Completely agree, Winter. One of the things I like so much about the Avengers. I think the original X-Men films did it best, having 3 generations.

Yeah seems Marvel really likes using their Ultimate storyline for their movies. The whole being young is straight from Mark Miller's run so I'm expecting them to be part of a think tank like in the comics (let's just hope Reed doesn't turn evil in any sequels).

I thought all the first actors were great casting choice but just with a terrible script. Just a little confused with Johnny being black yet Sue being white, should've made her a sista. Now I thought Michael Chiklis was fantastic (pun intended!) as Ben Grimm so I'm a little on the fence with Jamie Bell. He was great in the Eagle but Ben Grimm was a football star in college so the movie choice to pick a small framed actor for Aunt Petunia's favorite nephew is little shocking to me. Shocked but glad as I'm pretty small frame myself in real life so I'm glad my body type is considered for the role of my favorite FF as ever-loving Thing! :D

Please Hollywood just stick to making the FF explorers of the unknown...HERE! Just use this as reference for goodness sake!!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eue8XngYdzM

Fighting Patriot wrote:

Yeah seems Marvel really likes using their Ultimate storyline for their movies. The whole being young is straight from Mark Miller's run so I'm expecting them to be part of a think tank like in the comics (let's just hope Reed doesn't turn evil in any sequels).
I thought all the first actors were great casting choice but just with a terrible script. Just a little confused with Johnny being black yet Sue being white, should've made her a sista. Now I thought Michael Chiklis was fantastic (pun intended!) as Ben Grimm so I'm a little on the fence with Jamie Bell. He was great in the Eagle but Ben Grimm was a football star in college so the movie choice to pick a small framed actor for Aunt Petunia's favorite nephew is little shocking to me. Shocked but glad as I'm pretty small frame myself in real life so I'm glad my body type is considered for the role of my favorite FF as ever-loving Thing! :D
Please Hollywood just stick to making the FF explorers of the unknown...HERE! Just use this as reference for goodness sake!!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eue8XngYdzM

Isn't the FF movie still owned by FOX and not Marvel?

GhostHack wrote:

depression.
why calll it the fantastic four, if you're just gonna make it up from scratch :-/

I pretty much thought to same thing about the Abrams Star Trek reboot movies. To me they were pretty well done "generic space sci-fi action movies" that were fun to see and had a great cast of actors... but they weren't really Star Trek movies. Abrams himself ensured that he wasn't even attempting to take the canon seriously by coming up with his time travel alternate universe cop-out. At best I consider them "Star Trek adjacent".

Winter wrote:

As always, I reserve my full judgement until I actually see the thing, but my initial reaction is a dislike of the younger cast.

Maybe they just have the standard hope to make a trilogy out of this reboot and wanted to make sure the cast wouldn't "age" on them too badly. *shrugs*

Automatisch wrote:

Lothic, the star trek reboot used time travel to change things: there was an explaination. This jerk is changing things only because he can. Big big BIG difference

Eh, Abrams came up with the time travel alternative universe plotline as a thinly-veiled attempt to explain/justify his main desire to give himself poetic license to do whatever he wanted with the franchise. He did that because he could, period. He could have just as easily given us a clean break with a straightforward, non time travel oriented reboot with the new cast which frankly probably would've worked better than the hot-mess he foisted on us.

The guys behind this new FF are changing things as they see fit (or desire) as well. The only difference I see is that maybe the FF guys aren't bothering to try to be smooth about it by working a plausible excuse for their changes directly into their scripts. *shrugs*

GhostHack wrote:

To be fair... I think Abram's was tasked with "Rebooting" Star Trek.... and made the conscious choice to do so in a way that was least disrespectful to the original (alternate time stream, take it or leave it) rather than somehow claiming that the original movies "didn't happen"
This is a different kettle of fish. This isn't so much "taking the story in a different direction with respect to the source material".... as it is "keeping the minimum amount of details to still justifiably use the title, so we can rope in fans even though they'll hate it"

Well I personally think it was ironic that once Abrams "cleared the way" to have a completely new Star Trek timeline to play with all he did with it (so far) was to make a second movie that for all intents and purposes was a fairly ham-fisted remake/reimagining of The Wrath of Khan. So much for Abrams branching out and creating his own stories in his own alternate universe. Talk about being "disrespectful" to the original Star Trek canon - he couldn't even come up with a second new story with a new villain to go with it. If all Abrams wanted to do was pull off the [url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1386703/]Total Recall remake maneuver[/url] on Star Trek he didn't need to come up with the elaborately convoluted time travel conceit of his first movie. Just saying. *shrugs*

So while you claim that the "keeping the minimum amount of details to still justifiably use the title, so we can rope in fans even though they'll hate it" tactic more appropriately describes what the FF people are doing I would actually say that it applies very equally with what Abrams did with JJTrek™.

P.S. For what it's worth they managed to create an entire prequel Star Trek TV series ([url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0244365/]ST:ENT[/url]) that didn't need to resort to any silly alternate timeline trickery to make it "fit in" with all the previous Star Trek canon. By covering the "origin" of the original series Abrams' had the perfect opportunity to more or less do the same thing Enterprise did and he fumbled it very badly. In hindsight his alternate timeline "reboot strategy" left much to be desired.

At the risk of derailing the topic....

