ireactions wrote:

Trank feels he made a mistake in his handling of F4:
https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/josh-t … ent-wrong/

Trank shares some blame, but the movie was based on the unpopular Ultimate Fantastic Four premise. Working in those parameters, it was going to be an uphill battle no matter who directed it.

The only real good things to come out of Ultimate Fantastic Four were the zombie universe (The Frightful Four) and the fall of Reed Richards as he showed Doom that Reed was a better villain than him too.

lol - well, in hindsight I mischaracterized my statement.  I should have said those were the only *memorable* things that happened (not necessarily good).  I was caught up in this amusing thought that Doom was once again humiliated by Richards when Reed was more evil in villainy than Doom could be.

But of the Ultimate titles, I feel the FF was never the one people were talking about.  Ultimate Spider-man was the success story. The Ultimates had the memorable moments and ideas (many, like Sam Jackson’s Nick Fury,  translating on to the MCU).  But Ultimate FF was never really in the conversation.  Even if you talk to Marvel Zombies fans, I would bet that many wouldn’t remember it started in Ultimate FF.

ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR was... unpopular... ? Ultimate Reed becoming a villain was... good?

TF is making me wonder if I am completely out of step with superhero comics now which, I admit, I don't read too often. I tend to let things pile up for a few years on Comixology and then catch up. I read everything between AVENGERS VS. X-MEN and HOUSE OF X last month.

ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR was a neat reimagining of the team with Reed as a gifted teenager drafted into a US Army think tank in New York City with Sue Storm as a scientist, Johnny tagging along just for the hell of it and Ben as the only friend Reed had from childhood. Mark Millar and Brian Michael Bendis did (I thought) a great job of updating the 60s team for the 2000s by making everyone (a) teenagers and (b) working for a US Army weapons farm and Reed and Sue accidentally turning themselves and two innocent bystanders into superweapons. Millar's action-oriented set pieces and Bendis' hilarious dialogue were (I thought) a winning combination for the first arc.

Then came Warren Ellis, who brought his brilliant hard science approach into exploring how Mr. Fantastic stretches. How the Invisible Woman manipulates the molecular structure of her body. How the Human Torch can ignite. And how Ben is basically immortal now. Ellis had several great arcs and after a fill-in with the equally clever Mike Carey, we had Mark Millar bring his crazy action lunacy back to the team as he advanced the characters from operating within a secret branch of the army to existing as independent superheroes (and brought in the Marvel Zombies). Then Mike Carey came back again with some exciting extradimensional adventures that brought the crazy Kirby adventure with the youth of the Ultimate FF.

It was very much the energy of SLIDERS with the sci-fi creativity of Douglas Adams and the humour of David Mamet -- but now that I think about it, maybe it wasn't that popular because Marvel ended up blowing it all apart with that weird ULTIMATUM crossover that massacred the X-Men and the Ultimate Avengers and blew up the Fantastic Four's headquarters and had the team break up.

I guess Marvel wouldn't have blown the team apart if the book had been selling well.

Then came that very odd ULTIMATE ENEMY series where Reed killed his parents and sister and attacked the Earth with his new alien allies and became a crazy supervillain, a bizarre turn of character that was completely at odds with the gentle, polite, merciful scientist who tried to help Doom, clearly adored his baby sister, and spared the Marvel Zombies when he could have gassed them to death and called it a day.

It was the equivalent of Quinn Mallory becoming an emotionless sociopath in Season 4 of SLIDERS and I waited for the comics to explain what the hell was going on. Instead, Ultimate Reed became even more of a psychopathic, mass murdering sociopath who renamed himself The Maker.

It was bizarre and everything there remains as incomprehensible as Quinn being unconcerned with Wade in "Mother and Child" and as baffling as Quinn being indifferent to rescuing his mother and adopted home Earth in "Revelations" and as traumatic as the Professor's horrific murder in "The Exodus" and typing all this is actually making me upset and distraught and pained and agonized and confused and Temporal Flux is right and ULTIMATE FF was a terrible experience I can't go through this again good bye.

Trank feels he made a mistake in his handling of F4:
https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/josh-t … ent-wrong/

Trank shares some blame, but the movie was based on the unpopular Ultimate Fantastic Four premise. Working in those parameters, it was going to be an uphill battle no matter who directed it.

