Four Actually Fantastic Things About the Previous Fantastic Four Movies… Thank God This List Doesn’t Go to Five
I’ve yet to see The Fantastic Four: First Steps, but it seems that the movie, which comes out today, might have finally gotten things right after four truly terrible previous films. First there was the low-budget, never-released Roger Corman-produced film in 1994 made simply to hold onto the film rights of the characters. Then, in 2005, came Fox’s near-universally panned movie by Tim Story and its 2007 sequel that did about as well as the first. Most recently, there was the stupidly-titled 2015 Fant4stic that everyone hated even more than the two Fox films from a decade earlier.
Still, I’d argue that none of these four films are entirely without merit. Here’s one actually fantastic thing from each of them…
While Fant4stic isn’t the worst Fantastic Four movie (that distinction belongs to the 1994 Corman film), it’s the hardest to defend — this absolute dud had a $120 million budget. Plus, the recipe for an even moderately good comic book film was well established by then. But from never mentioning the team’s name to the all-black tactical suits, everything about the movie suggested it was profoundly embarrassed by its source material.
Finding something positive to say about this movie is hard, but I’ll admit that the scenes with young Reed and Ben becoming friends in the start of the film were charming. It’s just too bad it was all downhill from there.
The Silver Surfer Kicked Ass in ‘Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer’
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer suffered from the same shortcomings as the first movie in the series, including a mediocre cast, simplistic storytelling and a practical effects version of The Thing that left a lot to be desired. Its shining light, however, was its portrayal of The Silver Surfer, the herald of the planet-eating Galactus.
While Galactus was technically the second movie’s big bad antagonist, he gets very little screentime. When we do see him, he’s nothing more than an amorphous cloud. Instead, much of the focus shifted to the Silver Surfer, and we learn that he’s a tragic prisoner of Galactus named Norrin Radd, who only agreed to serve the planet eater to save his own planet. Portrayed by Doug Jones for the body and Lawrence Fishburne for the voice, The Silver Surfer is the same cold, stoic alien who saves Earth from becoming Galactus’ lunch as he is in the comics.
Despite the limited visual effects of the time, the Silver Surfer looked exactly as he should — much like how the CGI technology of 1991 was all we needed for the T-1000 in Terminator 2.
Many Fantastic Four fans have been griping that the new movie features the female Silver Surfer, Shalla-Bal, instead of the more well-known Norrin Radd, but I’m okay with the switch-up because we already have a pretty great Norrin Radd movie, it just happens to be trapped inside of a not-so-good Fantastic Four movie.
The Terrible Roger Corman Film Gave Us a Great Documentary
The 1994 Fantastic Four produced by B-movie legend Corman is easily the worst of the bunch. With just a $1 million budget, the movie looked like shit, and the acting was just as bad — as was the story and the script. However, there’s a 2015 documentary about the film that’s excellent. Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s The Fantastic Four deftly chronicles the very funny behind-the-scenes story of this god-awful movie.
Michael Chiklis Was the Perfect Ben Grimm
I’m confident that Ebon Moss-Bachrach will do a fine job in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, but my Ben Grimm will always be Chiklis, and his casting was clearly the best thing about the 2005 film. He combined the absolute badass tough-guy thing he brought to Vic Mackey in The Shield and merged it with the everyman charm he brought to Tony Scali in The Commish, which is exactly what the character needs. Even if the prosthetic suit of The Thing had some technological limitations — again, this was 20 years ago — there’s no question that Chiklis owned this part. Even Stan Lee agreed, saying at the time, “I don’t think anybody on Earth could have played (The Thing) as well as he did.”
