Trailer Park: Fantastic Four

In which I discuss the latest movie trailers.

There's been a lot of questioning looks being cast Fantastic 4's way in the last couple of months.  The unduly young cast, the excessively grim tone and revelations that Doctor Doom isn't a scientist and a diplomat, but a blogger, all contributed to everybody's well-founded concerns about the direction that Fox has chosen to take with the franchise.  It doesn't even look like it's going to tie in with their X-Men series, which was such an obvious tie-in that I'm shocked how they could have missed it.  They've just released the movie's second trailer, which you can check out here:

When all is said and done, however, this trailer works for me.  The cast is still way too baby-faced for my tastes and the tone is considerably darker than Marvel's premiere superhero team calls for, but it none-the-less works.  It's not quite as dark or heavy-handed as the first trailer was, which gives me hope that they've lightened things up (at least a little bit) from what they've been marketing it as until now.

We also get to see the team's superpowers in action for the first time, and they look considerably better than their previous incarnations.  Reed's stretching powers, Johnny's pyrokinesis, Grimm's elemental form and Sue's invisibility and force field projections all look awesome, and that's something that a Fantastic Four movie hasn't been able to say before.  And then there's Doom.

Forget everything that you've heard about Doom until now.  Doctor Doom looks awesome in this trailer.  Every version of the character since the 60's has looked varying degrees of stupid: chunky, ill-fitting metal armor that's ill-suited to conveying emotion.

The new version of the character looks less like The Man in the Iron Mask and more like some kind of techno-organic organism that simply is metallic the same way that we're made of flesh.  I can't say if we're still getting the inane "blogger turned supervillain" story that's been teased until now or if he'll factor in as a native inhabitant of the dimension that the team crossed into to get their powers, but I'm sure he'll turn out to be better than Julian McMahon

That's another thing that I can't help but get excited about.  I've always been a sucker for alternate dimensions, and this plays perfectly into that interest for me.  Is Doom the ruler (maybe sole survivor) from the dimension in question?  Does he simply tag along and get powered up the same way that the Fantastic Four did?  Is one of the dimensions that they'll eventually sneak off to the X-Men Cinematic Universe?  The possibilities are beyond infinite, which isn't a bad way to start off a series.

I still have my reservations about the new movie, but the worst of my fears have been stemmed for now.  I'm slightly more eager to see this than I was before, and at this point I'll take every ounce of excitement that I can get.  Hopefully the movie itself will be better still.

So what are your thoughts about the new Fantastic Four trailer?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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