So Fantastic Four...and tangents

[Scalenex]

I really like superhero movies. But nobody says anything good about Fantastic Four, so I'm skipping it till it costs me a pittance to stream it.

On some level it's more entertaining to read about it's suckitude. I guess I'm such a nerd I have shadenfreude about this.

Early on there was whining about the Human Torch being played by a black actor. Some of the whining was racially motivated. Most of it was from comic purists. Some of it was people who tired of the cliché of a token black member of a group. If I was consulted I would have made the Human Torch and the Invisible woman both black. The characters are brother and sister after all. Beyond that, movies and TV shows can avoid tokenism by having TWO black characters.

Yes, I know Hollywood, you're welcome. Let me know if need help solving your problems.

My understanding is that the suckitude of the new Fanastic Four movie was not due to the casting.

Here are things that harmed it.

-The director fought against the producer. The director wanted a grim and gritty movie and Fox wanted a light colorful movie.
-The director did not get along well with many of the actors and the crew

Okay the director sucked. But wait, there's more!

-The first two Fantastic 4 movies Fox produced were mediocre at best.
-Any super hero team movie will be compared against The Avengers and/or Guardians of the Galaxy (Avengers in space). The bar has been set quite high. Perhaps too high.

Maybe Marvel Studios should make a Fantastic 4 movie. But here's a fun fact fellow nerds. Before Marvel figured out to make decent movies, they sold the intellectual property rights to Spiderman, X-Men, and Fantastic Four to major producers. If the current owners of these properties do not release movies often enough Marvel gets the rights to these franchises again. I believe if Fox doesn't make another Fantastic Four movie by 2023 they lose it.

Did you that they made a Fantastic Four movie in 1994? It was only aired in one or two theaters and all the full film reels of it were destroyed. It was made on a laughable small budget and aired in the minimum theaters just so Fox could retain rights to the characters. Here's the cruel part. The first-time actors who starred in this movie didn't realize they were essentially making a fake movie. They thought their careers were about to launch into the stratosphere. Before the movie came out (sort of) they were boasting about it and signing autographs.

While some Marvel movies are better than others, they have yet to make a flop in the Iron Man era. I wish Marvel could get Fantastic Four back. Wouldn't mind seeing them get Spiderman back from Sony.


Now lets cover something different. Superhero origins. I can understand a lengthy origin story for Antman, but we all know about the Fantastic Four and their origin doesn't really build their characters. Their characterization comes from their inter-party interactions.

A huge portion of Fantastic Four involved sending the characters into space to face the cosmic rays and develop their unrelated super powers. We aren't gold fish. It's not a crime to start out the movie where they all have their powers and one of them says "Wow, that was a crazy experience giving us our powers, let's focus on the main plot right now!"

That really bugged me about the new Superman movie. They put way too much detail into Krypton and turned it into a sepia toned hell-hole. Does anyone watching Superman not know his story? This how I would do the reboot. Tearful parents putting Cal'el on spaceship, two minutes. One minute scene with spaceship landing on Earth. The Kents adopt him in two minute scene. Max five minutes showing Clark Kent figuring out about his powers as a kid. Then you figure out which theme you want. Superman feels separate and apart and Superman feels human though humans don't agree. Make a max ten minute scene with young adult Clark Kent showing this. Two minutes of "I want to be a reporter." Main plot starts. You shouldn't spend more than 15 minutes for the one person in the audience who never heard of Superman before.

While Batman's origin is more important for characterization than most other superheroes. The thing is Batman has more movies and shows than any one else. Do we need to kill Thomas and Martha Wayne again in the next movie. It's about Batman and Superman. That's just a time filler.

 

[The Sauric Ace]

So I follow a couple of nerd orintated YouTube channels, and such the news of Fant4stic had already come to my attention a while back.
I haven't seen it, the first review was of Moviebob, but he pretty much hates everything that is not marvel. Meaning that I didn't thought more of it until I saw numerous of other reviews. It was first when Emergency Awesome, on YouTube, made a review I realised how terrible it must be. That guy can find something good in pretty much everything and is so positive about what is out there. So hearing him basically saying that it sucked was the final nail in the coffin.

I reckon I'll do as @Scalenex and wait, maybe I'll buy it cheap on a dvd sale or watch on a streaming device like Netflix.

 

[n810]

The main problem I have with it,
is that it's yet another remake of a movie
that I 'd rather see a true sequel to instead. ---- >

 

[pendrake]

Superhero movies with an obligatory [?] origin story should put that in the trailers. At the theaters the various trailers are shown in sequence, before the film, in with all the usual dreck that theaters show before the film starts. Like this:

• Individual trailers are shown on TV and youtube prior to release.
• At the theatre the trailers get shown as (and are revealed to be) snippets from a 7-10 minute short film that is shown prior to the main show.
• Then the movie starts with an audience that has had every possible chance to get up to speed.

 

[NIGHTBRINGER]

 

[Caprasauridae]

I have seen the movie, and it was a weird experience. It wasn't the most terrible movie out there, but... boring. Which is really weird.

The part that had most problems was definitely the script. First of all, it was only 1h 40min, which is short by today's standard. Now, I'm not saying every movie should pass the two hour mark to be good, but since this movie takes so long to set the characters up, it could extend the ending as well, without being over-long. Secondly, and a bigger failure in my mind, is that not many of the actions the characters took had any consequences. Why make the team get separated and angry at each other, when the next time they meet everything is normal again.

Third was casting. And I'm not talking about the black Human Torch, he was, in my opinion, one of the best characters in the movie, and pretty close to the image I have of Johnny Storm's nature. Richard Reeds was made out of wood, which in some sense fits his character, but Susan Storm (Kate Mara) was absolutely terrible. I don't remember the last time I have seen an actor playing a role as unintentionally unlikable as that!

Maybe Marvel Studios should make a Fantastic 4 movie. But here's a fun fact fellow nerds. Before Marvel figured out to make decent movies, they sold the intellectual property rights to Spiderman, X-Men, and Fantastic Four to major producers. If the current owners of these properties do not release movies often enough Marvel gets the rights to these franchises again. I believe if Fox doesn't make another Fantastic Four movie by 2023 they lose it.

This movie was pushed to the market because Fox would have lost the rights to the FF by the end of this year, I believe. Now they bought themselves some time, but maybe at the price of almost completely destroying the franchise...

Did you that they made a Fantastic Four movie in 1994? It was only aired in one or two theaters and all the full film reels of it were destroyed. It was made on a laughable small budget and aired in the minimum theaters just so Fox could retain rights to the characters. Here's the cruel part. The first-time actors who starred in this movie didn't realize they were essentially making a fake movie. They thought their careers were about to launch into the stratosphere. Before the movie came out (sort of) they were boasting about it and signing autographs.

That's interesting, I did not know that. I have heard of the 1994 movie, but didn't know it was "intentionally bad".

While some Marvel movies are better than others, they have yet to make a flop in the Iron Man era. I wish Marvel could get Fantastic Four back. Wouldn't mind seeing them get Spiderman back from Sony.

Marvel already got the Spiderman license back from Sony. Spidey will have a smaller role in the Captain America The Civil War. But apparently the actor will be different.

And about the superhero origin stories... I think it's a remnant of the time when superhero movies weren't very popular and studios constantly underestimated the audiences. For some reason they fear they lose too many viewers if they don't show the origin story for the umpteenth time. When the movie is the first film of that characater/team/whatever, or when it has been more than 10 years from the last movie, I think it might be good to remind the audience about it. But when it's a character that literally anyone who goes to see that movie knows, like Superman and Batman, it just gets tiring.

Still, all in all, it's a great time to be a nerd