Fantastic Four Reboot

It might suck. It might not. People will hate on it anyway because it's not the awful 1990 Fantastic Four film.

I think we're all forgetting that Chronicle was an awesome film.

The Burton movies at least you could feel came from an author's vision.

The Schumacher movies came from the soulless vision of a corporate board trying to sell as many Happy Meal tie-ins as they could.

I once killed an excellent movie's hide and wore its skin to make me look better. It only ended up making me look like a deranged idiot wearing a dead skin that once looked fine.

edited 25th May '15 2:30:14 PM by NapoleonDeCheese

I have a feeling that Brad Bird would make an awesome Fantastic Four film (well, he already made The Incredibles). But they may never offer it to him.

edited 25th May '15 2:30:39 PM by alliterator

I was referring to the awful 1990 Fantastic Four film. Batman was goofy Adam West to the general public and could only go up from there. I'm gonna give this film the benefit of the doubt.

edited 25th May '15 2:32:05 PM by GethKnight

I once killed an excellent movie's hide and wore its skin to make me look better. It only ended up making me look like a deranged idiot wearing a dead skin that once looked fine.

I...have no idea what this means. Do you think Fantastic Four is going to wear Chronicles skin? Is this like a Buffalo Bill thing? It puts the lotion on the skin or it gets the Doom again?

I mean, Chronicle was an awesome film and Fantastic Four hasn't come out yet, so we have no idea if it's good or bad. I'm cautiously optimistic. But it doesn't look anything like Chronicle, if that's what you are saying. (Mainly because Chronicle was a found footage film that deconstructed superpowers.)

edited 25th May '15 2:33:03 PM by alliterator

Yes, but I think the author's vision sucked.

(Then I guess he needed glasses, ba-dum TISH!)

edited 25th May '15 2:34:36 PM by spashthebandragon

I've got fanfics for Frozen, Spectacular Spider-Man, Crash Bandicoot, and Spyro the Dragon.

Granted you're taking about Tim Burton, so that's sort of like saying "This water is awfully moist."

Your momma's so dumb she thinks oral sex means talking dirty.

I think the primary weakness of making Joker the one to kill the Waynes is that it makes the hero more dependent on a supervillain to be relevant, even making it a revenge story. Having them be killed in a random mugging and it better represents the world that created Batman. (I also feel that Batman Forever is one of the better films, in part because Schumacher knew the character better than Burton and actually gave Bruce/Batman a character arc instead of just being the one to stop the bad guy(s))

As for this Fantastic Four movie, much like The Amazing Spider-Man I think its' main flaw will be trying to distance itself from the prior movies because it is a reboot so close to the original, and as such won't allow itself to go with elements that they should because it will be repeating the prior movies. And like ASM it may very well have some great moments that improve upon the previous adaptation, but feels stale regardless because it's recycling the same premise.

edited 25th May '15 2:48:56 PM by KJMackley

ASM is easily my favourite Spider-man movie.

Garfield was a great Peter Parker/Spider-Man.

What elements you feel they are avoid simply because it was in the first film? The space travel? Interdimentional travel works just fine for that and it is a very Fantastic Four plot.

I watched the trailer and I liked what I've seem. Not spectacular, but I was expecting worse. I really like the other dimension thing (Negative Zone), it is a classic FF plot that haven't been explored in movie yet. My main issue was Doom's presence. I feel the movie could have gone without him.

edited 25th May '15 2:59:45 PM by Heatth

It's more hypothetical than anything else, since the movie hasn't come out yet we have no way to discuss what is and is not in the movie. One thing that seems a little off is that once they got their powers they seemed to have been swiftly recruited as a military strike team, rather than being their own autonomous group.

As for ASM, I thought it was a good adaptation in its own right. But to avoid having Uncle Ben repeat the "Comes Great Responsibility" quote it conflated Uncle Ben and Captain Stacy and tried to bring in a missing parents subplot, which I found to be overly complicated and got in the way of each other.

Everybody always whines about it not saying "with great power comes great responsibility," but really the movie just articulated the concept with a wording closer to the Ultimate comics version. I don't see how that's really "conflated." And besides, having Uncle Ben give the speech isn't actually a mandatory part of the Spider-Man origin story in the first place. It wasn't even in the original comic!

Now, if this Fantastic Four reboot never has Ben say "It's clobberin' time," THEN we'll have a real problem...

I've got fanfics for Frozen, Spectacular Spider-Man, Crash Bandicoot, and Spyro the Dragon.

It's not the line itself but the fact it divided Peter's parental figures across almost every adult in the film. The first Spider-Man movie compared Uncle Ben with Norman Osborn as an anti-father figure, and by the climax he makes it clear his motivation is paying respect to the memory of Uncle Ben. ASM had Peter's actual father, Uncle Ben, Captain Stacy and Curt Conners. This made Peter's motivations split between all of them (continuing his fathers work, stopping the Lizard, find Uncle Ben's killer, earning the respect of Captain Stacy). ASM articulated something about responsibility but by the end I wasn't sure exactly what Peter had really learned, other than that he wanted to keep dating Gwen. If he had a nice mantra to remember, that would help in that regard.

And I really don't care much about how something was originally portrayed, because some adaptations actually improve upon the original idea (and regressing just to be faithful can make it more shallow). I find the whole change in Fantastic Four from being on a space station studying cosmic rays to inter-dimensional travel to be perfectly fine, because where they are or what they are doing is not so important as just them being scientists and something gives them powers.

edited 25th May '15 5:14:12 PM by KJMackley

In Amazing Spider-Man's defense, Captain Stacy's role as a dead father figure was just as redundant in the comics as it was in the movie. So that's really more of an issue with the source material transferring over to the adaptation, which shouldn't really be anything too shocking. It's not (necessarily) an adaptation's responsibility to fix all the issues with whatever it's adapting.

