#f4ntastic

Galactus Hungers! [Marvel Proxies]

Artist Credit: Olivier Coipel

I remember when the F4ntastic Four movie came out in 2015 (and seriously, F4ntastic? What is this, the 90’s again?) and we saw that the new Human Torch was… different. There was some concern, admittedly even from me, about this change. I mean, Johnny Storm is white, right? Why cast a black actor?

  Well I could have let that slide without issue as long as they explained, even with just one sentence to not take up too much time, why his sister is white and him black. Yes, there could be a hundred-score reasons why, but it is unintuitive. Since then I have grown up and don’t mind nearly so much, but this “issue” comes up again and again. The new Doctor in Doctor Who is a woman and there has been rumour about a black James Bond floating around for a while. My favourite superhero died and there was a fuss when he was replaced by a black kid; Tony Stark let a black girl replace him as Iron Man (or whatever name she went by) and there was a fuss both times. Are you seeing the pattern?

  Established heroes are being replaced by children!

  I’m kidding.

  But there is always a fuss when a beloved character is changed and I must admit, a black James Bond would bother me. A female James Bond would bother me; the first and least important reason is that James Bond is an established white male character and a lot of his stories would be different if he wasn’t. The other characters in his stories would treat him differently, he would have had different experiences and would not be the same person.

  More importantly though, it’s kind of insulting (not to me mind, I’m a white male) that people seem to think that the James Bond brand is what’s needed to carry a black or female lead. Seriously, we already know that’s not the case, so make a brand-new character who fits your criteria. If you have the rights then put them in the same world as James Bond, sure. That could be fun.

  A female Doctor doesn’t bother me because it works in-world; they established long ago that it was possible to regenerate into a different sex so it’s cool. It works.

  It’s just a shame the writing was crap. Fingers crossed for the 2020 series.

  There were rumours for a while that Spider-Man, no cross that, Peter Parker was going to be gay in an upcoming movie. This didn’t happen and I’m glad. I probably shouldn’t be but I am. See, I let a lot slide in comic book universes because there is the multiverse and as long as we don’t know which universe exactly the story is based in, there is nothing wrong with Peter being gay. But again, why not make a new character who happens to be gay?

  Isn’t it offensive to think that a gay Spider-Man has to be the original?

  This is where Miles Morales comes in. He’s not a black Peter Parker, he’s a brand-new character. And yes, you could say my above argument should apply here, after-all it’s still the Spider-Man brand. But Spider-Man is pretty unique in that there has generally only been Peter Parker. Yes there is Miguel O’Hara in the future and similar variants but many superhero mantles have been picked up by other characters, but Peter Parker is usually Spider-Man and no-one steps up to take his place if he dies or vanishes.

  Except maybe Ben Reilly, Peter’s clone.

  But even if he wasn’t unique, it wouldn’t matter. Do you know how many Spider-Women there have been? Including another of Peter’s clones?

  So when the Peter Parker of the Ultimate universe dies, Miles Morales comes along and tries to pick up the slack. This is just comic book tradition, and it works. I like Miles Morales. He brings a freshness to the Spider-Man story; seriously, screw Uncle Ben I want to see more Uncle Aaron.

  Speaking of Uncle Aaron, I was a fan of Prowler when it was still Hobie Brown under the mask, but multiverse so whatever.

  So changes thanks to the multiverse is cool, as is taking up another hero’s mantle. What else am I okay with? Well for starters, if something is done well.

  It seems a lot of Iron Man fans weren’t too happy with the Mandarin but, and maybe this is because I didn’t know a whole lot of Iron Man lore, I thought that the twist was amazing. That is how you do a trailer. They set up this mysterious terrorist (yawn) who was dominating the Middle East, only for that to be a façade for the real villain. As a twist this is not only amazing but was set up incredibly well.

  And then there is Michelle Jones from Spider-Man: Homecoming who we discover is MJ right at the end. She is quite possibly as far from the MJ we know as is possible but then again, she isn’t Mary-Jane Watson. I really like what they are doing here, using an established character whose relationship with the hero pops up in nearly every iteration, to hint at future sub-plots without actually being the same character.

 So I’ve been pretty positive about the idea of “changing” a character, so why am I bringing this up? Because it doesn’t matter how justified the change is, the execution can ruin it. Doctor Who is a prime example of this.

I was pretty excited to see a woman portray the Doctor because there is a lot in his (I use the male pronoun for a reason) character that you don’t often see in female characters. Matt Smith was amazing at portraying an old man in a young man’s body; he was a treat to watch. Tennant, Smith and Capaldi were all very good at showing a character who was old, who knew, and had experienced, far more than any human could match. He took the lead, got angry when he needed to and had a fire in his belly, a sliver of ice in his heart, usually hidden by a cheerful and possibly forced optimism.

  To see that kind of female character would be new and awesome.

  Instead we had infantile episodes more focused on preaching than actually telling a story. I don’t know if Whitaker can act, I don’t know if she is up to the job of being the Lonely God, because we didn’t get to see it. I’ve been watching the old episodes, by which I mean 1963 onwards and I’ve just revisited the 2005 onwards series’; two companions really has to be the maximum number of companions and if there is a third then they should be the Doctor’s equal. Otherwise the Doctor gets ignored.

