On Jennifer Lawrence's ongoing Mystique

[Just to be clear: I have not watched X-Men: Apocalypse yet and this post will contain zero spoilers as a result.]

On the one hand I don't think I can really complain about Jennifer Lawrence wanting to do more X-Men movies. She's a fantastic actress and hopefully her future appearances will lean more towards the First Class than the Days of Future Past. So, definitely something to cautiously look forward to.

On the other hand, though, Fox's X-Men movies have a tendency towards mediocrity, a horrible “oh, just get it made” attitude that squandered the promise of the First Class reboot in the very next film. Until now everyone has been assuming that Fox's plan was to keep turning out X-Men films until Hugh Jackman ages out of the part, quits or dies and we were all sort of okay with that. There have been a few genuinely great movies in the franchise. It doesn't break anywhere near even on the good/bad divide but there have been good ones.

I'm not going to lie, I want to see Marvel and Fox come to a Spider-Man style shared custody deal and the one thing standing in the way of that until now was Hugh Jackman, a middle-aged man. Now Fox has Jennifer Lawrence's star power to rely on into the future and she's twenty years younger than him.

Then again, this is Hollywood we're talking about so she probably "counts" as being the same age as Jackman so the overall plan might remain unchanged.

The missed potential of Kate Mara's Sue Storm

If there's one thing above all others that annoyed me in Fant4stic then it's the treatment of Sue Storm. Beyond the unconvincing monkey, the unconvincing tree, the unconvincing characters and the unconvincing attempts to make me believe actual effort went into making this film, Sue Storm annoys me.

You see, I can't deny that Fox had a whole list of great ideas for her. They just didn't actually do anything with that list. Here is allthe things that Kate Mara's Sue is according to the film as shown:

She is a Kosovan orphan.

She speaks with a US accent but can summon her native accent at will.

She is Doctor Franklin Storm's adopted daughter.

She has a talent for spotting patterns.

She views music in terms that are both mathematical and poetic.

She uses her “pattern-spotting” talents as a form of psycho-analysis.

Both she and Johnny have history with Doom.

She is more academically accomplished and closer to her father than Johnny.

She obviously loves her brother.

Neither her adopted brother or father place any qualifier before calling her their “sister” or “daughter” in spite of their obviously different relationships with her.

This is what is done with these ideas:

Her Kosovan origins and accent are referenced once in a scene that only exists to justify Doctor and Johnny Storm being black now. Ditto, the fact she is adopted.

The pattern thing, oddly, is never used in conjunction with her being a scientist. Her job on the teleportation project is making the environment suits. Even though two scenes involve her operating complex computer programs, one of which involves her using her pattern-recognition skills, she is not one of the computer programmers on the project.

The poetic speech about patterns in music is only to reinforce the idea that the hot woman is cooler than Reed, the speccy socially awkward nerd. Oh, Fox, you and your hilarious stereotypes...

Doom's feelings for her are never actually addressed in her direct presence. He just tries to use the force of sheer machismo to scare Reed off in one scene. Her view on Doom? Never addressed, never even referenced, not even in the one moment where Doom sort of brings it up to her when he says he wanted her to be Eve to his Adam on the nightmare hellhole warpstone planet that gave them their powers.

Sue and Johnny relate to each other in only two ways: mutual low key affection or Johnny being outright hostile. There is little middle ground and nothing that bridges the two emotions. The attitude of the film makers honestly seems to be “They're siblings, okay?” with no other explanation needed. The obvious view of Sue being the “good child” Doctor Storm favours over the less-accomplished Johnny is brought up once (by Johnny to Doctor Storm, again cutting Sue out of an emotional storyline that should involve her) but never explored. No connection is made between the fact that both she and Johnny are builders of things on the project: she the environment suits and he the welding on the teleporter itself. Nor is it ever addressed that she and Johnny are the only two of the five empowered characters who “switch off” their powers using the properties of their costumes.

Beyond that, of course, is the fact that she's cut out of the expedition that gets them their powers, gaining her own as a side effect of the group's return from the alien/alternate world. Yes, a Fantastic Four movie in which one of the Fantastic Four is not present for the actual incident in which they get their powers. What's she off doing while the others are doing their ill-advised thing? Chasing after daddy! Good grief. And then the boys get drunk before deciding to take the teleporter for an unauthorised test fight and, obviously, Sue couldn't be present for that because she is a good little daddy's girl.

Let that be the legacy of this film, folks: Fox has managed the impossible feat of plunging head first into the Madonna/Whore Complex in a film with only one female character. 

