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Fantastic Four Reboot Released To Tepid Reception
An anonymous reader writes: Another month, another superhero movie based on the Marvel universe. Today marked the release of Fantastic Four, an attempt to reboot a film franchise that did poorly in the theaters as recently as 2007. This isn't the same crew that's been pushing out blockbuster after blockbuster, though — it's the crew that keeps releasing mediocre X-Men flicks. From early reviews, it looks like we can expect to see another reboot in 2025. Rolling Stone calls it "the cinematic equivalent of malware," saying that even a solid cast of actors couldn't save it from failure. A.V. Club says it "struggles to fill out its relatively brief runtime," the NY Times says even its special effects aren't up to snuff. Metacritic shows rare agreement between fans (27/100) and critics (2.7/10), and it does just as poorly on Rotten Tomatoes. Even director Josh Trank seemed to have a problem with the film. Those who have seen it, what did you think?
If you don't have riveting hero(s), you darned well better have an awesome presentation.
Iron Man is kind of interesting. Batman's cool. Spiderman even, and many of the X-Men. The general public will usually risk those.
But when you start getting into "WHO?" territory, like Guardians of the Galaxy or the upcoming Deadpool, you need an incredible presentation to draw attention. GotG had that. Deadpool looks like it's going to be great. Point is, the further you stray from well-known characters into comic culture, you need a movie so cool that people who don't care about the characters will find it interesting. I still only know GotG as "Starlord, Groot, the funny raccoon, green Zoe Saldana and some red guy. But I'd pay to watch a sequel in a heartbeat.
I don't see F4 having that... zing.
"Oh no... he found the
Aside from new movies, all the time, there are so many shows on television: Gotham, Super Girl, Flash, Arrow, Agent Carter, Agents of Shield, Daredevil. I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot.
As a kid, I read comic books. At first, it was fun seeing the super heroes come to life. Now it's getting tiresome.
Also, does every other movie have to be a re-boot of the origin story?
Um, I'm sorry but you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
Mad Max: Fury Road used an incredible amount of practical FX and stunt-work, 80% was practical according to IMDB.
All the vehicles are real. All the chase sequences and crashes and explosions are real. They mostly just used CGI to dress up backgrounds, and for Theron's mechanical arm... that's about it. All the "action" is real.
We're in full agreement on Raiders of the Lost Ark though... greatest movie ever made.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
That's kind of my reaction to most Marvel characters in general - they're on the lame side. And when it comes to the Fantastic Four, I even thought they were lame back when I was a kid. Stretchy Guy? Girl Who Can Hide Really Well? Angry Stone Dude? Give me a break... the Human Torch should just walk away and go solo.
#DeleteChrome
and a black Thing would probably be racist, or something?
He's already the token Jew.
Circumcision is child abuse.
You really need to watch the behind the scenes features for Fury Road. Sure, there was some big obvious CGI (the giant sand storm) but for about 90% of the movie, the things you expect to be CGI (the car crashes, explosions, insane stunts) are real, and the CGI is limited to fleshing out the wasteland background and erasing some safety equipment.
It is a breathtaking movie precisely because it is so real. Action movie fans have been saturated with CGI for so long, we hardly know what the real thing is anymore. Most recent superhero movies have been a big yawn for me. It's all fake and the actors are not really in a scary situation. Nothing brings out good acting like actually driving at high speed through the desert with actual explosions and crashes all around you.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I don't think it's that complex.
Fox may simply not have licensed enough villains from the Fantastic Four comics. For all we know, their licensing is for the four primary characters and for their origin stories, and for villains from a specific range of comic books, and a prohibition on introducing new main villains that were not featured in those comics.
I don't see why they keep rebooting these franchises. Rise of the Silver Surfer did not so horribly damage the franchise as to make it completely necessary to abandon the storyline established in the Ioan Gruffudd and Jessica Alba version, and one of the few things that the Batman movies showed us is that it was possible to change actors every few movies and still have a continuous franchise. Granted, Batman did eventually jump the shark to the point that a reboot was required, but the Keaton, Kilmer, and Clooney movies are one somewhat contiguous set. Even in the Marvel-controlled Cinematic Universe some characters have been played by other actors and the audience has accepted this.
If they didn't want to continue to cast Gruffudd, Alba, Evans, and Chiklis they didn't have to actually reboot the universe in order to bring in new actors. Some would argue that such a movie might not be as successful as the studio wanted, but what they've created with this reboot is apparently worse than either of the previous movies. Hell, if it's this poorly received then perhaps Sony should release the rights back to Marvel, maybe they can actually make something of it.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I was actually thinking while reading these reviews that someone should instead make a movie where Doom is the protagonist. Doom is an interesting character in so many different ways; he is motivated by the need to be a better man than anyone else, including himself, and to make the world around him better, but he keeps headbutting with the "actual heroes" because they don't understand him, they don't even want to understand him, and he is willing to use more drastic methods to bring about his utopia than these "actual heroes" are willing to let him. Even when he becomes a literal god, saves the universe from a collapse and makes the world a wonderful place for people to live he still can't chug down the feelings of inferiority compared to what he thinks he could still become nor are the "heroes" still willing to look past his exterior and see who he is for real.
There's just so MUCH potential there, it could be a very deep movie and flipping the viewpoint around like that to revolve around the anti-hero instead would definitely interest a lot of people. But nooooo, Hollywood just wants to push out easy, mediocre crap :S
The problem that I’m pointing out is that only die-hard fans of the comic will know that, and to everyone else in the world a mole is a small, blind furry creature that can easily be bested with a shovel. “Dr Doom” on the other hand sounds like someone who means business and has the qualifications to pull it off, so he’s much better from a marketing perspective.
(In reality I suspect Fox was too cheap to license any other characters)
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