DVD movie commentary

Absurdism, existentialism, and meaninglessness forms the backdrop of films like Accident (1967, UK) and Annie Hall (1977, USA), but for me the experience of those kinds of films are incomplete. The philosophy ruined it, though cleverly conceived.

Fantastic Four (2015, USA) runs in a different philosophical direction, which is more on the ball for me.

Fantastic Four starts by setting up a scientific idea that runs through the film, teleportation. Teleportation, simply understood, is moving matter across dimensions.

A young Reed Richards explains the science in front of his class. Then we know that Fantastic Four, based on the Marvel comic, is within the science fiction realm, obviously.

Reeds Richards gets older and masters the science behind teleportation. This puts him in the way of Dr. Franklin Storm who offers Reeds and his friend Ben Grimm a scholarship.

They wind up working in an organization that has built a teleportation machine. Reeds, Ben Grimm and their friends, Johnny Storm, Sue Storm, and Victor Von Doom, are told to move matter using the teleportation machine, to see if it works, before NASA embarks on world saving missions with the technology.

But on the occasion the young scientists try the machine out, against orders, the device has got a problem.

No surprises here—the incident sets the plot going in the forward direction (though could have been better done).

The scientists are caught up in a teleportation nightmare that gives them strange but powerful abilities. Perhaps it is like an errant spider biting Peter Parker in Spider-Man (2002, USA) who then turns into Spider Man.

How they respond to life as it happens to them is the heart and soul of the film.

It is a life theme that resonates in reality. When bad things happen to people, how do they respond?

You could go two ways, but choose only one. One of those options is embracing change as an opportunity, which is unlike films that view life as pointless.

Of course you have got to have the resources to make a bad thing turn good. In some parts of the world there are no such opportunities, but if you happen to be in a setting that allows you to make the best of a bad situation, then why not embrace it, because you may do something good with it.

However, there are stories of people turning around impossible situations when they had few resources…