The only real good things to come out of Ultimate Fantastic Four were the zombie universe (The Frightful Four) and the fall of Reed Richards as he showed Doom that Reed was a better villain than him too.

https://www.polygon.com/2020/5/5/212466 … -chronicle

Then the second half really is a different movie.  Bureaucratic guy becomes "take over the world" evil, Reed runs off, Ben gets mad that he was abandoned, Johnny embraces his powers, and Sue is just helping or whatever.  Then Reed comes, fixes the machine in ten minutes, they get Doom back, he tries to destroy the world, and they team up to beat him.

So there's no villain until Doom shows up the last 10 minutes.  Doom wasn't really a bad guy before he transformed.  He never endangers the other guys (except maybe convincing them to go in the first place).  Bureaucracy guy just wants to move the project along - and even when he's using Ben (and then Johnny) as weapons, both seem pretty okay with it.  Doom is just tacked on so there's someone for them to fight.

If it was me, I'd leave the first part of the movie almost exactly the same.  I'd have Doom refuse to come back but start working on his own gateway with the Latverian government.  Reed and co finish the gateway first, go to the planet, and they get their powers by some accident.  A year passes.  Reed doesn't run off because that plot doesn't go anywhere.  The government uses Ben on some missions, but Franklin's been able to keep Johnny on the sidelines while Reed and Sue work on the gateway.  Meanwhile, Doom finds out that Reed got it to work when he sees what's happened to Ben.  So Latverian soldiers attack the facility, and the Four are able to fight off soldiers using their powers (an action piece where they work individually because it's super powers vs. normal soldiers).  In the chaos, Doom sneaks in and steals a vital piece to the gateway and gets away.  Back in Latveria, he completes his machine and goes along with a couple soldiers to Planet Zero.  Something bad happens, Doom gets left behind, one soldier dies, and the last soldier comes back horribly mutated (I don't know any other FF villains but Doom and Galactus so let's just say it's either one of their villains with a new origin or it's a new villain entirely).  The mutant starts wrecking the lab and Latveria asks for the Four's help.  So they go, struggle at first, and the defeat him as a team.  End credits scene shows Doom on Planet Zero, using his powers to create a gateway on his side.

More action, no cramming Doom into the finale, an extra action piece.  Not changing a ton.  Could've worked.

I do wonder how Trank figured on ending the film.  Because, again, there's no villain in the part of the story he seems to be affiliated with.

Science, Sorcery, Alchemy etc were all fields of Power and Knowledge he tapped into both seperately and in combination with each other.

He was a more Grounded Genius than Reed Richards but Doom hated Reed and always strived to. Outdo him.

Doom was able too leverage his breakthroughs. To benefit the People of. Latveria but. Gets bored quickly so. Stirs things up. A. Lot..

What's funny is that I watched the movie in two parts because I got distracted and had to stop in the middle.  I stopped exactly at the time jump in the movie.  So I got to watch the first half before they get their powers and then the second half (which was just about 40 minutes).  And, yeah, the stuff with Doom is pretty dumb, but I think it'd be pretty simple to make a pretty good movie out of it.

It was short on action, so I would've included more of the army scenes that they alluded to (and showed clips of).  If they have to team up at the end, maybe individual action sequences to show them using their powers (instead of just testing them - maybe a foreign army tries to kidnap the Four or something).  And since this was "Fantastic Four Begins" - I would've had the government be the bad guys and save Doom for a sequel.  He seemed completely shoehorned.  Plus, I've seen 3 movies, read a few articles on him, and you guys have tried to explain, and I still have no idea what Doom's powers are supposed to be.

To me, movies are all about expectations.  I was expecting the worst superhero movie ever, and it wasn't.  So I sorta liked it.

(I know I just lost all credibility I had left )

Trank might have been able to make it work with *interpreting* the script differently. But the attempt to twist a big budget action epic into a character study by cutting out the special effects only created a hollow, empty film. If FOX didn't want to make FANTASTIC FOUR as an expensive action spectacular, they should have thrown out the existing script and commissioned a new one specific to the budget they wanted to commit. FOX would likely say they were too far along the production process to start fresh and they would have had to essentially cancel the movie and start a new one.

Hindsight is 20/20, but they were probably better off cancelling this F4 film rather than releasing what they did.