Fantastic Four. Josh Trank. 2015. ⚂
It feels like years since I’ve seen a super-hero movie. And… perhaps it has been? It might just be the corona.
But, right, this is the infamous Josh Trank Fantastic Four movie? I’ve read about how fucked up this is supposed to be…
Let’s see!
[seven minutes pass]
It’s typical of a movie like this to recontextualise “it’s clobbering time” like this:
Instead of being something Ben came up with himself, or something his friends were saying, it’s instead something his physically abusive older brother would say.
It’s so deep!
And so not Jack Kirby.
[like half an hour passes]
I don’t get why everybody hates this movie!
An imdb rating of 4.3 is basically THIS IS UNWATCHABLE. But it’s been fine… so far. The guy playing Ben is fine, and while they’ve youngified everybody considerably from the comic book, they’re all OK. The changes make sense: With the Storm siblings as brainiacs, it makes more sense for them to be involved with this venture than the Kirby/Lee origin story.
As usual, I’m annoyed with them doing the origin story instead of just doing a super-hero thing (when I’m watching a super-hero movie, I want to see super-heroes!!!!1!), but this is a better origin movie than most.
The rest must be horrible tedium to warrant that level of hostility.
[like another half hour? I’m slightly drunk]
I find this fascinating:
I’m still not getting why this is such a loathed super-hero movie… sure, it’s got a plot that jettisons everything from the Kirby comics except the actual super-powers (which is a somewhat strange move; the particulars of those comic books were why it was a huge commercial success back in the 60s, not the super-powers themselves), but surely very few of the reviewers knows about that, so… why this visceral loathing of this movie?
I’m not saying that it’s a good movie… the pacing is pretty slow and it’s basically a movie about evil gummint military or something… but it’s more entertaining than at least a dozen other Marvel-related super-hero movies.
Perhaps it’s all down to the revelation that The Thing has neither a dick not a butthole. That’d alienate most of the reviewers, I think!
[the end]
I rather liked that. It makes more sense than most super-hero movies, and it does that by jettisoning all the comic-book super-hero plot points.
Good show!
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