Fantastic Four's Future Looks Storied and Frosty

Hey guys, it's Donnie...What struck me most after the first X-Men film wasn't necessarily how GOOD it was, but how much potential it had. The actual plotline was better than average but still left something to be desired. What it did very well, on the other hand, was establish the characters and create the world in which they lived. Even if you walked out of the theater disappointed, you had this feeling that when the X-Men returned, it was gonna be big.

I tried to keep that in mind as I walked out of Fantastic Four this past summer. While the film feel infinitely short of where it could have been, I tried to focus on the positive. "Well," I thought, "The Thing was all kinds of awesome, and the Human Torch was a lot of fun. Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman and Dr. Doom...well, they were kind of disasterous. But Julian McMahon and Ioan Gruffudd can act. So perhaps with a better writer next time around they won't come off seeming so utterly retarded. Also there might be an actual conflict between the heroes and the villain. As far as the character's world, it seemed kind of like a less interesting version of Raimi's New York. What was interesting about it was the different character's reactions to being super-powered. The idea of superheroes as kind of celebrities I thought was very interesting. Again, with a better director at the helm, the sequel could possibly utilize the groundwork here to create a very different sort of super-hero world then that of Gotham, Metropolis, or the X-Men universe. Especially if they start going into the stranger, alternate-dimensional characters and stories that the Fantastic Four used so frequently.

Alas, it is not to be.

Director Tim Story and screenwriter Mark Frost have just signed on to return for the sequel, along with all the major cast members but Julian McMahon. Hopefully that means that Dr. Doom will be sitting this one out and we might get a plot with some more...activity. Then again, I wouldn't hold my breath. They might be just dumb enough to try re-casting the role, which I suppose wouldn't be too big of a deal since Dr. Doom is trapped behind a tinfoil mask that hides any semblence of human emotion. I could go into all of the rest of the things that were wrong with that movie, but I don't have 3 hours to kill.