Revisiting Old Marvel Films (part 3)

In this third part, I look at the three Fantastic Four films and change my mind and have yet another look at the first Hulk film ...

The Fantastic Four - Well... I did think I'd remember this film, but in many ways it was like watching it for the first time. I don't think we ever got around to watching it a second time and I really can't understand why. As far as a 2005 Fox superhero film goes, I don't think they did a bad job of updating it for the 21st century. One gets the impression they learned a lot from the dreadful X-Men films, because this felt like a proper Marvel film at times, especially the interaction between Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm. Plus, It's like the current MCU took inspiration from this film, because the dialogue - at times - had a snappy comic book feel to it without being too cheesy; it showed how an iconic comic could be made believable, because it felt set in the real world, whereas X-Men and Spider-Man both felt slightly like they were in comic book worlds (of which, apparently they were). 

I kind of feel like breaking this down into good and bad points, because it really is a film of two extremes. Johnny Storm (played by Chris 'Captain America' Evans - which felt really weird) was pretty much perfect apart from the lack of longer blonde hair and his sparring with Ben was straight out of a Lee/Kirby comic. Ben Grimm (played by Michael 'The Shield' Chiklis) was both excellent and totally wrong. They got his tragic nature correct, but putting a man in a Thing suit kind of let it down. Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffud) is physically a great bit of casting, but retconning him into some kind of failing scientist with multiple bankruptcies and being more of a nerd than a geek didn't really work the way I suppose they wanted it to and Sue Storm (Jessica Alba) was probably a hot choice at the time, but she didn't really carry the role off and there wasn't really enough of either of these two in a superhero way. Coupling her with Victor Von Doom (Julien 'Nip/Tuck' McMahon) seemed like a bad idea, especially as he was quite awful as Doom and not at all menacing or convincing - but it was a means to an end, a plot device that made the rest of the film work, even if Vic soon forgot his adoration of Sue. 

However, the updated origin of the FF was well handled and I liked it; it was a shame they had to make Doom part of this experiment and give him powers, the VVD I grew up with was just a mad genius with power, more money than Croesus, and many more gadgets and tricks than a dozen Tony Starks. Making him some kind of electric metal man kind of stunk up the film a little, although as a villain it sort of worked. It's all wrapped up in less than an hour and 45 minutes and set up the sequel quite well (what should have been a post credits scene with his assistant - the excellent - Hamish Linklater seeing the seized up Doom back to Latveria). 

The special effects were strange - the Torch was excellent, but as I said Chiklis in a rock suit sucked; Reed's stretching ability, while underused, was a wee bit cheesy (a word I've already used once) and Sue's invisibility and force field could have been better, but I'm not sure how - she's the problem that the MCU will have when they get around to rebooting the franchise in 2025.

All in all, I think I enjoyed watching this far more than the Spider-Man or X-Men films, but the FF were one of my first great comic loves and this film did feel like it was made with a little bit of love towards the great Kirby/Lee era of the book.

[Digression #1 - Deadpool. The enigma in non-MCU Marvel films; not because of any other reason than the way it does its own thing in a breaking the 4th wall way. Both films are funny, fast paced, violent and rubbish but in a fun way. Obviously, the Wolverine Origins film introduced us to a different character, also played by Ryan Reynolds, which confused people, but fitted in perfectly with the absolute fuck up Fox had made and was about to continue making with the X-Men and its entangled continuity. But don't worry too much; it's all about the multiverse, ennit?  The thing is the two Deadpool films are enjoyable, throwaway films, but have all manner of problems if you look closely, but are also, in many ways, far closer to the comic book character than anything else Fox ever did with mutants - not that I've ever thought of Wade Wilson as being a mutant, although I'm sure they've found a way of making him one in the 22 years since I last read a Deadpool comic. The films fit nicely into a place that also has TV series like The Boys, Peacemaker and the Umbrella Academy included and when the MCU finally gets around to Deadpool 3, I hope they don't try to change it too much because the films work as 'adult' hero films and probably wouldn't work half as well if the character was homogenised.]

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer - Seriously, after all the reasonably good work of the first film this stunk to high heaven; such promise, such rich history to mine and they came up with a piece of shit that effectively ended the franchise just as it was getting started. Almost everything about this film was awful; from the scene with disco Reed Richards that makes the hipster Peter Parker scenes in Spider-Man 3 look like a masterpiece of cinematic genius to the story that simply made no sense from start to finish; if they could do something wrong with this film they were all over it like a rash.

