fajrdrako | Fantastic Four: the movie... (Reply)

I was ten years old when I fell in love with the Fantastic Four. I already liked comics, especially Batman, and I liked them a lot, but it hadn't quite slipped over the line into fannish obsession. Then one day I picked up Fantastic Four #18, "The Return of the Super-Skrull". That was it. I was done for. My love affair with comics then lasted forever, and counting.

So I was actually resistant to seeing the Fantastic Four movie. I didn't want to see my precious characters in the FF treated like, for example, some of the characters in X-Men; or a treatment like Matt and Elektra got in Daredevil. From the trailer, it looked like good special effects, but I don't like movies full of explosions and people bashing each other. Would I be squirming throughout? It has Ioan Gruffudd as Reed Richards.

Ioan. Though he isn't one of my top-ranking favourite actors, I loved his Horatio Hornblower (and wrote a lot of HH slash to prove it). And loved him in Century City. Unfortunately he was also in the most dreary and depressing movie I have ever seen, Salmon and Gaynor. Jessica Alba, Michael Chicklis, and the guy who was Johnny Storm were just names to me. Not, physically speaking, Ioan is perfect for Reed - have I mentioned how much I adored Reed Richards when I was aged ten to, say, thirteen? With him to inspire me, I wanted to be a scientist, and to discover the Negative Zone. Until I discovered I was really bad at physics. I still adored Reed Richards, who was high on my list of perfect men. Could I stand it if he was a dud in the movie?

I found myself making excuses not to see it.

I waited for some sort of reassurance. Reviews don't count; reviewers don't understand comics. (Okay, maybe one in a hundred does, in the comic book press, or on sites like aint-it-cool.com.) My friend Lil, who knows nothing about comics, said she liked it. I wasn't really reassured. Lyn said she liked it - that was better; Lyn knows comics well.

Today I felt tired and enervated with the heat. A movie was just the thing. So I went with Sheila and Paul to see Fantastic Four. How bad could it be? If it was awful, I could still snooze in air-conditioned comfort, and eat popcorn.

When the movie, I found myself getting excited. I was afraid to hope... and yet I was loving it.

Then it didn't let me down. It wasn't perfect; I have, really, three complaints, all minor.

In Fantastic Four #1, there is a famous scene, right after the FF get their powers, where they put their hands on top of each other's hands so their arms form a cross, and they swear loyalty to each other. I wanted to see that somewhere in the movie, and I didn't. Maybe it was just too hokey but it spelled out, to me, what the FF really were.

Johnny Storm should have seemed younger; Sue Storm should have seemed older. Their dialogue and roles were perfect, it was just their looks that were at odds with the roles.

It should have been mentioned that Alicia was a sculptress.

The best moment of all was Stan Lee as Willie Lumpkin.

It isn't a perfect movie, but it captured the spirit of the comic in just the right way, the spirit that captivated me when I was ten years old. It will probably never be a big hit with the crowd that doesn't like comics, and it isn't a movie that transcends itself - but it may be the best adaptation of a comic I have ever seen. Faithful to the characters through and through, even though they updated the story - exactly as they should have.