Fantastic Four - Michael Chabon's Script

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The first thing I want to say is that the Fantastic Four are not about Darkness.

This might seem obvious but I think it's very important. They were conceived in another era; they have silly powers; their very name says it all. Not the Savage Four, the Shadowy Four, the Vengeful Four--the Fantastic Four, charged with the miraculous power of radiation, squabbling, fooling around, exploring other dimensions, worrying about college and sex and their physical appearances, and, above all, bursting with a childlike sense of wonder.

They are about wonder, the FF. Not Darkness.

So here's how I see the movie.

The world of the movie is a timeless, more innocent world, a world where Evil lives behind an Iron Curtain on the Dark Side of the planet, a world where, even in 1995, it is always November 21, 1963. Men still wear hats, kids are into hot rods and spaceships, women have bouffant hairdos, and New York City is the vibrant, shiny capital of the Free World. A Technicolor, bossa nova, Douglas Sirk world. A world where radiation is not only terrifying and evil but also capable of producing wonders and miracles. A world of amazing machinery and devices. There is wickedness, to be sure, and there are bad people, and it takes the eternal vigilance of a few stalwart champions to keep our shores from being overrun, our homes and towns from being infested from within, by the emissaries of darkness. Fortunately such champions exist: the Fantastic Four.

It's also, and I think it's important to some how get the sense of this--wonder, again--into the movie, a world of hidden cities, secret island laboratories, remote Central European countries where feats of incredible technology are performed, orbiting outposts of alien intelligences, underground kingdoms, etc.

I don't think the movie should be about how they got their powers. It's a pretty goofy origin story.

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