It's Renderin' Time: CGI Thing in 'F4' Reboot

Well...good luck, Fox. As you probably know, the studio is trying to reboot The Fantastic Four before Disney takes over all things Marvel (2013, 2014?), and I really don't understand why. It's not that I hate the comic - I actually liked it pretty well growing up - but some things just don't make great movies, and I think this is one of the many comic book adaptations that may not ever be that good. Just look at the characters: One guy can stretch a lot, the girl can turn invisible (movie magic right there), there's a dude who catches on fire, and then brick boy -- Ben Grimm aka The Thing. Screenrant says The Thing is one of the big changes this quick reboot is determined to make. When Michael Chiklis played the character, he was mostly created in the makeup chair. It didn't match the effects used in either movie - included that horrible representation of Galactus at the end of the second movie - and when you see him nd Silver Surfer in the same movie, that just doesn't work very well. So a CGI Thing is coming in a couple years. You'd think, nearly ten years since Gollum and Harry Potter's Dobby that this kind of thing would be a slam dunk. Ask Hulk about that. I really think it depends on how the characters are used. Gollum, for example, didn't have to engage in hand-to-hand combat with humans; Thing will, and that's the kind of activity that could be a problem. One test case could come from the same studio: Fox is using photorealistic apes in Rise of the Apes. WETA is developing them and if it works, that's the model to follow for The Thing. Still a big if since we haven't seen it yet. OK, so that potentially solves one of the many problems this property has to deal with.

Comments

[Adam]

I kind of liked that they used the swarm/bug version that is the Ultimate Universe's Galactus, but it would've been nice if there had been...well, some actual explanation for it.

[MRPigg]

It still amazes me that 17 years after the fact, the pioneering Jurassic Park is still one of the best examples of CGI used in film. The reason that Thing's makeup didn't "match" the CGI rendering of the other characters is because the computer effects were less convincing, not the other way around. When will they ever learn?

Sorry for the rant, but I recently dusted off Die Hard With a Vengeance the other day for no apparent reason. It had been a while and it surprisingly holds up very well until the terrible final half hour or so. Halfway through, there was an incredibly impressive subway crash scene I had forgotten about. The first thing I thought of was, "well, if this had been made ten years later that would have been all computery and less interesting."

[J.Bradley]

I liked the SECOND Fantastic Four better than the THIRD Spiderman that came out that same summer. The first one, which I used to see daily on an employee lounge dvd/tv where I worked at the time - actually gets worse on each subsequent viewing. I don't think I've seen that happen on many movies. The second one, I thought, suceeded mostly because the origin stuff - which WAY too many superhero movies do, was out of the way and it was just a good popcorn/superhero movie in the "Marvel spirit". Of course "The Incredibles" is the best Fantastic Four movie, even one of the best superhero movies in this era of them, period. If they could get that group dynamic right, and that's one of the things you can see just starting in the second FF. If they could've just gotten some writers that saw that THAT is what makes an FF story and not just the superheroics, then maybe they could've carried on with the series as they started it - with the SECOND movie - as I look at it. Anyway, I'm really glad they're looking at a reboot. Fantastic Four deserves a good adaptation and I hope they take the chance and do it right.