Can't be arsed digging up the old thread, and I caught this (long haul flights are great for watching films you wouldn't otherwise bother with.) And up until they revisit Planet Zero, it's really, really good, surprisingly so. So I'm unsure where all the loathing and butthurt originated from. They don't drift overly far from F4 origins, the acting isn't atrocious, and it's got all the the usual cinematic themes - daddy issues, love issues - and the effects work well, as do the use of powers. It's just when they bring Victor back from Planet Zero it all starts devolving into a mess. In fact they should've just left Victor on Planet Zero alone for a presumed sequel, and dealt with the plot about the military using the four for clandestine missions, and their attempts to get from under the military yoke as you had plenty of meat on those bones to chew on. What we actually got was a messy, badly paced final third, with a reasonable final battle on Planet Zero and a rather silly coda where the military switched from the F4's masters to servants in one scene of unconcealed threat from the F4. I can only assume the final third was when Trank was having his breakdown, and the studio was trying to rescue a full movie because it has none of the flow or quality of the first two-thirds.
Yeah, that final third is bad, but fascinatingly bad, like Showgirls. It's like a crime scene to analyze.
I'm no slave to comics. I know pretty much nothing about FF. I just personally found it very slow and boring. I certainly don't think it's the mess everything thinks it is. That's why I don't care to engage too much with genre circles. There's a lot of the "cool to hate or love X" attitude out there that tends not to have any grounding in an objective assessment of the product. I mean, look at the reaction to Deadpool. I've only seen half of it so far and what I have I found a bit average with juvenile humour. Not bad, but no masterpiece. But all the nerds just love it...'cause it's the cool thing to love right now.
We love it because it's true to the source material, unlike the disrespectful mess that is Trank's FF movie.
Stop telling people why they think and feel things. If you were a good people reader, you'd be a shrink, and if you were psychic, you could break a Vegas casino. If I gave a fuck about "what's cool", I'd've watched fucking "Mad Men".
And people who've followed the genre since at least '08 get to be in on the Easter eggs and references.
I was very disappointed with the latest FF. I don't mind that others liked it. I am a "to each their own" kinda guy about tastes in media. I even show grace to Justin Beiber fans, if you can believe such a thing.
Where is it disrespectful? It nailed the original characters in a modern light. Reed is the somewhat boring one, guilt-ridden over the accident Ben has a slew of self-loathing and depressed acceptance over his new appearance Johnny is brash. Sue is smart. The powers are all fine. The only one who wasn't really done well was Doom, which I put down to having to become origin and ally in one movie, which for such a complex character was never going to work out.
I don't give a shit about whether something's cool or not, either, but Mad Men actually was a good show. Maybe not your cup of tea, but it was really well done.
Not saying it wasn't. NuBSG was well done for what it was, but that didn't click for me either, and I got left out of the "cool kids", table discussions there too.
The first two thirds of the movie are actually very good. It all starts to go bad when you see Kate Mara in that awful wig (she had changed her hair for, I believe, The Martian, and they had to cover it up in the reshoots). The movie is very definitely NOT good on the whole, but it's not quite as bad as the Rotten Tomatoes score would make it seem. It just has horrible problems with pacing, logic, etc. in the third act. I liked the actor playing Victor; I thought he was good as Victor. But the producers' take on Doom was terrible across the board, from the "look" to the characterization. The Doom costume seemed like a reject from a 90s sci-fi show.
No it didn't. Reed is suppose to be an older "father" figure for the group not a twenty something year old who is around the same age as the other members Sue and Johnny Storm are suppose to be brother and sister biologically which means they are both suppose to have the same race. You don't take an iconic character like Johnny Storm and change him from a blond haired blue eyed white teenager into a black one. Sorry, but political correctness needs to be used for creating new characters, not changing characters that have almost 50 years of history to them. The Thing was not so huge that he towered over everyone else. In the comics he was riding in cars and airplanes albeit uncomfortably. Doom...holy cow where do I begin? Just totally wrong. From the changing of the name to the ridiculous costume. Fox would have been better off just making a whole new franchise if they weren't going to bother with being faithful to these characters backstories. Those decisions right there alienated fans of the comic series and guaranteed negative word of mouth before the movie had even been shot. Was done well in the Dark Knight with the Harvey Dent character. No, this film deserved every bit of its low scoring. It completely ignored it's source material from the very beginning with its casting and continued to do so by trying to make a downbeat ,gritty film from a series well known for its humor and upbeat tone. The issues with the film are well documented but here's one critic that picks the biggest four...
In the comics, Reed is around 5 years older Susan (current retconn), and the age difference between Teller and Mara is similar, and in the original accident (which the film is about) Reed was in his mid-20's. As for Johnny Storm being black... Really? That's your problem? Have you boycotted the MCU because Nick Fury is now black? And don't trot out the Ultimate Nick Fury, as Ultimates Reed was pretty much a teenager, and you've already declared yourself unhappy with a younger Reed. Much more interested in the nature of the character, and Johnny was always the hothead... The film captures that. The F4 backstory consists of Reed deciding to pop off into space, taking Ben, Sue and Johnny, because the government is planning on cancelling the project. I don't think the plot in the film for how they got their powers diverges that much, it's a retcon certainly, much as they've done in the comics to swap out 'the Communists' for 'the Chinese' as the reason for Reed's space project. Honestly, beyond modernising the characters, I see little abandonment of the origin backstory. Harvey wasn't the main antagonist, Doom was here, plus the Dark Knight had almost double the running time, so they had the luxury of being able to take their time. Now given how much the F4 film stinks in the final third, a longer running time wouldn't have been a boon in this instance, there'd just have been more stink to dislike. I'll take a look at that link later, but I disagree with it deserving a low scoring. The first two thirds were very good, and if people were expecting a replication of the comic on film, then they've obviously not watched any superhero movie in the last couple of decades.
Other than some superficialities (Reed's relative age, Johnny's melanin content), I thought the characters were pretty much in line with earlier versions of the FF. I didn't really see anything that made me think "The Reed Richards I know would never do that!" or "The classic Ben Grimm wouldn't say that!" Yes, the characters were made a little more modern and given some depth; this is one of the parts of the movie that worked. Give me a good, solid, satisfying third act in this film, and it would rank significantly better than average in comic book film adaptations.
You have to understand a LOT of people don't recognize the current retcon. They only care about the ORIGINAL version that made this series so popular for so long. And in that version there was a much bigger age gap between Susan and Reed. I just recently finished up the Civil War series which was just ten years ago and in it there was flashbacks to when Reed first met Sue Storm. She was a child while Reed was going off to College. If there was a retcon it must have been VERY recent and the studio was stupid for trying to base a movie around that. Since skin color and background no longer matter, can we change Black Panther and Luke Cage to be white,asian or hispanic? Yeah I didn't think so Like it or not, Johnny Storm has always been white and changing him to black changes the identity of the character that people have known for decades. The fans didn't buy it. That's no excuse. If anything it only makes my case stronger since the Dark Knight was able to flesh out TWO villains in one movie while F4 couldn't even get one right. You could have cut the Dark Knight down to the same run time as F4 and while Harvey Dents turn would have been cut you would have still had an awesome portrayal of the Joker. Granted we didn't get an origin story for the Joker in this film, but who cares? What matters is creating an awesome villain and F4 failed miserably at this. There's just no excuse for not being able to get Doom right. He's one of the best villians in the Marvel Universe. I'm actually amazed than Fox can do such a great job with the X-men but continues to screw up the Fantastic Four. Hopefully they pass this franchise over to Disney like Sony did with Spiderman and this can finally be done right.