  River Song was never just a companion and while you could say that her presence detracted from his, it was in a good way that allowed the characters to bounce off of each other. In series 11 with Whitaker we saw more of Ryan and Graham’s relationship than we did the Doctor herself, that is when they don’t pause the episode to dump exposition onto the viewers (I’m looking at you, episode 3).

  Of course as far as I’m concerned, the greatest sin occurred in the second episode: she gives up. The Doctor gives up. For no good goddamn reason. Okay so there is a reason. Her time-machine, which has been coming and going for centuries isn’t there at that very moment! She didn’t see it disappear, not to return for another hundred years; it just wasn’t there yet and she knew it was due any moment. What the fu-?!

  Who is this woman? Certainly not the Doctor who chases away fleets of spaceships with a speech.

-what a speech- 

  How about another example? You may have heard of Spider-Gwen (don’t worry she doesn’t actually go by that name, that would be stupid), her series is based on Earth-65 as opposed to the mainstream series which is Earth-616 (who numbers these?). I don’t want to talk about her, although I totally could. I like her and what they wanted to do, even if the execution was poor. No, I’m bringing up the Earth-65 Captain America: a black woman called Samantha Wilson.

  The agenda behind that can already be practically tasted but I prefer not to whine about such things and she seems okay as a character. My problem is that if she went through the same process as Steve Rogers, which she did, then why isn’t she ripped like Steve? Seriously, that guy is jacked in virtually every incarnation so why isn’t she? Because she’s a woman and thus her biology is different? I think it’s safe to say that that is BS and the only reason she isn’t covered in rippling muscle is because it wouldn’t look sexy.

-seriously? Trump is Modok? He’s even quoting Trump! Urgh, the taste of agendas-

  Men can be huge but women? Nope.

  I don’t mind Gwen not being massive, depending on the artist then Peter can be pretty skinny too. But double-standards much?

Friend A: "And the Fantastic 4 movie- oh hey Jade."

Me: "F..fantastic 4..?"

Friend B: " Oh boy here we go."

Me: *begins sipping tea*

Friend A: " what do you mean?"

DISCLAIMER: I haven’t read the comics and I remember very little of the earlier movies beyond the fact that they had Chris Evans and it was a real trip watching him there after seeing him as Cap. I remember that they weren’t as bad as I expected based on what I had heard, though.

SPOILERS!!!

I liked the science project stuff at the beginning, though it didn’t work quite as well as I expected based on the trailer - it was less about the struggle and excitement and more about showing how Super Awesome Reed is, though the Dummy Teacher doesn’t see it even when he’s shown. I would have preferred a version where Reed got some credit for the work he did, one where he managed to turn the teacher (or some other teacher) to his side at least a little. They can’t all be like that? Even if they didn’t believe in him and what he was trying to build, they could have at least tried to turn him towards more reasonable science projects instead of just tearing him down. Why are they even teachers? The whole Cinderella situation with Storm showing up just didn’t work because the teachers were so unbelievable. It was too much “no one sees how awesome I am” cliche.

I really liked Reed and Ben’s friendship - their touchy-feely scenes were some of the best in the film, but they were kind of ruined by needless melodrama and by how Ben’s contribution after he went Hulk-size was pretty much just “so what’s the plan” while Reed was Super Awesome. Still - I felt that they were pretty much the only characters who had real chemistry in the movie, even if it was only part of the time.

I was really disappointed with Johnny Storm. I expected so much better from him than him just being a hothead with no real depth. He's a rebel teen with superficial teen issues, snap and he’s on fire and that’s all you need to know about him? However, I didn’t have a problem with the actor, though people have complained about them picking a black dude. I kind of liked that, actually - he’s like coal to the fire.

Sue was mediocre, but at least they didn’t do worse with her than movies in general do with female characters. She actually got to do stuff other than just look pretty, but was still left feeling flat.

To be honest, this was a pretty bad movie. I felt like the characters were caricature-like, there was no real suspense and I just didn’t care about the characters or about what happened to them. Well, except for the Reed & Ben friendship scenes, but other than that I didn’t care for either of their characters, either. I also didn’t care when daddy Storm died because it just seemed so pointless and was in the middle of all that bad writing.

I like well-written villains/antagonists who have enough depth that I can sympathize with them, but Doom just didn’t deliver. I liked the fact that he just wanted to go “home” (especially because I could sympathize with his feelings after he was just left there) and pretty much just told people to get out of his way instead of going on a rampage, but other than that he was boring. I also didn’t like his fixation on Sue or how she was turned into a damsel in distress and Reed saved the day in a very cliche way.

I could have lived with the movie being a badly-written mess of cliches and stereotypes and boring characters, but they even screwed up the music?! If you’re making a big budget movie, can’t you at least hire someone competent to write the score? At some point it sounded like someone had been very impressed with the Winter Soldier theme and wanted to try something similar, but it didn’t fit at all and sounded bad, too. In general, the music would have fit an 80′s movie better than one which came out in this time and age. Then again, the rest of it was kind of 80′s, too... certainly not the quality I expect from a superhero movie these days.

Still - at least there was no awkward, major-scale, badly written romance. (I don’t count Sue and Victor because that was just pathetic, or Sue and Reed because that was so cliche and I am so, so, so glad that they didn’t make it more central/obvious in the story.)

4/10.