I don't think I've seen a worse superhero film (yet). They even managed to make a film about an all-life-on-Earth-threatening cosmic entity and wrap it up in 85 minutes; if this was a modern MCU film it would have been at least two films running in at 5 hours plus. Where I happily could break down the first film into good and bad points, this film is almost lacking completely in redeeming features; it's just awful - apart from maybe the initial meeting between the Silver Surfer and the Human Torch; that was a well-handled, if slightly confusing, few minutes of racing around the world. There is literally nothing else. 

As the wife and I started watching it I casually chucked in the comment that it must have done something wrong for it to have killed off the franchise so effectively. By the time Reed was 'doing the twist' at his stag party (about 7 minutes into the film) I realised what. If some superhero films feel like bad concepts, this felt like it had been plotted and scripted by some mentally challenged 6 year olds with a check list of cool things from the FF comic that they had to cram in. In fact, it felt like half the film ended up on the cutting room floor and left me wondering if the Fox executive who green lit the release of this film still had his job ten minutes after it hit cinemas.

When you have someone as interesting as Doug Jones playing the Surfer, why do you need Laurence Fishbourne to do his voice? That was a minor gripe but one that resonates even more if you see Jones in the original Hellboy films or recently in Star Trek: Discovery; he's a unique actor perfectly suited to play the Surfer and be his voice and personality. The same could be said for Andre Braugher - a great actor of his generation - reduced to the position of snarling distrusting army general prepared to give more rope to a guy who attempted to raze NYC to the ground rather than the people who saved it and in that I'm talking about Doctor Doom, newly restored to full Julian McMahon mode thanks to an unlikely encounter with the Surfer in the opening 20 minutes when it seemed all the silver one was doing was flying around the planet changing the chemical composition of anything he came into contact with - something that was never explained properly, but allowed them to have some comedic moments by transferring the FF's powers between them all. 

I literally cannot emphasise just how shit this film is and how disappointing considering it pretty much had the same creative team on it as in the first film, but where that was quite a tight, well-scripted film, this was just corny and full of awful stereotypes and a lot of unnecessary innuendo. I also got the impression that the budget was less than the original despite the bigger premise - a common thing among Fox films, I believe - much of Reed's stretching ability seemed like bad CGI; the Thing seemed to have his head more humanised making him look a little weird and Sue's invisibility and force fields seemed to be used even less than the first film and with less effect. They still got the Torch right, but somehow managed to crank Johnny's twattishness up to level 11.

Awful, awful film.

Which brings up nicely to...

Fantastic Four (2015) - I know a person who liked this film. A person so contrary he'll like anything most others dislike, so we'll discount his opinion...

Let's get one thing straight; this isn't the Fantastic Four as anyone remembers them, nor does it feel like a standard superhero film. It's an attempt to post-modernise a concept first dreamt up in 1961 and to sex it up and make it appeal to a younger audience, because, you know, the FF are really three older people and the invisible one's hot-headed younger sibling. I mean, Reed Richards has got grey hair...

The problem with this new-look, ultra modern young team is that it doesn't work on all number of levels, but that's not to say the film isn't bad, even if it is. In fact, it's something of an enigma why they made this film the way they did. I understand it was the need, at the time, to keep the franchise going and now 20th Century Fox had acquired it they could destroy its heritage in the same way they destroyed the X-Men.

Whereas the first FF film had its feet firmly in the original concept, this did not. Instead of cosmic rays and space flights, this was about travelling to another dimension and being exposed to unknown forces that would transform our team of intrepid misfits and nerds into something better. At least that's what the tin is trying to say, but what it turns out to be is yet another superhero film where the US government has far too much of a say in everything. This is a film where the villain kind of has a decent enough reason to want to destroy the planet and the heroes are really dull and annoying and that probably shouldn't be how it was intended.

Toby Kebbell (most recently seen playing the chef in the odd horror/drama The Servant) plays Victor Von Doom, an altruistic scientist who dislikes playing by the rules of those governing him and has a history of being a bit of a loose cannon. Miles Teller plays prodigy Reed Richards, who since he was about 12 years of age has wanted to build a machine that taps into other dimensions(?!?!). His best pal is Ben Grimm, son of a bullying scrap yard owner and played by Billy Elliot himself, Jamie Bell. Linking this together is Susan Storm (Kate Mara), adopted daughter of uber-scientist Franklin Storm and also a genius in her own field and her... ahem... hot-headed, wanksplat of a brother Johnny, who is also a genius, this time at constructing things and is played by Michael B Jordan, the guy who played the villain in the recent Black Panther film. Johnny and his father are black Americans, Sue is white - this isn't a problem apart from the obvious 'Right On' signs posted throughout the film.

