I haven’t been a great fan of the recent Fantastic Four movies. I thought Johnny was fine, and the Surfer was dead-on perfect; but Reed, Sue, and Victor were badly miscast; Reed and Sue had zero chemistry; Reed’s stretchiness never looked right; Victor had the wrong origin and lacked the original’s proto-Vaderesque gravitas and tragic grandeur; and Ben wore a clunky, overly small suit instead of being sensibly CGI.
The good news, then, is that the FF film franchise is being rebooted from scratch, with the generally excellent Iron Man reportedly serving as the model. (Conical hat tip to AICN.)
Given that there’s supposed to be a Sub-Mariner movie in the works, I wonder whether they’re planning a tie-in (since it was in the pages of Fantastic Four that the Atlantean prince had his first Silver Age appearance).
Please have them fight the Mole Man!
Bring back Paste Pot Pete!
Yeah, the movie Dr. Doom was just lame. Once again, we have Marvel’s suck-tastic Ultimate universe to blame. That’s how we ended up with Galactus being a friggin’ cloud named Gah Lak Tus. No way! He’s the last colossal survivor from a previous universe, dammit!
As the line went over in Image Comics’ The Savage Dragon : “Ultimate Arachnid, huh? What’s so ultimate about you, anyway? The only difference I see is that now you mutter constantly, and you have Harry Potter glasses and hair!”
The only bright spot to the Ultimate crap that I could see is that Ultimate Thor is kinda cool in an anti-authoritarian way. Somebody read up on the ancient Scandinavian societies before they worked him out.
I kind of liked Ultimate Galactus but it’s not the version I wanted to see adapted in the film. (Though I wouldn’t have minded having the Siberia plotline in the film, but that they didn’t use.)
I got a kick out of Reed’s “you’re the jock asking asking me the nerd for help” line in Ultimate Galactus, and would have had no problem with the film borrowing it, except that the actor messed up the delivery, I thought.
The word on Newsarama that the new F4 movie will be “darker” worries me.
I watched the first F4 film last night. I had really low expectations, so I was pleasantly entertained, actually. I agree, Reed and Sue had zero chemistry – Reed suddenly went from restoring a friendship with Sue to proposing to her! I also think the end was something of an anti-climax. I appreciated the fight in the streets of New York, with Doom and the F4 throwing buses at each other, and how reminiscent that was of Superman II – but, unlike Superman II, the fight in F4 seemed to end pretty quickly.
And I’ll never understand the point of putting Jessica Alba in a film and then making her invisible!
> And I’ll never understand the point of putting Jessica Alba in a film and then making her invisible!
Didn’t they use this to have her appear in her underwear in public? You have your answer. 😉
When Roger Ebert put F4 on his list in the worst-of-the-year show, he was puzzled by just that decision, saying “if she’s in a movie, she should be The *Visible* Girl.”
The Victor von Doom that appears in the first F4 movie is an obscene trashing of the classic character. It was a disastrous decision to have him romantically involved with Susan Storm. It actually made me physically sick to watch it unfold. In all of the F4 issues I own (all of John Byrne’s run, plus a few more) there is no mention that I can remember of Doom being sexually interested in any woman. Doom’s motivation as a character is the return from Hell of his mother, and the prosperity of his country (and world domination). Where was this in the movie? They made Doom personally charming as opposed to ruthlessly charismatic. A Marvel editor once described Doom’s accent as “like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s”. Whether that’s completely accurate or not, it would have been better than the American accent Doom uses in the F4 movie.
They dumbed down the smartest character in the Marvel Universe, Reed Richards, and cast a guy with no screen presence in the role. They trashed the origin by including Doom. Doom and Richards were college rivals, but not rivals for Susan Storm, and Doom was not on the space flight where the F4 were bombarded with cosmic rays. Doom wears a mask because his face is horribly scarred. This happened during one of his ruinous efforts to resurrect his dead mother. All of this was going through my mind (and I’m sure many other F4 fans) as I was watching the sickening F4 movie. I didn’t bother with the sequel.
Agree with all of the above. Still, on behalf of the sequel, they do get the Silver Surfer right, I thought.
I also have to agree.
I like Ioan as Hornblower, but he was no Reed.
I DID like Mike Chiklas as The Thing. Him not being CGI wasn’t a problem. Johnny was also ok, but in the original he was still in high school (guess they needed to make him older to make it more plasible he’d go in space with the rest).
While Jessica Alba is a babe, she’s no Sue Storm.
Reed, Doom, and Ben went to college together (Doom and Reed almost roomed together, Ben & Reed did), but Sue & Johnny should be younger. Doom never had a ‘thing’ for Sue, that was the Submariner.
The Silver Surfer was done well, Galactic not so much.
Like others, I didn’t like how they handled Doom.
Will see how the reboot goes.
I have trouble picturing Ben and Reed at the same college.