front of a crowd of phones. Bloody shield, silence, credits. So when the thirty-second spot from October has somebody asking “Right Cap?” in a room full of Avengers, and Walker in his beret pipes up with “I was also Cap for a minute,” it’s the funniest thing Marvel’s put out so far and it’s got a nasty edge if you remember how his minute ended. He’s there because Thunderbolts made him part of the team, a lot that inherited the Avengers shorthand without doing any of the work, and it shows every time somebody says the name out loud. So that’s the original, the current one and the disgraced one in one building, and I can’t think of a better way of getting that argument on screen than having them bicker over a title.

John Walker points across the room — John Walker: “I was also Cap for a minute.”

November 14, 2026 0 comments

The Fantastic Four: First Steps — Reed Is Scared and Franklin Is Waiting

by Hutch Morzaria September 16, 2026

written by Hutch Morzaria

This is the last film before Doomsday and the last post in this rewatch, which makes it the natural place to ask what all of it was for. Watching First Steps again with everything else fresh in my head, the answer is clearer than I expected. This is the film the whole run has been walking toward, not because it’s the best of them, but because it’s the one holding the pieces that actually matter.

I barely mentioned the separate-universe thing in my 2025 review. The film is set in its own world, distinct from the main MCU, and at the time that seemed like a creative convenience, since it let the retro-futurism exist without having to explain why nobody in New York had noticed a chrome 1960s next door. It isn’t a convenience at all. A separate universe is the precondition for an incursion story, and an incursion story is what’s about to happen in a few weeks. Everything I liked about the film’s self-contained world, the reason it felt coherent in a way almost nothing else in that era did, is the same property that makes it necessary. The film gets to be its own thing and carry the weight at the same time, which is a trick nothing else in this run pulled off. It reframes the retro-futurism too. That’s not a style choice, it’s the visible evidence that this is somewhere else, and the more distinct it looks the more the eventual collision is going to cost.

Reed and Doom is the oldest fight Marvel has

My period review ended on the Doom tease with a careful note that there was nothing to go on yet. There’s plenty to go on now, and what I’d add is that the film had already done the important work before the tease even arrived. Reed in this version is anxious, over-prepared, and visibly carrying the weight of being the person everybody expects to solve everything. That’s the correct Reed and it’s the one that makes the rivalry function. Doom against a serenely brilliant Reed is just two clever men arguing at each other. Doom against a Reed who is quietly terrified of failing the people who depend on him is a real fight, because Doom’s whole proposition is that he would do the job better. I said in 2025 that the version of Doom that works is the one genuinely certain he’s the only person competent enough to run things, and Reed is written here as the exact counterweight to that argument, before anybody watching knew what shape the argument would take.

Franklin I gave almost no attention first time round, which in hindsight was a mistake. He’s the loaded gun on the mantelpiece, because anybody with a passing knowledge of the comics knows what that character can eventually do, and the film puts him carefully on the board and then leaves him completely alone. On a first watch that looks like restraint. On a second, knowing an event this size is coming, it looks like patience. Whether December uses him is the single most interesting open question going in. He’s either the answer to a problem nobody else can solve, or a temptation the writers ought to resist, and the film has kept both doors open, which is more discipline than this franchise usually manages.

Nothing has changed my mind about Galactus, though. He should have been bigger. If anything the rewatch made it worse, because the rest of the film is so confident about scale in every other respect: the world is enormous, the tech is enormous, the ideas are enormous, and then the world-eater turns up at a size you can comfortably fit inside a wide shot and the air goes straight out of it. I compared it to Infinity War at the time and I’d make that comparison harder now, because that film understood a cosmic threat has to feel unanswerable before the answer arrives. First Steps skips the beat entirely. Galactus shows up as a problem to be solved rather than a fact to be survived, and a lot of carefully built dread leaks away. The Silver Surfer still works and is still the best version we’ve had, so the herald landed even when the god didn’t.