I've got fanfics for Frozen, Spectacular Spider-Man, Crash Bandicoot, and Spyro the Dragon.

Also, in Captain Stacy's defense, Denis Leary is awesome.

To think no Spider-Man movie will ever have Denis Leary and J.K. Simmons, what a great tragedy that is.

Like I said, I didn't think anything was really horrible about the movie but knowing the overall Spider-Man mythology and the production history of ASM, I could tell they would have liked to use certain classic elements from the comics if it wasn't for a mandate to put some distance between them and the prior movies. I mean, even the choice of doing the Lizard as his first enemy is probably because he hadn't been done in the previous trilogy already (Gwen too, if she was more prominent in the previous trilogy ASM would have gone with MJ). And I'll agree, the cast was very well chosen.

There is something interesting to compare that movie with Batman Begins, how it was a Continuity Reboot with a Starter Villain who was not previously depicted in film and certainly not one of the top three of the hero's Rogues Gallery. What made that work was that it had a few extra years since the previous film and the tone between it and the previous Batman movie was night and day.

And just so I always bring it back around to Fantastic Four, one hurdle they have is how limited their Rogues Gallery is. Doom always comes back around, Galactus is nigh impossible to translate into live action and most everyone else is more famous for being cross-series foes rather than FF specific (Like the Skrull). It doesn't help either the very premise of their series comes from the height of silver-age goofiness.

They could have used the Mole Man. He was the first villain Ultimate Fantastic Four.

Of course, he looks goofy as shit as well.

The thing is that The Fantastic Four are not necessarily Superheroes in the common sense. Their main job is not taking out villains, unless it is Dr. Doom, they are mostly explorers.

The 'whitewashing' controversy is arguably among the least of the Last Airbender movie's problems given that short of getting an entire cast of actors with enough skill to chew that movie to pieces and turn it into one of the most hilarious unintentional comedies ever, what they ultimately put together likely would have been a flop regardless.

I'm inclined to imagine that there'll be a number of people that'll go to see it even if it's the worst movie ever simply on the grounds of 'we have to go see it and support MBJ!'

Let's not also forget that Zach Snyder made 300 - a movie that people though was great - before making an arguably mediocre adaptation of Watchmen, the 'looks great in trailers but is actually absolutely horrific' Sucker Punch, and the highly controversial Man of Steel.

And that M. Night Shamalan made a number of great movies before his career crashed and burned in the worst possible way.

A man making one great movie - and one good movie is all that Josh Trank has - means little in this circumstance. You can not keep holding up Chronicle as evidence that this movie is going to be any good at all, especially if that's all you have to go on. Worse, we have that tidbit of news about him being kicked off a Star Wars movie because of behind-the-scenes problems on Fantastic Four - hardly the kind of information that gives people reason to have faith in Josh Trank's work with this movie.

If the movie were up in the air where people couldn't tell if it was going to be good or not, Chronicle might be something to point to as a reason to be optimistic. But when just about everything we hear about this movie points to it being an absolute stinker where people are positing genuine questions of whether it will fail or not and maybe even make the last two F4 movies look good in comparison, saying "hey, Chronicle was awesome, so let's stay optimistic about this movie" rings hollow.

But here's the main thing I think you're missing, alliterator - and my apologies to De Cheese if I am in fact missing the point of what's being said. Aside from the fact that F4 isn't a found footage movie, people keep getting reasons to suspect that this is just a spiritual sequel that's being put together by Fox in a desperate attempt to hold onto the movie rights. And the problem is that F4 is supposed to be a wildly different tone and style than Chronicle even discounting the whole Found Footage angle.

Ultimately, what I think - think - is being said is that it doesn't matter if they're taking Chronicle (a good movie) and trying to make a Fantastic Four movie in a similar style (barring Found Footage). If it's not a good movie, all you get is a worse product that leaves everyone involved looking bad as result and gets you a bunch of angry fans who will point to it and say Fox should never have made the movie in the first place and just let Marvel have the rights back already.

Brad Bird's already made the best Fantastic Four movie to date, and he's currently on his way to making what may well be the second.

I'd dare say he doesn't need to make a live action F4 movie when he's doing such a good job with the animated version thus far.

Let's not also forget that Zach Snyder made 300 - a movie that people though was great - before making an arguably mediocre adaptation of Watchmen

I'm going to have to stop you right there. 300 was not great. 300 was a pile of shit. (And this is coming from somebody who liked Snyder's Watchmen.)

The point is, though, that we can't judge this film yet. All we can judge is the director's previous film, which was Chronicle, which got great reviews. And yes, in my opinion, it was awesome.

edited 25th May '15 11:12:30 PM by alliterator

I disagree. I mean, yeah, they don't have a Rogues Gallery on the same level as Spider-Man or Batman, and Doom and Galactus are the big ones. But there's also less well-known, but still great villains like the Puppet Master, Molecule Man, and one of my favorites, Annihilus (can you imagine how he'd look in live-action? That'd be awesome!). I mean, if the Marvel Cinematic Universe can turn Whiplash into a good villain, then I don't see why you can't do great things with the non-Doom and non-Galactus FF baddies.

edited 25th May '15 11:38:49 PM by DrFurball

Weird in a Can (updated M-F)

They also have Annihilus and Blastaar and the Frightful Four.

Although they can't actually use Medusa or the Sandman in the Frightful Four, now that I think about it. That only leaves the Wizard and Hydro-Man. So, uh, perhaps not.

edited 25th May '15 11:49:02 PM by alliterator