Trailer Trashin’: Marvel’s First Family is Back in Fantastic Four
I hope that you all enjoyed the Super Bowl dear readers! For all you football fans, whether you supported the Patriots or the Seahawks, I hope you enjoyed the game. Personally, I’m just wait to see all the movie spots that are shown during the game. In the meantime, this week’s belated installment of Trailer Trashin’ is our third Marvel Comics adaptation in a row, with the first trailer for the upcoming August release Fantastic Four.
Premise: After four people – Reed Richards (Miles Teller), Susan Storm (Kate Mara), Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan), and Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) – are teleported to an alternate universe, which alters their physical forms and grants them superhuman abilities, they must learn to harness their new powers and work together as a team to save the Earth from a former friend turned enemy.
My take: For quite a while now, there’s been a cloud of uncertainty hanging over Fantastic Four, 20th Century Fox’s reboot of its movie franchise based on Marvel Comics’ first superhero team. Filming took place from May to August last year, with not a single set visit by the press or spy picture being leaked to the public. And over the last several months, we’ve heard rumors about the film making radical changes to the source material, and that director Josh Trank was clashing with the studio. Now, with just over seven months left before the film’s release, we finally have our first trailer. While it doesn’t look like Fantastic Four will be the train-wreck some had feared, it also does not look like a good movie version of the Fantastic Four from the comics.
The cast of the film is quite a talented bunch. Miles Teller – who starred in both Divergent and Whiplash last year – plays Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic, who gains the ability to stretch his body into any shape he desires. Kate Mara – most recently seen in the Netflix drama House of Cards – plays Susan Storm/Invisible Woman, who can render herself invisible and create invisible force fields. Michael B. Jordan – who starred in director Josh Trank’s first film Chronicle (2012) and the acclaimed drama Fruitvale Station (2013) – plays Sue’s adoptive brother Johnny Storm/Human Torch, who is able to engulf his body in flames, control fire, and fly. Jamie Bell – who most recently starred in the AMC series Turn: Washington’s Spies – plays Ben Grimm/The Thing, who is turned into an orange rock-creature with superhuman strength and durability. The voice-over in the first part of the trailer is provided by Dr. Franklin Storm, the father of Johnny and Sue, played by Reg E. Cathey, best known for his work on the HBO series The Wire and Oz. Notable by his absence is Toby Kebbell as Victor Domashev, the film’s version of Doctor Doom, the arch-nemesis of the Fantastic Four; my issues with the changes being made to him will be detailed later in this column.
I was surprised by how restrained this trailer is. For what is ostensibly a superhero film, it instead seems to be trying to evoke nothing so much as the trailers for Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), complete with over-serious narration about the great potential of mankind. It’s all about mood and atmosphere, rather than laying out story. But let’s be honest, without the Marvel logo at the beginning, the title card, and the end shot of the four standing together, does anything about this really feel like a Fantastic Four movie? Instead, it feels almost like Fox took an existing script for an original sci-fi film and just slapped the names of the characters from the comic in there.
Kate Mara in “Fantastic Four.” © 2014 Marvel & Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.
Obviously, this film is making many, sometimes drastic, changes to the source material. Some of these I have no problem with, like Johnny Storm being black, and him and Sue therefore being adopted siblings rather than biological ones. Some of these annoy me but I can live with them, like the Fantastic Four wearing black suits instead of anything like their classic blue uniforms from the comics. But my biggest problem with the film is the changes made to the character of Doctor Doom. In the comics, he is Victor von Doom, an intellectual genius, skilled scientist and sorcerer, has a suit of powered armor which grants him a number of powers, and is the ruler of the fictional European country of Latveria. In this film, Toby Kebbell plays Victor Domashev, an anti-social computer programmer and hacker who goes by the name “Doom” online. No, I didn’t make any of that up. Kebbell has said that the film will depict how Victor becomes a villain, but if this is the character’s starting point, I think we should abandon any hope of actually getting Doctor Doom as we know him on our screens. And after Toby Kebbell did such amazing work as Koba in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), it’s really disappointing that this will be the next thing we see him in.
Ultimately, my feelings on the film after seeing this trailer are a true mixed bag. It looks like it could be a decent sci-fi film, but it does not look anything like what I’d want in a movie version of the Fantastic Four. If this was a trailer for an original sci-fi film instead, I’d be a lot more interested. At this point, the film has nowhere to go but up. In the meantime, I’m going to wait for reviews before I decide whether or not to see Fantastic Four when it comes out this August.
ANTICIPATION: “Fantastic” is not the word I’d use at this point.
Starring: Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Bell, Toby Kebbell, Reg E. Cathey, and Tim Blake Nelson
Director: Josh Trank
Writers: Simon Kinberg, Jeremy Slater, and Josh Trank, based on Fantastic Four by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
Timothy Monforton