The Movie Ramble: Fant4stic

Credit where it is due: the first 30-ish minutes of this film are okay, averagely decent, passes muster, good enough. Let's face it, if there's a phrase that characterises Fox superhero movies it's “good enough”. Their X-Men franchise has run fifteen years on being good enough. Yes, the characters were a bit light, the plot was a bit coincidental but a year ago I gave a pass to these guys giving Ellen Page magical time travel powers and no lines. I was ready for a good enough film on an X-Men: The Last Stand sort of level.

Then the Fantastic Four get their powers and it all falls apart. I am not kidding, there is that clear a dividing line between the good enough portion of this and the trainwreck portion.

Didn't matter, I was already obsessed by the chimp at that point. You see, in this version of events the FF (or, rather, Reed, Johnny, Ben and Doom) get their powers by jumping in a teleporter they built and visiting an alien planet. Or an alternate Earth, it's oddly ambiguous. First, though, they test it by sending a chimp through.

A CGI chimp. A poorly rendered CGI chimp. And so it was, during the many moments when my attention began to wander I wondered whether it was really that prohibitively expensive to rent a chimp for a day. My friend and I, first thing we said to one another when the lights came up, was to ask each other about the chimp.

It's not even the worst effect in the film. There's an unconvincing tree at one point. No kidding: there's a green screen effect so bad it makes a real, living tree look like bad CG.

There was a groan, an audible group groan in the cinema, when Reed Richards has the “we're stronger fighting together than separately” revelation.

If you've heard bad things about Kate Mara as Sue Storm, I'm telling you: it's all true. She isn't part of the expedition that gets them their powers, her own powers are an odd effect of the others coming back from the expedition. There's even a scene from the trailer which has been changed for the finished film: instead of using her forcefield to wreck a whole bunch of transport containers like a bomb going off the finished product has her barely able to shift two in a move she clearly has little to no fine control of. Her powers are barely used except as transport for the two non-flying boys. There is literally not a single sequence in which she appears that she is not somehow sidelined. There's one sequence that looks like it might involve her going off and doing something but then the heavy lifting gets handed to the Thing and a six pack of army men.

When early-60s Sue Storm compares favourably in terms of agency to 2015 Sue Storm, you know you're on to a loser.

What's more, Fox continues with this bizarre notion they have that Reed, Doom and Sue need to be a love triangle yet barely commit to it beyond a single scene in which Doom tries to scare Reed off while Sue... sits in the background blissfully unaware of this entire plot strand. Are we really in a place where, as a society, we can't get together a better modernisation for the origin of a mad scientist THAN FRAGILE MASCULINE SEXUAL SECURITY!? Especially when the source material gives us good, old-fashioned hubris and rivalry?

Oh, the hell with, let's just rail on all the politics: there's an environmentalist subplot that somehow justifies Doom wanting to destroy the world; a cartoonishly evil government man who wants to replicate the FF's empowerment to make super-soldiers; the fact that this plot involves the Thing taking human lives is just sort of shoved out there and never addressed; Doom is an unwashed internet activist stereotype when he first turns up but his personal politics don't actually seem to extend much beyond moody nihilism except here and there he has a plot-convenient spirit of exploration about him.

Consistency would be nice. This is a short bloody film and Doom disappears for a third of it, giving him a consistent character shouldn't be that hard. When he does reappear, having been abandoned for a year on the alternate Earth/alien planet he has ALL THE POWERS! He can kill people with a look just so long as they aren't important to the plot and shape the alien/alternate world to his will so long as it wouldn't protect him from taking a punch.

He is literally defeated because Reed Richards, super genius, works out that all four of them hitting him together is more effective than hitting him separately. Cue audience groaning.

So Doom can't settle on a personality; Reed has no recognisable emotions; Sue has nothing to do; Ben has none of the personality that usually allows him to cope with his condition; and Johnny... honestly, Michael B. Jordan ain't bad but he just isn't given the material. No one is. None of the character interactions really come off: Ben and Reed's friendship, as adults, is strangely sterile; Reed and Sue flirt once in lieu of anything resembling human interactions; Ben and Johnny's first actual conversation is in the final bloody scene; endless potential existed in exploring an uncommon sibling dynamic in a continuity where Sue is Johnny's adopted and more accomplished sibling yet it is never exploited; Doom and Reed's friendship is set up in a fun little montage of the group eating takeaway but is, again, never explored; and, I've already ranted about the anaemic wretchedness that is Fox's latest attempt to boil Doom's motivation down to feeling cuckolded.

