Fourth time is not the charm.
Jon Stewart retired this week, and Don Trump won the Republican debate. But neither event can hold a candle to this week’s real disaster…
There is so much wrong with this movie that it defies critique. At its heart, it’s a movie about brilliant creative people, written and directed by slow-witted dullards who understood nothing of the source material.
I tend to root for comic book movies, and it’s very rare for one to disappoint as much as this one did. Green Lantern and Jonah Hex are the only other two that got down to this level of pure, unfiltered awfulness like the new FF movie did. If you’ve seen either of those previous bombs, you know where we are.
Sigh.
A terrible adaptation encrappens us all.
Ty the Guy OUT!
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Without question, this is STILL the best Fantastic Four movie:
It even made a pretty good comic book, drawn by my buddy Marcio Takara!
Now, if Pixar ever made a live action Incredibles movie, we might have something resembling a proper FF picture.
Sigh.
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Ty Templeton's ART LAND!! 
Haven’t seen it; not going to. But I saw a preview, and I want to say now that among their many mistakes was making Johnny Storm black—they should’ve made Reed Richards black.
OOOH I like that idea. (I got nothin’ else, I just wanted you to know that someone agrees with you.)
Re the FF: funny, I was just saying to someone the other day that the Lee-Kirby FF was tied to a particular cultural moment in the Cold War and of course to Project Mercury. (Alan Shepard’s first space flight taking place, I figure, around the same time that FF#1 was being drawn). And the Reed-Sue romance, with the then-fairly-daring age difference, probably echoed the Jack Kennedy-Jacqeline Bouvier marriage which was part of “Camelot’s” glamour.
In passing: the weird appeal of the Human Torch depends on his NOT looking too much like a burning man (Kirby and Ayers managed this beautifully), but like something else outside of normal human experience…a glowing being who happens to throw off trails of fire. The clips I’ve seen of the Torch from the new film remind me of nothing so much as that poor Jordanian pilot who was burned to death by ISIS. Fire engulfing a human body is perhaps the most horrifying of all mental images, and the filmmakers should have considered this.
Loved your comment that The Incredibles was the best FF movie.
But nobody’s talking about my hero (?), doctor Doom. The fact he’s not even mentioned in any review I have checked, makes me think his movie version must’ve been so awful that it just can’t be put into words…
Sadly, yes. There IS a character named Victor Von Doom in the movie, but he has no resemblance and any way, shape or form, to the original. He’s part of the “team” originally, and is left behind on the alien planet, where he survives for more than a year, and develops “magic” powers, sort of like a cross between Professor X and Magneto. He wears no armor, he has no agenda of saving his mother from hell, or conquering the world through technology…he’s not the monarch of Latveria, he’s not scarred by his experience, and his final form looks kind of like someone left a Tron costume out in the rain for a month. He’s so awful it’s silly to call him “Doctor Doom”. He does have a slight Euro-accent, though. So there’s that.
Goshdarnit, again with giving random magical powers to Doom!! But what’s wrong with him just being a supergenius??
Then add some major psychiatric complexes (body image issue, identity issue, abysmal megalomania) like he was a Batman villain…. nah, that’s probably too complex for superhero movies these days.
The movie guys want to give him magical powers? Fine, they should do so in the second or even third movie, AFTER you have established him as the genius with the hi-tech hypermodern exoscheleton fashionably yet crazily made to look like an ancient armor.
Doom has the potential to be far more memorable for the movie universe than even Tony Star or Loki. Heck, if they turned Loki into an interesting villain, imagine what they could do with Doom!
So, I guess you never saw the Doctor Strange movie, then? They kept the window, anyway.
If you mean the Doctor Strange Made-For-TV movie staring the mother from Arrested Development as the love interest? Seen that movie, and own me a copy. I have a raving fondness for the tepid Marvel TV Tryouts of the Seventies. Love me some Thor and Daredevil meets the Hulk movies, too! Don’t get me started on Turkish Captain America or Japanese Spider-Man. I have a sickness for that stuff. And I swear, I enjoy every ONE of them more than this joyless snore-ride of nerd-emo that is the latest FF movie. Give me the Reb Brown Captain America any day.
In fairness to 20th Century, they probably can’t do a cross-over with the X-movies…both teams have a long history of interstellar mayhem and comics cross-overs…if Singer could do an FF/X movie, I’m in. Also, apparently Lionsgate has the rights to Namor, another big area of FF mythology they don’t have access to.
Basically, it’s Doom or bust.
Obviously, Doom is to the FF, what Joker and Luthor are to their heroes, you have to include them in movie franchises. BUT…Doom or Bust? That leaves out huge areas of FF villainy that could be played with. What about the Watcher, Galactus, Silver Surfer, Annillus, Pscho-Man, Blastaar, the Skrulls, the Impossible Man, Dragon Man, Puppet Master, the Thinker and his Amazing Android, the Future Foundation, The Molecule Man, Diablo, and so many others? That’s leaving off The Black Panther, The Inhumans, the Kree Sentry, and a few others because the rights are messed up. The FF have a pretty deep bench BESIDES Doctor Doom, and they’ve yet to get Doom even close to correct in a film.
Practically everything on your list isn’t in their rights list. Maybe a few of the low-balls. Surfer and Galactus were covered in FF2. No rights, no bench. Panther, Inhumans, and the Kree are all in the MCU right now, or coming.
I’m going to argue that they will never get Doom right, because to do so would invoke Communism for a North American audience, and could be construed as insulting overseas. Doom with Latveria isn’t Doom.
What are you left with? Bad guys no one has ever heard of but comics fans.
The only hope for a decent film is for 20th C to sell it back to Disney or work out a deal similar to Sony did with Spidey.
My 2 cents, anyway. Glad to hear you’re recovering and back on the blog, btw.
This is a very bizarre comic you’ve made. They didn’t do it for “duty” and “patriotism”. Have you read Fantastic Four #1? Reed Richards is obsessed with beating the Soviets to space. So he wants to steal a space rocket. Ben Grimm is against it, because it’s horribly unsafe Sue calls him chicken, and Ben acquiesces because he’s deeply insecure and obsessed with machismo. So they steal a rocket ship out of conceit. This is literally what happens in Fantastic Four #1, the first ever Fantastic Four comic. The movie is bad, but it’s not because it portrays the FF as deeply flawed people.
I think you’re too used to modern comics that tend to soften the edges of these properties. It’s not bad to like modern comics, but it leads to confusion over what the “real FF” is (there is no “real” FF, honestly).
The Incredibles is a good move and all, but ultimately it’s lacking as a FF movie because it removes the cosmic sci-fi. The characters are there, but the context of destructive, dehumanizing scientific process is not.
Given my age and the overwhelming percentage of my collection being early Silver Age stuff, I doubt I’m too used to modern comics. And yes, Reed and the gang did it to beat the Soviets into space. That’s patriotic bravery, not conceit and self interest…unless I’m confused, which I just might be.
Reed RIchards and gang steal the rocket Reed Richards was working on. They didn’t even need to steal it, they just wanted to beat the Soviets into space, and safety precautions and “proper clearance” were obstacles to that. Ben Grimm says that there hasn’t been enough research into cosmic radiation to determine if it’s safe.
It wasn’t bravery, it’s hubris. The comic even makes a point that Ben Grimm isn’t doing it because he’s brave, he’s doing it because he was called a coward. That’s not bravery, either. And that’s before he tries to kill Reed to impress Sue Storm. The whole point of the FF was to have characters who were flawed.
The FF movie did it badly, but it wasn’t inaccurate in that regard.