Published July 19, 2014 by Devin Faraci
FANTASTIC FOUR Actors Cause Internet Uproar With Misunderstood Quotes
The internet freaks out when Kate Mara says FANTASTIC FOUR isn't based on any comics.
https://badassdigest.com/2014/07/19/fantastic-four-actors-cause-internet-uproar-with-misunderstood-quotes/
Quick, on which comic storyline is Captain America: The First Avenger based? You can point to elements from Captain America Comics #1 that appear in the film, very specifically in the Cap origin sequence, and you can certainly see the influence of some comic book storylines on the film, but in general it's not really based on any one comic. Neither is Thor: The Dark World. Or The Avengers. Or The Dark Knight. They pull elements from the comics, but they're not real translations of any one comic story; even Captain America: The Winter Soldier plays very fast and quite loose with the famous story from which it draws its name.
I mention this because there has been an uproar about some comments made by the Fantastic Four cast this week, especially Kate Mara, who said:
I’ve never been a fan of comics, I’ve never actually read one. I was going to for this movie but the director said it wasn’t necessary. Well, actually he told us that we shouldn’t do it because the plot won’t be based on any history of anything already published.
Which sent off alarm bells across fandom because a lot of people expect to be pandered to in these situations. They expect the actors and filmmakers to be able to point to a specific storyline or run and say "This is what we're doing," even though it almost never is. Here's the thing about Mara's quote: you could apply it to almost any superhero movie released. Hell, I just saw Guardians of the Galaxy and while I could tell you exactly what run influenced it, the film isn't adapting any single story whatsoever. If there's no one to one storyline you're using why send your non-comic reading female lead down a rabbit hole of different iterations and versions of these characters, who have morphed and changed over five decades?
I don't know much about the latest drafts of the script, but I can tell you that previous drafts prove the concerns that this movie isn't drawing from any Fantastic Four storyline wrong. Earlier drafts had many elements that will be familiar to readers of the first Ultimate Fantastic Four arc, which in broad strokes is a nice update of a very space age comic concept. The idea of Reed and friends stealing a rocket for a joyride seems weird now; creating a dimensional portal feels way more correct. And all the school stuff - the Baxter Building as a high-level science genius academy - works nicely as well. These have been elements present in previous drafts of the script.
Meanwhile Michael B. Jordan said stuff that also upset people, especially those who maybe never read Fantastic Four. He said:
It’s not your typical superhero film, you know, we aren’t looking at this as like, being superheroes. We’re more or less a bunch of kids that had an accident and we have disabilities now that we have to cope with, and try to find a life afterwards – try to be as normal as we can.
That's a different spin than Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had... sort of. He's certainly describing The Thing to a tee here. And you know what? The Fantastic Four are not superheroes in the modern conventional cinematic sense. They're science adventurers, explorers and an occasional defense system against the truly weird and bizarre and malevolent. They don't fight crime, they get tangled up in interdimensional wars. Their main enemy is the ruler of a foreign nation. They don't fit the superhero mold as we know it from movies, and the fact that director Josh Trank gets that is good. I honestly don't know how any serious reader of Fantastic Four can look at this next quote and not feel ecstatic:
One of the good things about the Fantastic Four is that everybody is different. And it’s like, sometimes family doesn’t always consist of your relatives or by blood. Sometimes your best friends can feel more like family than your cousins. I think everybody kind of has that same feeling. When you go through an accident together, when you go through a traumatic event, sometimes that brings you closer together.
That is Stan and Jack's vision for Fantastic Four in a nutshell - this unconventional family brought together by strange circumstance. I love that this is the angle. How can you be a fan of the property and not feel good about this?
Will Josh Trank's Fantastic Four be any good? Beats me. But it sounds like he's making a science fiction movie centered around the concept of family, which is what this adaptation should be.