Enterprise, while a fun show isolated from all concepts of Star Trek, was a glamorized bastardization Berman took to completely screwing over canon he wrote when on the TNG crew, and could have been left isolated except he pulled a douchebag maneuver with the series finale, going back on his original assertion all events of the ENT crew would be considered "lost files" and promptly rewrote that the TNG crew had full access to it in holodeck files.

If ENT set the bar for rebooting Star Trek, then it was set SO LOW in my opinion that the Abrams movies succeed in passing that bar.

As for Fantastic Four, it is owned by Fox, and I'm vaguely press-aware they intend to construct an equally monolithic 20th Century Fox branded Marvel Universe to compete against the already monolithic Disney branded Marvel Universe (so far in fact as to force both studios to use different actors for Wanda and Pietro Maximov and disallowing any mention of Avengers/X-Men in the opposite movieverses). I don't care for the casting decisions, but I'm open minded enough to check out the movie on Netflix/Redbox when it gets home distribution. In comparison, I am more open-minded to the younger F4 cast than Ben Affleck as Batman. So again, bar set low, easily surpassed.

summer-heat wrote:

At the risk of derailing the topic....
Enterprise, while a fun show isolated from all concepts of Star Trek, was a glamorized bastardization Berman took to completely screwing over canon he wrote when on the TNG crew, and could have been left isolated except he pulled a douchebag maneuver with the series finale, going back on his original assertion all events of the ENT crew would be considered "lost files" and promptly rewrote that the TNG crew had full access to it in holodeck files.
If ENT set the bar for rebooting Star Trek, then it was set SO LOW in my opinion that the Abrams movies succeed in passing that bar.

To be clear I never claimed that ST:Enterprise was a "good" show. I just claimed that it didn't need to resort to the kind of time travel shenanigans that Abrams thought was necessary to "preserve" the canon. And again the ultimate irony was that Abrams made a big deal about creating an alternate Star Trek timeline for his first movie with which he ultimately didn't really use for his second "remake of an original timeline" movie.

Again to bring this back to FF I would say that like the FF folks Abrams decided to "play god" with the Star Trek franchise in a way that was far more destructive than was really necessary for an effective reboot. Just because these newer filmmakers can ignore canon doesn't mean they should.

Automatisch wrote:

I was never really a Trek fan. I think that the alternative timeline serves to "reboot" without throwing awat 50 years worth of canon. It is a way of recognizing the original work without saying it doesn't matter. However,this may be due to the fact that I am a comic junkie and a multiverse is no big deal to me. If JJ ruined what made Star Trek fun, then I sympathise.

I wouldn't really say Abrams ruined Star Trek in the strictest sense because he never really made a "Star Trek" movie in the first place. Instead he made a couple of generic, big box-office, sci-fi action space adventure movies that were closer in tone to the Star Wars or Indiana Jones paradigm than they were to anything Abrams thinks he knows about Star Trek.

With that said I have higher hopes that he'll be able to handle the new Star Wars trilogy much more so than if he ever has anything to do with another "Star Trek" show.

Lothic wrote:

Abrams is an admitted Star WARS super fan. There's nothing really wrong with being a Star Wars fan but usually people tend to like one franchise more than the other, even if they generally like both.
So I strongly suspect Abrams' level of "investment" in Star Trek was always a bit half-hearted (half-assed?) because his ultimate goal always was to get to do the new Star Wars movies. The fact that he practically "phoned-in" the plot behind the last Star Trek movie attests to that suspicion.

Yep, I actually think he can do justice to Star Wars (especially with Kasdan writing) because SW was never much about thinking the way ST was on its good days.

Lothic wrote:

The way I see it good for him - we can only hope whoever gets the helm of Star Trek for the next movies and/or TV shows will be more "enthusiastic" about the franchise than J.J. was.

Agreed. I think the actors are ok if they could be in something that is more Star Trek than the films they have been given so far.

agreed, Auto... I don't mind "Universe 619" or something.... but I don't think that's how they're going to play it....

GhostHack wrote:

lothic... you are accepting the fact that JJ Abrams didn't write the screenplay of Into Darkness... right?
he just directed it and his studio helped pay for it.
blame Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof for the "phoned in" script

I can easily blame "Head of the Franchise" Abrams for not knowing any better than to let Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof and whoever else get away with "phoning it" in.

I'll stick by my contention is that if Abrams actually cared more about Star Trek things would've been better. My guess is that he was too preoccupied at the time with making his deals to get involved with the new Star Wars trilogy. *shrugs*

Winter wrote:

For anyone who hasn't heard:
Reed Richards/Mr. Fantstic - Miles Teller (provided scheduling can be worked past)
Sue Storm/Invisible Woman - Kate Mara
Johnny Storm/The Human Torch - Michael B. Jordan
Ben Grimm/The Thing - Jamie Bell
I think they made the wrong choice with a young cast. I think they are all decent actors, and I have no problem with color-blind casting (indeed, I encourage it). But it is their youth that bugs me.

They made that goof in the first one with Mr. Fantastic.

They made that goof in Superman Returns with both Superman and Lois (23-year old baby-faced Kate Bosworth, who [i]5 years earlier was a world-class star reporter and Superman's lover?[/i])

What clown puts a hundred million dollars at risk on such decisions? Did nobody involved get the same instant gut reaction that it felt wrong that I did?

I'd also like to point out that Michael B. Jordan, Miles Teller, and Kate Mara are older than Chris Evans and Jessica Alba were when the first movie was made. Unless everyone's talking about the actual characters' ages.

Better have a Stan lee cameo

Adoption!

Their parents were probably gay, see, so they had to adopt.