The Fantastic Four - Teaser Trailer Talk

The Fantastic Four - Teaser Trailer Talk

The film is directed by Josh Trank, known for films like Chronicle and for being announced as a Star Wars stand-alone film director. Writer Simon Kinberg, who has worked on Days of Future Past and is currently working on Star Wars: The Force Awakens will join him. The story follows the famous and original superhero group ‘The Fantastic Four’. In contrast to the films released a few years ago, this story will see a slightly younger cast and will use a different source for their strange and unique powers. In the original imagining of the team, they would gain their powers through cosmic rays but this new film draws on ‘The Ultimate Fantastic Four’ series, where the characters gain their powers through teleportation/dimensional travel.

The trailer has a darker tone than what we’ve previously seen in the cinematic adaptation of this franchise. It has an almost horror tone, with some scenes being very dark, graphic almost (I refer to the scene with the character crawling on their front. Very dark and this is followed later by the team climbing some sort of mountain/rock face). Trank and Kinberg have mentioned in interviews that there is an influence of Cronenberg throughout, although I've not yet properly familiarised myself with his work, I've heard experts in the area say there is a definite influence.

As I said earlier, the cast is significantly younger and this fits in with the overall tone and theme of the next generation taking on scientific, discovery challenges.  The trailer also shows us some small glimpses of our heroes using these newfound powers. The main ones include the Thing breaking out of his ‘rock’ cocoon-like structure, although I'm not too sure what is happening and the Human Torch ‘flaming-on’, which I thought looked pretty awesome.

I suspect the people who have put this teaser together have purposely left out Mr Fantastic’s and The Invisible woman’s powers because these will be visually unusual and also counterproductive as these will obviously ruin the surprise of seeing it on the big screen.

The cast is quite a ‘dramatic’ based group. Miles Teller is ‘mister fantastic’ (PUN INTENDED) in Whiplash, which I have previously reviewed. Kate Mara having been in 127 Hours, Michael B. Jordan having been in Trank’s previous work Chronicle and Fruitvale Station (which I've only heard good things about, and his performance in particular) and Jaime Bell who’s always pretty good in every movie he stars in, in my opinion. ‘Doom’s’ character is being played by Toby Kebbell, who was sensational in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

I will say the trailer made me think of Interstellar and Prometheus, both films I liked. It is still a safe trailer and does the job. The ‘Doom’ character will decide the fans conflicted about whether this film will work.

Also there has been so much crap directed towards the movie, about Michael B. Jordan being the Human Torch… It was just depressing to see, it doesn’t matter that he isn’t what the comic book shows, he’s playing a fictional character, where the director and producers have artistic license on who they eventually cast. Get over it. 

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