The clever ones - Ben is still out on the scrap heap - come up with a way of sending people to a new dimension, fleetingly referred to as Planet Zero, expect to be the first to test drive this new toy and are firmly told by the US government that thanks were in order but they were not having anything to do with the testing, because, you know, they're just kids and obviously won't be able to identify potential weapons benefits over their insatiable scientific curiosity. So the three boy scientists all get drunk - seemingly on one small hip flask - and decide 'fuck the government, we're going to test drive our new toy' and call Ben up to accompany them, because that's what you need when you're young scientists, take the guy who lives in a junk yard along for the ride.

Obviously, it all goes tits up pretty quickly; Victor is seemingly lost to the strange green energy flowing across the surface of this place and Sue is hit by a huge amount of that energy when they return from the hell dimension, conveniently by-passing her need to have gone there to acquire her super powers. This is where the film dallies briefly with the comic book; we have a Human Torch, a Thing, a Mr Fantastic and an Invisible Girl/Woman, except unlike the comic, they're all being experimented on by the government, so Reed escapes, leaving his pals behind to be turned into weapons. He then evades capture for over a year, as he tries to create his own teleportation device, until he's finally tracked down by Sue using her pre-power innate ability to spot patterns in anything (or the fact he's using a nickname on the internet that is also the name of the hero in his favourite book). She rats him out to help her dad to try and recreate the experiment and possibly help cure the four of them, even if the US government has different ideas.

Seriously, I've lost the will to live just typing two-thirds of that synopsis... The means to teleport is recreated, a team of crack US marines go over discover Doom, who shouldn't be but still is very much alive and looks slightly like the Doom from the comics, but not necessarily in an accurate way. They bring him back - I'm not sure why - so he can just about kill everybody at Area 51, return to his new home and initiate something to create a black hole to drag and destroy the Earth into it and leaving him to build a new world on his new home. The limp that was so pronounced when they found him mysteriously disappears and he blows everybody's heads up, apart from the FF. This Doom is a proper bastard, much worse than Julian McMahon, yet nowhere near as psychopathically driven. He almost sounds like a slightly demented climate activist.

From then on in it's a battle on Planet Zero between our heroes and Doom and by working as 'a team' they manage to despatch the villain, return to our planet, via the closing rift in space, and negotiate a new working contract with the US government where they're in charge - the end...

It's a truly dreadful film. It isn't really the FF despite the Thing possibly being a better bit of SFX than the first/original films. The Torch didn't seem as torch-like and some of his distance shots looked straight out of the 50p FX bin. Reed's stretching powers were, again, not really used to any great effect and while they managed to make Sue's invisibility and force fields slightly more cinematically interesting, they were more like the Not-So Fantastic Four than anything else

It is pretty much the lowest ranked modern non-MCU film on IMDB (not counting Man-Thing) and as a Marvel film it deserves every brick bat that's thrown at it; however, if it had been tweaked so that the heroes all didn't resemble Marvel's Fantastic Four, it would have, at least, felt like a weirdly original bit of plagiarism without any reason to put your finger on why. I have to admit I hated the film first time around and yet I feel less inclined to hate it on second viewing; I think it's a better film than Rise of the Silver Surfer, but only in that what we were watching was written to make a little more sense than the previous film - whether that was intentional or not.

We still have at least three years wait to see what the MCU's reboot of the FF is going to be like. We've had teasers that some incarnation of the team is likely to appear in upcoming MCU Multiverse-themed films - whether it's a brand new team or a reprise from any of the previous eight actors tasked with playing the team, who can say. I'd like to think that the FF could still be a massive smash for Marvel and could lead the wave after next of MCU films; they've got a third opportunity to do something right with Marvel's first family; the ball is in Kevin Feige's court.

Which brings us nicely to...

Hulk - You won't like it if it's Ang Lee...

... But first, a minor digression or two. 

Despite becoming a huge fan of the X-Men in the 1980 and 90s, it was never in my top 10 superhero comics until it became a comic book phenomena. I was never a real fan of Spider-Man; I enjoyed it, but, you know it wasn't a patch on the Fantastic Four, the Hulk or Thor. For me comics had to be extra special bonkers crazy with apocalyptic villains, marvellous set pieces and an unbelievable back drop. I like Spidey, Daredevil et al, but there were very few of their adventures that put them at the top of my must read pile. Usually when I collected my monthly comics it was the earthbound issues that sat at the bottom and might not get read for two days.