Don't see this movie. Just don't. It isn't even a fun bad movie. A fun bad movie has to made in good faith with the actual ambition, misguided as it may be, that what is being made is going to be great. This has no ambition beyond merely existing to satisfy a contract. It didn't need to be good, it just needed to be made cheaply and that is achieved by having a middle third of it in which nothing happens at all. Just endless scenes of Vancouver forests and underground bunkers in which the cast think seriously about maybe having a character moment if they feel like it. 

Fant4stic: I don't know but I been told

Tomorrow afternoon, masochist that I am, I'll be watching the new Fantastic Four movie with a friend. Why would I want to do this terrible thing? Originally I was just going to let this one pass and check it out, basically, never. I got caught out with The Amazing Spider-Man, no way was I getting suckered into another of these IP rights hate boner flicks in the hopes the First Class lightning would strike twice.

Then the reviews started coming out. I expected negativity. I expected endless jokes about it being “less than Fantastic” or “I'm only giving it a 4 out of 10 for the gag”. I did not expect the phrase “urethra scraping” to come up.

And the director disowned the final cut.

And Miles Teller gave an interview in which he said critics would hate the movie because critics hate “this kind of movie”.

And it took an abysmally low figure at opening weekend.

Plus, Donna Dickens tweeted out a list of the scenes from the trailer not present in the movie which basically amounted to everything that mildly interested me in the trailer. Apparently there's no Thing jumping out of plane in the middle of a storm, no Doctor Storm bigging up Reed's abilities as worldchanging, no Johnny saying he'll need a heatproof lab. I know the film was going through re-shoots when that trailer came out but that is some seriously dodgy shit.

Mostly, I'm just seeing this because someone else wanted to and I think the epic ranting session in the pub afterwards will be entertaining. There's also an element of pity here. Hundreds of people spent maybe tens of thousands of man hours and millions of dollars to make this trainwreck for no better reason than no one at Fox wants to be the one face down on the carpet before their evil overlords explaining why they let the rights revert to Marvel and basically handed the hated enemy millions upon millions of dollars.

In all seriousness, on the off-chance that by Tuesday anyone other than me and my gentleman friend are in the cinema I fully expect the rest of the audience to be a guy in a jumpsuit and two small robots. 

Fox, please just give up on the Fantastic Four

So apparently Fox have announced that in their new (hate-boner commissioned) Fantastic Four movie Reed Richards will not have stretchy powers. Instead he will warp time and space around his limbs.

THERE IS NO MIDDLE FINGER BIG ENOUGH!

And no, this is not about “respect for the source material” or some fannish nonsense like that. I don't mind changes to the source material that do something to improve the plot. Take, for instance, making Drax an alien in Guardians Of The Galaxy instead of an altered human: that was a good idea because Star-Lord being completely disconnected from any human contact was important to the plot.

This, though? This is a change that will likely do literally nothing. His power is still making his limbs longer its just instead of being made out of rubber flesh he'll be manipulating time and space. Why? Because it's less silly and apparently Fox is one of those companies making comicbook movies that still cares about looking like adults.

I watched Avengers: Age Of Ultron on Thursday and they showed the Fantastic Four trailer beforehand. It was painfully generic, said nothing, showcased none of the supposed changes to the story besides Johnny being black and that science lab scene that makes it seem oddly likely the FF's powers will be induced intentionally instead of being a tragic accident. You know what, though? I can kind of dig that just this once. Yes, it ignores the central tragedy that all the pop art insanity of the FF is built on but since a) they screwed that up good and proper last time and b) I really, really doubt this thing will get a sequel, it might be interesting as a one off thing.

That still doesn't solve what seem to be the central problems here: this is a movie Fox doesn't want to make; has previously failed to make work to the point of cancelling the series on a cliffhanger; and has only commissioned so the rights won't revert to Marvel Studios and no one has to explain to their bosses how Marvel made hundreds of millions on an idea they couldn't score a profit on.

Its just dumb. Really dumb. Time and effort is being wasted here for no reason other than spite. Millions of dollars, too, on a film rebooting a series that couldn't make a good enough profit even when it largely prototyped the astronomically successful method Marvel Studios uses on all its films.

I'm serious. More with the first one than the second but Fox's last Fantastic Four efforts gave them pretty faithful costumes and aside from Doom they all had their established personalities and interpersonal dynamics intact. What alterations were made were either in service of streamlining the origin story or pointless alterations to Doom's personality to reference the actor's role in Nip/Tuck. Hey, I didn't say it was all good.

Yet now they seem to be going with the dark and gritty treatment that has gone so well for DC-Warner because this is just how insecurity manifests in the production of superhero movies.