Ranking the run, and what it taught me

Something I noted approvingly in 2025 and still undervalued: the domestic scenes are doing real work rather than just providing warmth. An incursion story is, underneath everything, about two worlds where only one gets to continue, and that’s an abstraction. Abstractions don’t generate dread. What generates dread is having spent two hours in somebody’s kitchen. The film’s patience with ordinary family business, the arguments and the meals and the easy competence of people who know each other well, is what turns a cosmological event into something with an actual price tag. It’s also why the Galactus problem stings so much, because the film did the hard half correctly and then undersized the thing threatening them.

Since this is the last post, here’s where the rewatch left everything. Guardians Vol. 3 is the best film of the group and it isn’t close, because it’s the only one allowed to be about something other than the franchise it belongs to. Deadpool & Wolverine is the most fun and the most confident, and the one I’ve gone back to most for pleasure rather than homework. First Steps is third, and the gap between it and those two is more about ambition of subject than execution. Then Thunderbolts*, which tried something real and fumbled it, and Brave New World, which mostly ran errands for later films.

Doing this in order changed my view of the whole stretch more than any individual film did. Watched one at a time, across years, these read as a series of disconnected disappointments with the odd highlight. Watched close together with the destination known, a pattern shows up: almost every one of them was carrying weight for a plan that changed underneath it while it was being made. That doesn’t make the weaker ones good, and it does explain why so many of them feel oddly shaped, like rooms built for furniture that never turned up. The films that hold up best are the ones that were carrying the least, which isn’t a coincidence and is probably the most useful thing I’ve taken from nine months of this.

First Steps is the exception and I don’t think that’s an accident either. It’s the one made after the plan changed, with the destination already known, so everything in it points somewhere real. That’s also its limitation: it’s a very good setup and a slightly thin film, and the 3.5 I gave it in 2025 still feels right. What’s changed is that I now think the setup was the job, and it did that job well. The reception was solid and I suspect it’ll look better still after December.

Doomsday arrives in a few weeks. Of everything I’ve rewatched over these nine months, this is the one to watch last and the one most worth watching twice. The world is separate, Reed is scared, Franklin is waiting, and Doom is coming. That’s a better position than this franchise has been in for years, and after everything above, I didn’t expect to end this project feeling optimistic.

September 16, 2026 0 comments

Marvel Movies

The Fantastic Four: First Steps: Great Retro-Futurism, Undersized Galactus

by Hutch Morzaria August 7, 2025

written by Hutch Morzaria

Marvel finally got the Fantastic Four right, and then made Galactus too small. That’s the short version, and I’ve watched it a couple of times now to be sure I wasn’t being unfair.

I enjoyed this one. The retro-futuristic vibe is the best thing about it, and it’s the first time this team has felt like it belonged in its own world rather than being awkwardly retrofitted into somebody else’s.

The world is the win

The whole look of it works. A 1960s that never happened, with the technology imagined by people who thought the future would be chrome and optimism rather than screens and grey. Every set, vehicle and gadget belongs to that idea, and the film commits to it completely rather than hedging with a modern framing device.

That commitment does a lot of quiet work. The Fantastic Four have always been a product of the space-race era, a family of explorers rather than a team of soldiers, and putting them in a world that shares those assumptions makes the characters legible in a way the previous attempts never managed.

The character portrayals are good across the board. They read as a family with a working dynamic, which is the entire premise and the exact thing the 2015 version most conspicuously lacked. That film is bad enough to be entertaining, in fairness, but it never had four people who seemed to like each other.

The Silver Surfer is better than we’ve had before

I’d put this as the best Surfer we’ve seen on screen. The design works, the movement works, and the film understands that the character should be melancholy rather than menacing. He’s a herald, not a monster, and the tragedy is that he does the job anyway.

That’s a hard note to hit with a silver CGI figure and no facial detail to speak of, and it mostly lands.

Galactus should have been enormous

Here’s where the film loses me, and it’s a big one.

The Fantastic Four have had some genuinely great villains over the years. Galactus obviously, but also Annihilus out of the Negative Zone, and above all Doctor Doom. Galactus is the one that ought to be unmissable, because he isn’t a villain in any normal sense. He’s a force of nature that happens to have a face. He eats planets, not out of malice, but because that’s what he is.

The portrayal here is much better than what we’ve had before, and I want to be clear about that. It’s a real attempt at the character rather than a cloud.

