Fantastic Four Trailer Release Reveals Jeremy Slater Lied To Us All

by

The Fantastic Four Trailer’s was released last week, and our first look at the controversial reboot starring Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Bell and Toby Kebbell was so hotly anticipated that it amassed 42 million online views – a record for 20th Century Fox that surpassed X-Men Days Of Future Past. If you’ve not seen the trailer, take a look here:

If you think about what you’ve seen there’s not much to the trailer, or if you think again about what you’ve seen there’s a lot to the trailer. For those who grew up with Sue Storm, Ben Grimm, Reed Richards, and Johnny Storm, what you will see is totally different and implies a totally different story. And, if you’ve followed the development of this movie, you will also realize that it’s screenwriter, Jeremy Slater , lied to us all.

(And calls into question how Kevin Feige would have handled The Fantastic Four, as well as can MARVEL get control of the property away from 20th Century Fox?)

First, before I get to that, I have to say I have no problem with the amazing African American actor Michael B. Jordan (Chronicle, Fruitvale Station) playing Johnny Storm. That he is black means there has to be some reason why Sue Storm, played by the terrific Kate Mara, is still his sister; she was adopted. (Which means that her adopted father’s black in this movie, another cool development.) Second, I have a massive problem with the crazy distilling of Victor Von Doom into nothing more than a computer programmer with the name . OK, maybe he’s a super-bright guy, but the name change to Victor Domashev, who is, as Toby Kebbell, who plays him, put it to Collier’s Steve Weintraub, from Victor Von Doom, and with the “Doom” being his blogger handle, was a bit disappointing to me. But here’s Toby talking about it:

But what this all reveals is that Jeremy Slater lied to us all when a leak of the The Fantastic Four story plot planned for the movie hit the Internet and wound up on i09.com, leaving him to say it was “100 percent bullshit”. Take a read:

Reed is a genius convenience store clerk with Ben. Reed’s parents don’t care about him, and Ben’s dad is abusive. They’re good friends and have each other’s backs. Reed writes a paper for community college on teleportation that attracts the attention of Dr. Franklin Storm, CEO of the Baxter Building research center.

Storm has a son, Johnny, and an adoptive daughter, Sue, whose father, Storm’s old partner, died in an experiment gone wrong. Johnny and Sue are party kids, and Sue is particularly disdainful of science. Reed and Sue don’t get along at first.

Victor Doomashev is a anti-social Eastern European computer programmer and hacktivist who calls himself “Doom”. He hates the 1%, particularly Storm, whom he claims corrupts science for profit.

Storm uses Reed’s paper to complete some equations on a machine to access another dimension, the N-Zone. Reed invites Ben to watch the machine being turned on. Sue and Johnny are also there. Doom manages to hack into the Baxter Building’s servers and use a computer virus to damage the machine, which explodes. Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben are exposed to otherwordly energy and become mutants with powers that they can’t control.

Storm takes them to the Baxter Building and creates containment suits for their powers. They begin to train. Reed and Storm also begin developing a way to revert the accident. Sue blames Reed for everything, but they eventually become friends and then a couple. Ben can switch off his powers when he’s not in danger. Johnny changes colors based on heat intensity, and Sue has some borderline telekinetic thing. Reed is pretty much Reed.

Doom finds out that the four have acquired powers and becomes angry it’s not him, so he comes up with a plan to break into the Baxter Building to access the N-Zone through the rebuild machine. As a distraction, he reprograms a bunch of stolen military drones, the “Doombots”, to attack the building. The four come together as a team for the first time and save people.

Doom activates the machine and gets technopathy powers or something, basically energy blasts and making machines obey to him, and a fight ensues. The machine goes critical, and, in order to prevent it from exploding and destroying the city, the four push into it and Storm shuts it off.

There’s a countdown before it reaches critical mass. Inside the N-Zone, the four battle Doom again, and manage to leave him trapped there after he disfigures himself soaking up too much power. The Four manage to escape, but Ben gets the blunt of it to protect Reed and can’t switch back.

The machine is destroyed, Doom is gone, the four have learned to work as a team, and Reed vows to find a cure for Ben. And it ends there.

That story, what Jeremy Slater said was, again, “100 percent bullshit” as it turns out, is anything but. It’s the story, folks. Moreover, it’s a rather juvenile one.

Once again Hollywood outside of Jon Favreau, misses the epic storylines that MARVEL Comics characters call for, and focus on something, well, “lo fi”. And while you say that’s what Fox wanted, that was a bad call.

The seeds of a movie that could be considered for Oscar best picture concern a story about some problem we’re dealing with that a super hero can fix. Something like ISIS, or a kind of fictional Mid East terrorist group like The Ten Rings in Iron Man 1. But a Russian computer programmer who’s jealous of the Fantastic Four gaining powers he thinks he should have? Really? Trank says he’s pissed off with the 1 percent and that includes Reed Richard’s investor? That’s hardly the kind of motivation that leads to a person creating all kinds of tech that would imply he’s got access to “one percent level” money.

Or how about Reed being a “genius convenience store clerk”? Reed Richards has been a top scientist studying the cosmos. Trying to give hope to real convenience store clerk’s by putting Reed Richards in the same job show a total misread for the talents that led him to the space journey that would change his life.

And what’s the deal about teleportation to the freaking N Zone? Why take space exploration totally out of the picture? It’s really bothersome to show this disinterest in space and at a time when, with global warming, we should be thinking about the next place humans can go before it’s too late. Rockets are real and I’m sure Elon Musk would have been happy to pay for part of the movie if only to get SpaceX some screen time.

Moreover, the story implies a small event that few in reality would know about. CNN can’t get a camera crew to the N Zone to see the battle. The events, on the whole, are not really public ones – the kind that are associated with a super hero saving the World, or at least a good part of our society.

But to come back home, Mr. Slater lied to us, big time. Maybe he was so upset with how much people disliked the story, he had to come up with some smokescreen. He did. But it didn’t last and now, folks are more worked up than before.

Still, there is a silver-lining in all of this: the look and feel of the movie is, itself, more epic and less cheesy than the other The Fantastic Four movies. It’s darker and more, well, deeper in its overall tone. And it has some of the best young actors of our current generation in it.

Let’s see what happens August 7th, 2015.

Leave a Comment