The Fantastic Four franchise is getting the typical Fox treatment. The first wave always defaults to: “Star power is far more important than good acting, and since good acting doesn’t much matter, the writing can be pretty terrible and people will love it!”
Fantastic Four 1.0 ultimately flops but now they’re locked into their cast, so plan B goes something like: “We need to sprinkle in a little more star power to offset the lack of talent we bought up, but this time, lets dump every remaining cent we have into visual effects and screw the writing altogether. This is going to be a home run!”
The inevitable strike out of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer comes to pass. Now we’re at their plan C phase which goes something like: “OK… our other great ideas somehow didn’t work (cue Ralph Wiggum: “Me fail English? That’s unpossible!”), so we need to do something drastic. Lets look up younger, newer actors getting decent lead and support roles in blockbuster-ish movies right now and just roll the dice on a few of them and hope for the best with a reboot/focus pivot.”
Here’s a peek at plan C.
FANTASTIC FOUR – Official International Trailer #1
So that’s what we have so far. Visually, the tone has certainly changed from campy and corny, to darker and more rough. Because Fox largely sucks at casting, the casting was a swing and a miss pretty much all the way around again.
Miles Teller couldn’t act his way out of a drenched paper bag let alone play a scientific genius like Reed Richards. His one single line in this trailer made me cringe.
Kate Mara… maybe. The jury is still out on her. I like her in very select roles and scientist/superhero isn’t one of those.
Jamie Bell is intriguing as Ben Grimm so I’ll take it.
Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm doesn’t bother me. Fox’s angle is what really bothers me because he’s the major departure from the source material and Fox doesn’t seem to be committed to it enough. Jordan is a solid actor/voice actor, and my dissatisfaction with his casting is 100% NOT because of the ridiculous race issue the internet has made of Johnny Storm, the brother of Sue Storm, now being black. It’s because Fox stepped outside of tons of great source material to create their own version of this character, seemingly for their PR benefit. My personal lack of faith in Fox’s general creative abilities is heavily focused on them now having to unnecessarily write back stories for 2 main characters as well as some support characters, because they intentionally created a mixed race family situation that never existed before in the traditional source material.
Fox made a move to inject diversity into the cast, but the way I see it, they half-assed it. If I was calling the shots around casting Jordan as Johnny Storm, the entire Storm family including Sue, would be black, making 4 traditionally white characters into black characters, already covering the cast diversity better than Fox has currently. If there was some desire from the studio to have a mixed race relationship component in there, the relationship between Sue and Reed Richards would be just that AND it would be the most prominent relationship in the story. Not tucked in the background and possibly only implied, between Johnny and Sue’s parents.
This move wasn’t thought through enough, Fox. Sure, this is a superhero movie, but beyond the whole suspension of disbelief with the super natural aspects of it, fans need to believe what they’re seeing. It’s perfectly believable to have 2 really smart parents who create genius kids. That exists. I know some. How believable is it that those smart parents have one genius kid but then adopt another kid and that one happens to turn out to be a super genius too? If 2 divorcees meet, marry and become a mixed race couple, again, how believable is it that both of their kids, sharing no common genes, turn out to be super geniuses? If the parents are a mixed race couple and the natural parents of Sue and Johnny, that creates a little bit of a gray area to work in casting-wise, but ultimately I’m not really sold on Kate Mara portraying a biracial Sue Storm. If it was such a nonissue to stray from Johnny Storm’s source material, it should be equally as much of a nonissue to stray from Sue’s. For the story’s sake, it would keep their sibling relationship simple since it’s really not that important to be made more complex than it needs to be.
Fox’s method here doesn’t show much, if any, genuine commitment to this “diversity casting.” It appears to be more of a attention stunt using a sensitive social issue and that rubs me the wrong way, in a big way. Beyond that, you don’t pick up a cult property to change it into something its fans have never known and only take it half way. Cult properties are bought up for the sole purpose of the movie already having success built into it because it already has a huge fan base ready and waiting to see more of what they love. The fans are massively uninterested in the corporate politics and PR stunts being dragged into it.
Other gripes I have with the movie are basically that Dr. Doom is pretty much just a disgruntled hacker/programmer known as “Doom” online, Sue Storm apparently can fly instead of just be invisible and create energy fields, and the Fantastic Four team gets their powers from a teleportation experiment gone wrong instead of, well… the way they originally get their powers.
That’s my 2 cents on the new Fantastic Four movie. I don’t think I’ll be following this one very closely but I’m sure I’ll keep an eye out despite my discontent with just about everything that I know of this one so far. Hit up the comments with your thoughts and I’ll see you down there.
Fantastic Four is looking massively disappointing to me already but if you’re NOT looking to be disappointed, you should probably maybe definitely follow me on facebook, twitter and instagram.
By: Eli Rebich
