3. Give Us A Team And A Movie That Looks And Feels New And Different
I can hear some uh-oh level rejection of this idea building from the dark side of the nerdforce. Now hold on a minute, before we go much further... I'm not suggesting that there should be a different roster with one or two of the "fill in members" like that time She Hulk replaced The Thing (although I think we can all agree that would make for an awesome movie). I want Fox to give us Johnny, Sue, Reed and Ben. I just want them to give us a different kind of Johnny, Sue, Reed and Ben than the ones we got in 2005 and 2007. Like it or hate it, one of the things Sony did right with The Amazing Spider-Man was to have a Peter Parker/Spidey who feels like a different version of the same character. If you look at Batman/Bruce Wayne in the Nolan Trilogy versus Bruce Wayne/Batman in the Burton movies, it doesn't really feel like the same character. Bale and Keaton present two very distinct and different approaches to answering the question of "who is Bruce Wayne". This is very much what we need from a Fantastic Four reboot. Ioan Gruffud was excellent as Reed Richards and watching Michael Chiklis as Ben Grimm felt like seeing the character come to life after stepping off of a page in a literal sense. I don't want to see two actors try to repeat those performances or give us the same chemistry that Chiklis and Gruffud had. I want a Reed Richards who feels like he's lived a different life that turned him into a different kind of man than the one from the previous films. I want each of the main characters to have a different way of interacting with each other. Instead of a Sue and Johnny Storm that argue like childish siblings, how about a pair that actually kind of hate each other and avoid talking for most of the movie? Or a Sue that takes pity on her loser little brother who will never amount to anything and a Johnny consume by a burning passion to get out from under the shadow of a scientific prodigy who's always been held over his head by the rest of the family? Instead of a put upon Reed having to deal with Johnny's screwball sense of humor, what if Dr. Richards secretly nurses a bitter envy of a guy who feels comfortable in his own skin and always seems confident? How about Ben Grimm thinking of Sue Storm as a surrogate sister and being worried that she's wasting her time with a cold hearted ass-hat who isn't capable of giving her the affection she deserves and would rather see her hook up with another guy even if it means stabbing one of his dearest friends in the back? But equally as important to the success of reboot is to have a different visual style. While I personally don't care for the look of the new Spidey flick, I am glad that it looks distinctively different. While some fans complain about recasting of characters in superhero flicks (like Rachel Dawes in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight) I love it. This is essentially the movie equivalent to the penciler trying something different with a character or a new penciler coming onto the comic book series. That visual metaphor is important to be taken to it's logical conclusion in a reboot, we need to feel like a different artist is drawing the new series in a drastically different style. The best success in the field thus far is X-Men First Class. It's miles beyond any other reboot, requel or preboot in having a different visual interpretation of the source material. That's of course largely due to having the film set in 1960's which is by the way, something that would greatly benefit an FF reboot. Remember what I said about doing a new origin only if it's worth telling? Well an origin that reclaims the cold war backdrop of the original comics would be brilliancy of a level on par with bringing the X-Men back to the civil rights era roots. The whole reason that the original movie replaces the experimental rocket flight with the space station angle is because it was set in the modern day mid-aughties (a.k.a. 00's) time frame. It wouldn't have made sense to have Reed and his pals steal a rocket to perform a daring test flight into space because that technology was already firmly handled at the dawn of the 21st century. More importantly, the motivation would not make any sense in the modern era because the idea of "gaining space dominance ahead of the commies" is bemusingly archaic. Doing a Fantastic Four movie set in the early sixties would be able to capture that feeling of urgency at out performing the Soviets and allow (even necessitate) a new visual style. While some people might complain "that would just be imitating First Class?" what if it could do more like...