It’s safe to say that it’s been a brilliant couple of weeks for the world of trailers, particularly if you are a fan of a good comic/science fiction film. We’ve seen releases of more footage for ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ and had our very first glimpse of the upcoming ‘Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice’ almost 12 months prior to its release.
In amongst all of those hotly anticipated trailers came the release of the second trailer for Fox’s upcoming ‘Fantastic Four’ reboot by ‘Chronicle’ director Josh Trank. Billed as a ‘contemporary reimagining’ of the team which debuted in Marvel comics back in 1961 ‘Fantastic Four’ (2015) is sadly not high on the must-watch lists of any of us here at GYCO tower.
This film does not look ‘bad’. What it doesn’t appear to be however is very ‘Fantastic Four’ in tone. The trailer confirms one of the major changes to the origin story of the team that has been long rumoured. Instead of a trip in to outer space leading to the events that give them their powers Reed Richards and co will be venturing to another dimension in order to get their powers.
I don’t want to dwell too much on the changes so let’s instead look at the trailer as it is: there’s some standard setup for the origin here with a boardroom of execs giving major props to the genius of Reed Richards and the development of technology to allow inter dimensional travel. There’s brief introductions to all of the major players aside from Von Doom and then we dive in to the action.
There’s some repeated footage from the previous trailer as the team go off on their misadventure but in this extended trailer we get the first footage of each of their powers. All look fairly standard and appear as expected. The biggest moment of the trailer if the final reveal of The Thing who looks substantially better as a mo-cap than he did in the rubber suit of the previous films.
There’s room before the trailers climax for an ominous shot of Doctor Doom’s face in the classic green hood but little time to uncover his motives or any changes to his character from that of the comics.
Aside from leaked details there’s very little to be gleaned from this trailer about the story beyond the origins of the titular team.
Don’t get us wrong we will go see this film at the cinema but we’re not going to be expecting anything groundbreaking. It is worth noting however that this trailer is playing in front of ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ in the UK.
