Staff Reports
Every superhero movie seems to run on the same old script: hero discovers powers, faces existential crisis, defeats villain in grandiose battle, and goes home wearing a cape. For many of today’s youth, however, the allure of these fantastical tales keeps spinning like a broken record. Once upon a time, the charm lay in watching heroes leap over skyscrapers, but in reality, the effect has shrunk our culture down to a perpetual twelve-year-old’s comic book fantasy—a world devoid of grown-up complexities and rich human dilemmas.
Case in point: the latest iteration of the Fantastic Four has yet managed to stir up both nostalgia and annoyance. Those aficionados who can’t resist a hint of the past might appreciate the nod to 1960s aesthetics. In this new release, the film sets itself in an imaginary America, where people don the hats and ties reminiscent of an upstanding decade. But underpinning this spectacle of style is a society that appears, at long last, to have achieved the dreams once promised by historical movements—a dream world they assured us would bring equality without backtracking into utter nonsense.
Now, what does this patched-up utopia consist of? It’s a peculiar blend: Imagine a world where integration is seamless, with men, women, and people of all shades sharing power without complaint or controversy. But, alas, that vision falls apart the moment one pulls at the thread where the left-leaning social engineers tend to weave. Because as the facade persists in cinema, in real life, the hype of affirmative action morphs into an insatiable hunger for power, routinely swallowing the very principles of fairness it first embraced. Remove the cape and you’ll see the left wasn’t after acceptance all along but sought to upend traditional values by stealth.
What’s even more curious is the odd casting decisions some films make under the guise of diversity. The casting choice often follows a playbook where diversity reels spin but conveniently land on token faces that make everyone believe they’re on the morality bandwagon.
Amidst the predictable bombasts of superhero heroics, lay one redeeming narrative feat: Storm, one of the fantastic four, finds herself in the peculiar position of making choices around motherhood, or so they’d lead you to believe. But even then, the plot comes across more as an homage to the ‘trolley problem’ than an authentic exploration of motherhood’s grit. The film flirts with the profound, hinting at the power of a mother’s love possibly saving the world—which, in the realm of serialized storytelling, is commendable but not quite deep enough to touch the complexities of adult life.
Ultimately, the film asks us to dwell in a place where a sort of ambient cohesion supposedly thrives. The left would have us believe this is the society they aimed for all along, but let’s be honest: such harmony doesn’t emerge from the fractured rhetoric of divide and conquer. The superhero realm proposes a world where the values of yesterday can construct a unified tomorrow if wielded by characters not bent on reversing the script. It’s storytelling touching upon tradition, showing what could be an America unified in diversity minus the manufactured outrage. And that, even though spawned from fantasy, might be the truest act of heroism yet.
