Oh boy, not even close.
Fantastic Four reboot-- Casting, Rumors, Pix, ect;
- Thread starter Turtletrekker
- Start date
Seeing as it's made by Fox will that mean good actor choices for the roles intended, acting ability and a good story?
^Not sure what being made by 20th Century Fox has to do with it. Fox produced the previous, weak Fantastic Four movies, not to mention Daredevil and Elektra, but it also produced all of the X-Men movies, ranging from the very best to the very worst. I don't think you can generalize about the quality of any studio's overall output.
Rumour went round yesterday that actor Miles Teller was the front-runner for Reed but apparently the director has already debunked it:
http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=107338
http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=107338
Oh so we'll probably see Hugh Jackman joining the Fantastic Five. 
Wolverine vs. The Thing. You know you want to see it happen. 
It's facepalmin' time.Wolverine vs. The Thing. You know you want to see it happen.
Hopefully the Thing will be done with mocap and CGI this time.
And hopefully the writing will actually be better, of course.
By 'better', you mean dark, and as for the main characters, they will be dysfunctional as heck.
Johnny Storm had graduated high school and was in his mid-to late teens/early 20s by the time the events that changed him into the Torch had happened.
I'll agree with you about the casting of age appropriate actors, though-one of the things about Supergirl that bugs me is that Warners has blown it repeatedly when it comes to getting a film with her off of the ground, and has missed chances to cast a teenager as Supergirl (she should be at least 15-16 years of age!) All of the good actresses that could have played her (in particular, one young lady and her sister that's done great work) have all aged out of the role or won't able to be in said movie in time (although they can always launch a casting call for one). Anyhoo, Johnny's cast, and that's all that matters.
Story and the scrpitwriters didn't get anything wrong other than people didn't like it for some reason (Johnny and Ben still bicker, Ben's a hotheaded angry guy, Johnny's a show-off-all just like in the original comics. And having Doom be a businessman like Lex Luthor was a great touch-there's only so much one can get out of the 'evil scientist who wants to take over the world' trope.
As well, having Sue be a scientist was a similar masterstroke that made the character a hell of a lot more better and relevant than her being an actress who just decides to tag along on her boyfriend's/fiancé's spaceflight (although that's taken from Ultimate Fantastic Four, and the Sue being the fiancée of Doom is a shout-out to her having a secret relationship with him in the comics of the time.)
All told, for me, I hope that this movie's as good as the Story movies.
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Johnny Storm was 16 when he became the Torch.
Yup. Essentially the same age as Peter Parker.
Oh, I agree that the relationship between Johnny and Ben was spot-on. In fact, IMHO, Johnny and Ben were the only things done right in those movies. And I took no real issue with Sue's new career. Nor did I take issue with Dr. Jean Grey in the X-Movies, or astro-physicist Jane Foster in Thor. In fact, I liked that these female characters were being presented as more than they were in the source material (Stan Lee never was good at writing women.)
Doom, however, was just boring. Doom should never be boring. And it wasn't so much that Doom was another corrupt businessman, it was that he was just another corrupt businessman. If Doom is to be a corrupt businessman, then he should be THE corrupt businessman. J.R. Ewing X 10. With armor that flies and shoots zaps. Instead, we got Dr. Meh.
Anyway, I'm glad that you enjoyed the Story movies. For myself, I hope the re-boot is a BIG improvement over Story. To each their own.
The first Tim Story movie got a lot wrong. Mainly, the FF weren't heroes in that movie. They weren't protecting anyone but themselves. In their first big action scene on the bridge, sure, they saved people, but only from problems they triggered themselves. And once Victor became superpowered, sure, he killed that one guy, but he never spelled out any plans to conquer the world or destroy people en masse -- he just went after the FF themselves. And the FF were willing to endanger the entire planet with Johnny's nova blast in order to save their own lives -- which is the diametric opposite of what heroes do. Essentially the FF were the villains of that movie, because callously endangering others in the name of your own self-interest is what villains do.
