THE FANTASTIC FOUR

Treatment
By Lamar Robertson & Tucks McKenna
ACT ONE
PROLOGUE
The Past.
Monster Isle.
Dimly Cavern.
Dawn.
Among the rugged surface, etched with complex glyphs that
could only have come from ancient civilization, five
spelunkers position between lighting apparatus. Stationing
the camera on top of a tri-pod, they stop. Freezing alert,
thunder rumbles the cave as the sound of rain thumps the
ground. Faded.
Blackness fills the screen. Whispers and loud rustles...
The camera focuses and we realize - This isnt standard. A
distant man. Short. A bit pudgy. Grubby in an utterly
eccentric way. Harvey Elder. Cryptozoologist and theorist.
His sweaty palms gripping the microphone to his mouth.
Wetting his lips for stalling support. Taking a deep
breath, begins to speak without inflection. He details the
cavern in explicit detail, slowly but fluently.
He reaches for his pocket, pulls a wrinkled paper. Fills
the camera with a horribly drawn map. The network of
tunnels that run beneath it leading to the Earths core.
His bland personality is more interesting than his
gabbling.
Ulysses Stone, the director, cuts the camera. We show scyfy this we wont even get picked up for an episode.
Harvey argues, Its good to inform the audience.
No one knows this stuff better than you, and no wants to.
Were myth busters not teachers.
Harvey reiterates but keeps composure. Fine, galling.
Roll the camera.
A kaleidoscopic suffuse. PULL BACK to reveal a pillar...

2.

Several pillars. Translucent of one another, up top on the

fringe of the valley of diamonds, the crew trudge down
the gorge. Laced in hazmat suits, without proper
protection people can only endure approximately 7 minutes
of exposure at a time. They harness and slowly begin
hiking down. Craggy and steep, they stumble along. Their
helmets already begin to fog. After a discomforting trip
down, they all station.
Alyssa Moy, a beautifully petite, freckled girl, readies
the camera steady on the tri-pod as Harvey skims over his
notes. Harvey reveals the location, commences in
describing the crystals in ultra detail. Theyre 17 m in
length, 6 m in diameter and 78 tons in weight. Extremely
hot with air temperatures reaching up to 64 C with 90 to
99 percent humidity.
The largest natural crystal-cave in existent, but, is not
the reason theyre there. His sensitive radar scope
detected anomalies with lower intensity of 2.0 magnitude.
Suggesting it may have also been a result of underground
nuclear testing or even large detonations of conventional
explosives, Harvey says what he detected was gravitational
waves rippling and was able to pin-point it to this exact
location.
Harvey stops, shook by Alyssa. Shes staring off into the
distance. She's heard something. Alyssa?, Harvey asks.
Then Harvey hears it, too. A low screeching sound. Harvey
turns, looks out over the gulch. Then he turns back and
tackles Alyssa to the ground.
Suddenly, a long pitched wing flies overhead, so close
they can almost touch it. It bounces the pillars on its
suspension, then soars off over the valley ahead of them.
Cooper after it. Alyssa pulls out her transceiver, panics
into it.
Harvey is dodging through the valley as fast as he can
push. Trying to steady the camera on the mobile creature.
Ulysses is hurriedly firing up an assault and connecting a
go-pro to his head. This is what a viewers will want.
Harvey is straining to see through the pillars, scanning
the bleak outlook. To the right, the dark shape of the
creature appears, flying low over the pillars. Harvey

3.

banks. Bursts out of the crystals and splashes across the

river and into an old, abandoned cave network, planted
over with pre-historic plants. Several yards in front of
him, the creature is still hugging the ground. It has
impossibly long, skinny wings, blunt on the edge. The tops
of its wings are covered with gruesome scars.
Ulysses is following the noise, high on alert. He finds
Alyssa, impaled with a crystal. Druid, the crews medical
clinician, helps her as Ulysses continues his search.
The creature WEAVES at speed through the old, trampled
crystals in the desolated, past oversized area of the
cave.
Harvey rounds a corner and come face-to-face with a
crystal pillar. He jerks to avoid it but loses the LCD
monitor.
The creature guides the desolation from pillar to pillar,
trying to chart a straight path across the field. It
bounces as it smashes through an encased set of pillars.
Ahead, Harvey is banking, nearing the creature.
The creature stands as we get our first good look at it.
Annihilus. Thin legs of an ostrich, its claws snikt as
he lets off a crackling roar. Its gnarly face becomes
shielded. Tucks his wings as he snatches its barbarianlike rod. The luminescence grows.
Harvey hesitantly points the camera directly at it and
just then - Bam! Ulysses fires, causing it to collapse.
Harvey yells for him to stop, and Ulysses grabs for a
bottle within his bag. Chloroform. Crashes it against
Annihilus face, knocking it cold.
A beat of respite. Harvey slinks over to Annihilus,
observes the unconsciousness body intently. He notices the
shimmering rod. Reaches for it... Just barely making
contact and just then- Sparkling flashes, every pillar
begins to blaze. The horror of Harvey scream and Ulysses
pushes him away. Blood streams down his face as Druid and
Alyssa come rushing through. An additional beat and we
FADE OUT.
Slowly fading back in... A cognitive room. Archive footage

4.

as Harvey sits. His head down in embarrassment. Eyes

protected with a synthetic goggle. Raspy voice begins to
speak, Humanity has always been driven by curiosity. By
which would put us on our brink. We cut to Monster Isle.
Converged with damp forests, rain drizzling from the sky.
Thunder and lighting strike continuously.
A tandem rotor helicopter swoops above the island. The
voice of Harvey carries, Of course the biggest discovery
of men couldnt stay hidden. Two exprts came in.
Confirmed the first encounter... Of many.
Thunder cuts us to black as we open back in the crystal
valley just shortly after. Viktor Von Doom, imperiously
suave, and Doctor Franklin Storm, a much older scientist,
behold the wreckage.
What you detected was in fact gravitational anomaly,
Franklins stern voice reveals. Wormholes colliding with
our atmosphere.
Alyssa, eagerly, That happened here?.
Not exactly. If that happened wed all
now. Which leaves only one explanation:
detected was most likely disintegrating
more than a few billionths of a second,
world and another.

Viktor laughs.
be consumed by
The anomaly you
portals. Not for
the meeting of our

Alyssa debates, Portals are impossible. Viktor once

again laughs. Ignorance is bliss. Franklin smiles.
Unprecedented technology proves otherwise. It would have
to be stabilized. Alyssa remarks, by what?
We cut to set of encased pillars. Viktor holds a
ghostbuster-esque laser gun to open a portal between two
crystal pillars. He turns to the astonished Alyssa. The
three gaze into the maelstrom void. Inside, another
universe. The camera slowly zooms... And zooms... And
finally, we enter this pressurized atmosphere.
Our title sequence plays as we view this universe.
Parallel to our own before something tears past at
incredible speed. A red dwarf star. It smashes headlong
through everything it encounters. Planets... Stars...
Something looming in the heart of the galaxy, a flaw in

5.

the fabric of space itself; A wormhole. The star is yanked

inside of the mouth as we take a fantastic trip inside. At
the end, we enter yet another universe. A greyscale,
patterned with effervescent rings swirling, distorting the
space as well as time. The star explodes causing
infinitesimal ripples to build energy and create vortexes.
A sight to behold, but we soon exit the majestic anarchy
back into the calm parallel. We PULL BACK continuously
before we realize... Were inside an air force hangar.
SUPER TITLE: Five years Later.