Board Thread:Movies/@comment-4651179-20140124221431/@comment-61022-20140301174755

Shiplord13 wrote: Right now I just don't want them changing the story

Yeah there are multiple FF origin stories. Even the core Earth-616 FF have had their origins retconned. In the first issue of the series Reed's rocket flight was to fly to the moon to beat the Russians in the space race. Which was a topical referenced in 1961 when the comic was published.

But the 1980s they had to do a retcon to make it so the characters were less dated. so they updated it to state that Reed's rocket was using interstellar technology and that they weren't trying to get to the moon.

Then consider the origins of the Ultimate Fantastic Four getting their powers through the N-Zone gate... Or the original movie cast that were aboard a space station that was bombarded with cosmic rays.

But as an aside, I wonder why people can't handle changes with a franchise. I mean in that for a franchise that has had many iterations, reboots, movies, tv shows and retcons, why do people get upset or surprised when things get changed around? Or more-over, why do you want to see the same story over and over again? Kind of redundant and boring isn't it?

There are certain comic book movies I'd say, yeah don't change anything, such as Watchmen (which was 98% faithful to the comic book) versus something like the Fantastic Four or Spider-Man. That's because with something like the Watchmen, it was a finite series, there was a set beginning, middle, end. Too much tinkering with the plot would not have made it the same movie.

The difference with Watchmen and say... Spider-Man for example... Is that Spidey is a character so ingraned in our popular culture most people recognize the iconography. You could have Spider-Man been given his powers by an alien spider and have him shoot webs out of his butt, but as long as you have the iconic costume people are going to recognize him as Spider-Man despite the origin.

What I'm saying is that plot elements shouldn't matter, as long as the basic ideals of the character are retained.

A good example of this is the first Fantastic Four movie that was made. The updated the origin with that space station origin and gave Victor von Doom super powers (on par with his Ultimates version). But it was a thoroughly enjoyable movie if you stopped nit picking at the cast (seriously, people focused far too much time on Jessica Alba and the fact that Alicia Masters was black) and the changes to the origin story. Because if you actually sat down and really focused on the film you'll notice that the characters interact with each other in much the same way as they did back in the early Stan Lee-Jack Kirby days of the FF.

I also don't understand why people go into these movies with very high expectations. You're just going to let yourself down in the end and cause yourself distress over something that is incredibly trivial. I go into a super-hero movie expecting nothing, and 9 times out of 10 I am impressed with the story they presented, instead of being disappointed by the story I expected.

I think the last time a super-hero movie disappointed me was when I watched Man-Thing. And that was because it had an incredibly low budget for the subject matter they were taking up, so when they did the big reveal Man-Thing looked unimpressive.