The second movie was better, since the FF actually were trying to protect the world instead of just themselves. But the execution was on a par with the superhero movies from a decade earlier. Their version of Doom just didn't work, and Jessica Alba was woefully miscast as Sue. Basically the only skill she displayed in these movies was the ability to look great in her underwear. That wasn't too much of a problem in the first movie, since it didn't call on her to do much more than that (although that's a more fundamental problem in itself), but the second movie required more from her and she didn't deliver.
That said, I really liked the Thing makeup, which looked to me like an Alex Ross painting brought to life. At the time, I doubt a CGI Thing would've been an improvement, not unless they'd had a lot more care and talent and money put into it than they probably would have in those films. These days, it would be more likely to work -- again, assuming they put enough care into it.
(EDIT: Come to think of it, I probably already said all this earlier in the thread. But there it is.)
The second movie was better, since the FF actually were trying to protect the world instead of just themselves. But the execution was on a par with the superhero movies from a decade earlier. Their version of Doom just didn't work, and Jessica Alba was woefully miscast as Sue. Basically the only skill she displayed in these movies was the ability to look great in her underwear. That wasn't too much of a problem in the first movie, since it didn't call on her to do much more than that (although that's a more fundamental problem in itself), but the second movie required more from her and she didn't deliver.
That said, I really liked the Thing makeup, which looked to me like an Alex Ross painting brought to life. At the time, I doubt a CGI Thing would've been an improvement, not unless they'd had a lot more care and talent and money put into it than they probably would have in those films. These days, it would be more likely to work -- again, assuming they put enough care into it.
(EDIT: Come to think of it, I probably already said all this earlier in the thread. But there it is.)
For me the biggest problem with the Tim Story movies was just the lack of epic scope. The cast was fine, and had good chemistry together, I thought. And the fun, lighthearted tone felt very true to the FF comics I've read.
But there was too much of a cheap, low-budget feel to the whole thing. The director was just never able to make that world feel as rich or complex as it needed to be, or give the characters enough spectacular things to do on screen.
Hopefully this Josh Trank guy will be able to do better, but frankly I don't get the sense from (the highly overrated) Chronicle that he would be any better at the "epic" thing than Story was.
But there was too much of a cheap, low-budget feel to the whole thing. The director was just never able to make that world feel as rich or complex as it needed to be, or give the characters enough spectacular things to do on screen.
Hopefully this Josh Trank guy will be able to do better, but frankly I don't get the sense from (the highly overrated) Chronicle that he would be any better at the "epic" thing than Story was.
I didn't need to have Doom spell out his plans to know that once he defeated the FF, he would be free to do whatever else he wanted. That is what I thought was motivating the FF (in addition to their own survival). If they didn't stop him -- who would?
Also, I took the use of Johnny's super nova as an indication of the level of danger to all presented by Doom rather than as an indication of the FF's desire to survive regardless of the danger to others.
BTW, I think a good portion of the X-Men's motivation in the the first (and second) movie was to save themselves, wasn't it? But to me, a certain amount of self preservation is allowable in an origin story.
Sure, you can assume that if you know the character from the comics, but movies are made for people who aren't familiar with the characters. Every story needs to be complete in itself. If you want the audience to see the villain as a threat to someone other than just the heroes, you have to convey that within the film itself, not just expect your audience to assume it.
The film just didn't establish its version of Doom as a major threat, as a conqueror or aspiring dictator or mass murderer. He was just some rich jerk who had it in for Reed Richards. The stakes were too low.
But, again, the film did nothing to demonstrate that such a "danger to all" existed. We were never shown that he had any ambition to harm anyone other than Reed, or whoever got in his way as he went after Reed. It doesn't matter what the comics have established about who Dr. Doom is; this is a different reality from the comics, a film made for an audience mostly unfamiliar with the comics, and so its version of Doom had to be assessed independently of whatever we might know about his comics counterpart. And the film just didn't sell him as a global-level threat.