But he should have been bigger. Much bigger. What we got is something on the order of taller than the Statue of Liberty, and that’s not the right scale for a being who consumes worlds. He should be Celestial-sized, something that doesn’t fit in the frame, something where the camera can’t get far enough away to show you all of him at once. Shrink him to a size a person can look at comfortably and you’ve made him a very large man rather than an appetite the size of a solar system.

That cost the film its fear. When he arrives, the reaction should be that nothing can be done. Instead it’s that something very large has turned up and will presumably be dealt with by the end of the runtime. Infinity War understood this: Thanos worked because the film let him be right about his own logic and let him win. Galactus needed the equivalent, and got a fight scene.

For a comparison closer to home, Thanos at his most cosmic still operated at a human scale emotionally. Galactus shouldn’t. The whole point is that he’s beyond negotiating with.

What the previous attempts kept getting wrong

It’s worth spelling out why this landed when three previous goes didn’t, because the answer isn’t budget.

Every earlier version treated the Fantastic Four as superheroes who happen to be related. This one treats them as a family who happen to have powers, and the order matters enormously. Their powers aren’t combat abilities, they’re personality traits made literal. Reed stretches because he’s spread too thin. Sue disappears because she’s the one nobody looks at. Johnny burns hot. Ben is armoured and can’t be touched. Read them that way and the team makes sense. Read them as a fighting unit and they’re a badly balanced one.

The other thing this version gets is that they’re explorers. The whole origin is a trip nobody had to take. Putting them in an optimistic retro-future where going to look at things is what people do makes their entire outlook coherent, rather than making them oddly cheerful soldiers.

The family, and why it holds

What saves the film for me is that the domestic material is genuinely good. Reed’s anxiety reads as a person rather than a quirk, Sue holds the group together without being reduced to that function, Johnny is fun without being only fun, and Ben gets more interiority than the character usually receives.

Compare it to the original Avengers assembly, which had to spend a whole film convincing you these people could stand each other. This one starts from a family that already works and puts pressure on it, which is a better engine and a less common one.

Marvel has always been better in short form when it comes to family material, and if you want the version of that done properly on the page, the best one-shots get further in twenty pages than most films manage in two hours. This gets closer than I expected.

The scale problem, more precisely

I want to be fair about the Galactus complaint, because “should have been bigger” sounds like a fanboy note about a number.

It isn’t about the measurement. It’s about what the size does to the storytelling. A threat you can frame is a threat you can fight, and the moment the audience can see all of something at once, they start estimating whether it can be beaten. That estimation is fatal to dread.

The version that works keeps him partially off-screen, glimpsed, too large to establish in a single shot. You’d feel him arriving before you saw him. What the film delivers instead is an impressive figure standing in a city, and impressive figures standing in cities are the most common image in this entire genre.

There’s a decent argument that a fully Celestial-scale Galactus is unfilmable on a practical level, and that the compromise was deliberate. I’d accept that if the film hadn’t already shown it could do scale everywhere else. It can. It chose not to here, and the fear went with it.

The Surfer, and what the film understood

Worth dwelling on the Silver Surfer a moment longer, because getting that character right is harder than it looks and this film managed it.

The temptation with a herald is to play them as a lieutenant, a lesser threat who softens up the target before the boss arrives. That’s the wrong note. The Surfer works when you understand that the job is a sentence being served, and that the person doing it has made a bargain they can’t unmake. Every world they mark is a cost they’ve already agreed to pay.

This version plays it that way. There’s a stillness to the character that reads as resignation rather than menace, and it makes the few moments of hesitation land properly. Given the character has no face to speak of and moves like something out of a physics demonstration, that’s a real achievement of design and performance together.

And then Doom

The mid-credits tease does what it needs to. Doom is the correct next step, he’s the character this franchise has been circling for twenty years without ever getting right, and the film is confident enough not to over-explain.

I’ll say this carefully because there’s nothing to go on yet beyond the tease itself: Doom is the most interesting villain Marvel has on paper, and the version of him that works is the one who is genuinely certain he’s the only person competent enough to run things. Whether that’s what we get is another question, and one for another year.

Good movie. I’ve watched it a couple of times and enjoyed it both times. I’d give it a 3.5. The world-building is a clear step up for this team, the Surfer is the best version we’ve had, and I’d take another film in this style tomorrow. Just make the world-eater look like he could eat a world.

