20th Century Fox has unveiled the first teaser trailer for its forthcoming reboot of the much-maligned Fantastic Four cinematic franchise, cannily referring to itself as "the studio that brought you X-Men: Days Of Future Past" and ignoring all culpability for the mid-2000s shit-fests that were the original Fantastic Four films in the process.
Starring Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara and Jamie Bell as the titular foursome, with Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes alumnus Toby Kebbell stepping into the middling shoes of Julian McMahon as the reimagined Victor Domashev/Doom. (Side note: what was wrong with "Victor Von Doom"? Comics films need to lose their embarrassment about the source material.)
Billed as a "contemporary reimagining" (because 2005's origin flick was so vintage and all) of Marvel's first family, the film will focus on "four young outsiders who teleport to an alternate and dangerous universe, which alters their physical form in shocking ways" — admittedly, some more shocking than others (being stretchy isn't really comparable to being made of orange living rock on the "ability to maintain a normal life despite awful misfortunes" scale).
With their new powers and a terrifying new world ahead of them, the team fulfils their origin-story obligations by learning to work together and utilise the new metahuman gifts with which they have been bestowed to save the Earth from sassy hacktivist (ugh) Doom.
Sure, it looks impressive enough, and already appears considerably less goofy than its terrible predecessors, but — like DC's Man Of Steel — in attempting to avoid the brightly coloured camposity of earlier iterations, it may run the risk of taking itself entirely too seriously, and when your main characters are made of living rubber, or can bend light, or combust at will, or whatever, that's a tragedy in itself.
Watch the trailer below and make up your own mind:
Fantastic Four, directed by Josh Trank (Chronicle), is scheduled for international release on 7 August this year.