The Hulk was a comic I fell in love with; Ol' Greenskin was my hero. I don't know why, but when I first discovered Marvel Comics it was the Hulk that I liked the most (followed by the FF because they had The Thing and he was also powerful, but not as). So after the disappointment of the TV series in the 1970s, which felt like the Hulk had replaced Daredevil in an awful comic on screen, the news that there was going to be a Hulk film made me go into complete fanboy mode despite being 40 years old. So I felt I had a lot invested in this film, in the way that people who have nothing invested in something but believe they do kind of way...

This might be an apocryphal story and a mix of fact and hearsay, but Universal Pictures had massive hope that a Hulk film - like the comics - was a great idea. It was the most bankable character from Marvel because of the success of the TV series and therefore arguably a more iconic position as far as your average viewer was concerned than Spider-Man or X-Men fans, especially as they were from other production companies. Universal saw this as their opportunity and they wanted to do something that blew the competition away...

Marvel couldn't care less; it was another film.

That's how Ang Lee got associated with the film, because the production company could tempt an Oscar winning director because of the Hulk's place in culture. There had been a script floating about since the late 1990s that would largely become The Incredible Hulk a few years later, which was then appropriated by Marvel's MCU, but Ang had his own ideas and people he wanted involved and what we got is arguably the reason why all superhero films should avoid using auteurs and indy directors because you don't get the desired effect - Eternals is a perfect example, IMNHO.

So... Ang Lee's Hulk with Eric Bana [snigger], Sam Elliot, Nick Nolte and Jennifer Connelly - it had Oscar nominations written all over it. However, while there were a few moments in the film that evoked both the comics and the 70s TV show, this was an overwrought, over-acted and overblown film with absolutely zero levity in it. It was just a two hour plus humourless slog with little to redeem it.

Random observations: The Hulk was far too pretty. While for the only time in his cinematic life Ol' Greenskin was actually the size he should be and the strength anyone who knows the character would welcome, there's little or no gravitas about his face; it's almost cherub-like and obviously a riff on Bana's boyish looks. 

Jennifer Connelly looked like she was still starring in Aronofsky's Requiem For a Dream, where she portrayed a heroin addict. At times in this film she looked ill, almost like she had anorexia. She also flips between great actor and someone who phones it in - this was the latter for most of the film.

The desert scenes were arguably the best in the film; one of the things Ang did correctly was the conflict between the Hulk and Thunderbolt Ross's army team. No one has even got close to using Hulk's ability to almost fly through his tremendous leaps since and it was a welcome sight.

The tweaks to the origin sucked big time and essentially making Banner's father a low rent version of the Absorbing Man didn't really work, especially as he was the main villain of the film and the finale lasted less time that a teenager could have a wank in. 

Did I mention how utterly fucking humourless it is. There isn't one moment in the film where you crack so much as a smile. It was just relentlessly grim from the start to the finish, although the ending was the closest we got to a borderline light-hearted moment, with Bruce explaining to yet another arsehole - the film is riddled with them - that he really wouldn't like him when he's angry.

It was about 45 minutes too long. It paid homage to the TV series with lots of split screen shots and at times the special FX seemed almost cheap and tacky. Stan Lee and Lou Ferrigno both had brief cameos and I got the impression that Ang Lee wanted to make a film about anger, because anger was the underlying theme throughout the film. Bruce's dad - angry. General Ross - angry. Glenn Talbot - angry. Betty Ross - smouldering anger. Bruce - you won't like him when he's - angry. There's almost as much anger as there are arseholes, because let's not forget: Talbot - an arsehole. General Ross - an arsehole (who somehow managed to become a 3 star general). David Banner - arsehole. Even Betty managed to do a bit of an arsehole thing when she ratted her ex-boyfriend out to her dad after he saved her from gamma-irradiated dogs. I totally get why people didn't like this film, probably because virtually everyone in it was dislikeable and by the end of it you wanted Hulk to not only beat the shit out of them but fuck them so hard they remember where their arseholes are supposed to be...

I was stunned at the fact I've seen this film twice and yet still managed to not remember almost 2 hours of the 2 hours and 18 minutes. There was the element of familiarity - the dogs, the split screen, San Francisco, but huge swathes of it were like watching a new film and not one I was enjoying. I would imagine the team behind this were horrified because they had such hopes for it, what with an Academy Award winning director involved and that his attempts to make a serious, almost adult, superhero film ended up being such a huge pile of green shit...

Anyhow, there are at least four other non-MCU Marvel films that I haven't even seen, so that is being remedied...

Next time: Daredevil, Elektra and two Punisher reboots. I'm so excited my teeth itch.