August 7, 2025 0 comments

Comics Marvel Movies

Fantastic Four – 2015 … bad enough to be good?

by Hutch Morzaria September 1, 2015

written by Hutch Morzaria

Wow!

I knew going into this movie that it had received a bad rap but I was definitely willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and tried to go in without any specific preconceived notions. I had heard that it wasn’t good but I didn’t know specifically what people were complaining about so to me it was very much a clean slate, perhaps even more so as some of the films that have been completely panned had some elements that I actually quite enjoyed – The Green Lantern with Ryan Reynolds being a case in point.

That being said the ending of this film was simply atrocious and while I know I’m perhaps jumping the gun a little bit starting off with that versus covering all of the other elements I’m sure that other reviewers and viewers in general were just as frustrated with the ending as I was and it probably ended up coloring their view of the film too! However in the interests of fairness, I’ll start from the beginning.

The first half of the film I thought was actually done quite well. It was interesting, there was a bit of humor and the characters of both Reed and Ben were well introduced along with their longstanding friendship. While Sue and Johnny were less memorable, their introduction and the whole controversy about the fact that Johnny Storm was black really had no relevance or weight and went fairly smoothly. However, when Victor was introduced as a brooding twenty-something year-old, well that’s the part of the film that for me anyways, started to stink.

Annihilus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I realize that this movie isn’t based on the standard FF comics but is probably built around one of the Marvel Ultimate Universes or something like that … I’ll need to check and confirm and see if the storyline matches, but I’ll be honest at this time I’ve not bothered doing that … based on this viewing however … I’d have to say that it probably doesn’t as it’s quite atrocious and if it was based on a comic book, well that book shouldn’t have been published either as it just didn’t make any sense at all!

When they went through the portal to I assume the Negative Zone and were imbued with powers, the transfer of power to Sue was just stupid as it was simply a blowback from their return to normal space. However the greatest fault here is probably the transformation of Victor himself! His whole power and abilities upon his return being so magical in focus and scope simply due to his extended exposure to that location, with no bearing on his knowledge and love of science. Pathetic. In fact his whole reason and rationale for attacking made no sense at all … it’s not like Reed and the others forced him to travel through the portal … in some ways it was his idea and while they weren’t able to bring him back he really has no rational justification for attacking!

Doom’s primary strength and usefulness as a villain is that he’s an amalgamation of not just magic but also science. In fact this amalgamation is so strong that in some circles he is at a level similar to some of the gods of the Marvel Universe and in fact has in some books defeated these same gods! In this film however not only didn’t he utilize science at all upon his return, his whole reason for destroying the earth just didn’t make any sense. Logically speaking he would have preferred to be home and perhaps tried to take over the Earth versus canabilizing it to transform the Negative Zone.

The special effects considering the budget spent on this film are a joke. Doom’s look and overall appearance was sadly the worst but unfortunately it wasn’t the only bad thing. In all honesty aside from Mr. Fantastic and his stretching ability in one fight sequence, there wasn’t really anything else likeable. The Thing was OK, but Sue Storm was pretty pathetic … her primary abilities that were shown were the ability to create forcefields and almost no attention was paid to the fact that she can turn invisible. Johnny … well it was just CGI really wasn’t it? It’s been done better than this for a lot less money. All of that being said, though we really need to return to Doom though … my god what were they thinking!!

The sad fact is they actually didn’t really need to use Doom at all in this failure of a film. If they’d wanted to create a new universe to compete against the MCU they could have kept him on in a recurring role and let him gradually grow into the Doom that we really all do know and love while utilizing another villian from the Negative Zone. Initially in fact I thought this was the plan when they shipped the monkey over as he (it?) would have made an excellent Annihilus I thought! I have to be honest when this didn’t happen I was a little bit disappointed – even more so of course when I saw what actually did happen!

It’s quite sad but I unfortunately have to echo the rating of rotten tomato and the score that they’ve given this film which is a real petty as it could’ve been something decent and challenged some of the other films in the MCU bet that’s absolutely not going to be the case now.

September 1, 2015 0 comments