Fantastic Four Teaser Discussion
Today, Fox released the first teaser for their upcoming Fantastic Four reboot and given the film's seamingly endless controversy, I thought I'd write a short discussion on what I think of the movie so far. Here's a link to the trailer if you haven't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxIldZcUuCk
I've had my criticisms with this movie but I'll start off with the positives of what I thought of it before I saw this trailer.
I kept seeing everyone completely rip this movie apart and criticise it without knowing much about it. Everyone claiming that it was a disaster in the making because of the cast and the updates to the FF mythos. I'm not the biggest fan of the mytho updates but that doesn't mean the movie will be bad. It can have a fresh take on the characters without completely butchering them so I remained faithful. To me, what matters is having a great director and good writer. And that's what Fox provided. Josh Trank has proven himself as a strong director with "Chronicle" and Kinberg wrote an excellent script for X-Men Days of Future Past.
So for a while I remained optimistic and hopeful that this reboot would be good.
Then I heard about their treatment of Doctor Doom. Ugh. First of all, they completely butchered his name, turning it from the awesome Victor Von Doom to Victor Domashev. Why? I mean okay making Johnny black is cool because the actor you wanted to cast was black but I see absolutely no reason in changing one of the best names in comics. So how does he get the name Doom? It's his internet username on chatrooms because he's an anti-social hacker.
DOOM IS NOT AMUSED!
Victor Von Doom is a powerful and intimidating man and the way I see it, has been forever. He didn't go from being an anti-social hacker, afraid of human contact to a foreign megalomaniacal dictator. That just doesn't work to me because you would always see the shadows of him being awkward and nerdy. His presence wouldn't feel as intimidating and that's an important aspect of Doom's character. He's my favourite villain and seeing him transformed for the worse definitely turned me off to this movie.
So for a few days, Fox have removed their furtive boundaries and started sharing set-photos and costume designs with the internet. The trailer was set for release with Kingsman but we've gotten it early.
What do I think of it?
It was decent. For one, the film looks absolutely BEAUTIFUL. The set-designs and shot compositions seem to be masterful so at least we can all agree that this movie will be an aesthetically pleasing piece. We didn't get much of the characters, but my scepticisms on Miles Teller's Reed Richards have been silenced. He actually sort of looks like a younger Reed and given his performance in Whiplash, I'm sure that he'll be able to pull off Reed Richards well.
The tone seemed to be quite dark, maybe something like Days of Future Past's tone because that obviously worked out well. I'm not against a darker done but the team will most certainly have to present a movie worthy of tacking seriously. It could work for the Fantastic Four who are more explorers than Superheroes, but for now I think it's interesting that something darker is what they're going for.
I'm also a little upset that we didn't even get a glimpse of Doctor Doom. I hope we'll see some official costume photos soon.
Overall, though, I'm quite indifferent after having seen the trailer. It's what I would expect. It's not fantastic but it definitely has potential. I'm hoping that Fantastic Four will be a great surprise and this movie will succeed but I won't get my hopes up. It could definitely end up being completely terrible but I think this trailer will calm some vehement haters.
Well, what do you all think? I'd love to hear what you guys think of this movie and what your general impressions are after having seen the trailer.