Not even close. In the first film, they were trying to stop Magneto from unleashing lethal mutations on the world's leaders, and thereby probably triggering global war between humans and mutants. In the second, they were trying to stop Stryker from using Xavier and Cerebro to kill every mutant on Earth -- and then to stop Magneto from using them to kill every human on Earth. Both films did an excellent job of establishing that the villains posed a threat on a global scale and that the X-Men were fighting to protect others, to stave off a planetwide race war. Heck, even The Last Stand did a good job of selling the global scale of its threat.
Of course the heroes are usually trying to keep themselves alive; that goes without saying. They can't save others if they get killed, and as a rule they'd like to stay alive themselves. The point is that it's not enough for that to be their exclusive motivation.
Standard sci-fi/fantasy storytelling rules are that in a given story you are given one "give" that the audience will simply accept. In the first movie it was that people got super-powers from space-light. In the second it was that there's this silver dude on a surfboard. Asking them then to accept that there's this big purple space-giant wearing a building-hat on his head who eats planets was all a bit much at the time.
Nowadays, the Marvel Studios films have done such a good job acclimating people to how superhero films work that you could totally do Galactus right, But back then it just wouldn't fly.
I don't think anyone seeing that movie, whether they were familiar with the comics or not, had any trouble determining who the "threat" to the world was. The movie may not have allowed Doom to monologue the details of his nefarious scheme for world domination, but I'de be willing to bet that the audience didn't need it.
Your complaint, it seems to me, is a nitpick -- a minor detail (in this particular film) that did not require further explanation or clarification. My daughter has read movie and T.V. scripts for a living, this is the kind of thing she would harp on. But it is not the kind of issue audiences of the first FF movie had a problem with.
It is an interesting topic for debate in forums like this, but from a practical standpoint, the first FF movie had no trouble getting audiences, even ones unfamiliar with Doom and the FF, to believe Doom was a threat serious enough to warrent maximum force.
Keep in mind I am confining my comments and opinions to the first FF movie and not to movies in general.
Except I for one don't think that it would be "right" to do Galactus as a giant humanoid with a funny hat and a G on his chest. Sure, that's faithful to the comics, but let's face it, it's pretty stupid. Even the modern comics have rationalized it as an illusion created by our minds as we attempt to interpret something beyond our comprehension.
Personally I prefer the idea of Galactus being something completely unlike a human, a vast cosmic force bigger than a planet. I think the movie's version was a decent attempt to convey that. Maybe there's a more impressive way of doing it, design-wise -- maybe something like ST:TMP's V'Ger, which did a superb job of conveying a vast, powerful, and profoundly alien entity. But the Jolly Purple Giant wearing a tuning fork on his head? No, thank you.
If I were doing a Galactus movie, maybe I'd put in a sop to the fans by having a scene where, say, Uatu puts the FF in telepathic contact with Galactus and creates the humanoid image of Galactus in their minds for them to communicate with. But giving Galactus a face and a voice sort of undermines the whole "cosmic entity" thing, makes him less impressive.
They never established him as a threat to the world, only to the Four. There was no sense in the movie that the FF were defending anyone else from Doom.
On the contrary, it's immensely imporrtant. Too many superhero movies get it wrong because they underplay or ignore the importance of protection as a key part of a superhero's job. They treat superheroes as warriors rather than rescuers. This is why the climax of The Avengers works so well while the climax of Man of Steel is just pointless excess. Joss Whedon made his heroes constantly aware of the civilians in danger and constantly working to protect them, as heroes should do. Zack Snyder didn't even have Superman acknowledge the existence of endangered civilians except in one scene, at which point it was too little, too late.
Umm, I saw the movie. I'm part of the audience. And I do have a problem with it. Don't insult me with blanket generalizations.
Yeah I frankly thought they made Galactus work on screen about as well as they probably could have (same with Parallax in the GL movie, for that matter).
The best bet would have been to simply avoid using that villain at all. If the only option is to realize him as some giant, abstract cloud, then you might as well not bother in the first place.