User blog comment:Gemnist/Fantastic Four Cast REVEALED!/@comment-1895174-20140223025705


 * Miles Teller - Too young. Reed Richards is supposed to be this incredible, world-renown scientist who has been to space even. He's supposed to be the wiser, pseudo-father figure to the group. And he's the youngest of them, barely old enough to have a bachelor's degree. I get that the movie is taking inspiration from Ultimate Fantastic Four, but that doesn't mean it's a good choice. Like most things Ultimate Marvel that isn't Spider-Man or (to a much lesser degree) X-Men, Ultimate Fantastic Four is pretty terrible. And struggling for relevance for the better part of the past 10 years. Of all the characters to make teenagers/young adults, the Fantastic Four are maybe the least appropriate. They should be closer to Tony Stark's age, not Spider-Man's. And that being said, Andrew Garfield is older than all but one of them.


 * Kate Mara - Straight-up not a good actress. And blew an opportunity. I like Jordan for Johnny more than I like Mara for Sue, so they should have cast a black actress as Sue. If it worked, then there goes the excuse that audiences don't want to see a superhero movie with a large, non-white cast that's keeping Marvel from making a Black Panther movie or going full-steam on a Luke Cage movie instead of just a Netflix series. Instead, now they have to go back to the script and find a way to insert a ham-fisted, exposition-y line about one of them is adopted or something. Listen - if you have to somehow justify how two characters are related to each other, your casting department screwed up. Kerry Washington's career has really blown up since she was in the last two movies, maybe someone at FOX should have called her to see if she was interested in doing the reboot. Or, if they were really dedicated to the younger route, maybe they should have looked into Nicole Beharie, the lead actress on one of the FOX TV channel's biggest hits right now. Either of them are better than any of the woman FOX had test for the role.


 * Michael B. Jordan - This actually works. The only problem is that it needlessly drums up controversy by changing the race of a major character. I get why this has to happen - they're adapting stuff that goes back to the early 60's, when our sensibilities toward race wasn't all that great. Heck, even the original lineup for the X-Men is made up of a bunch of WASPs. So they may have to change the race of a character or two so that the movie isn't super-white. And sometimes even works for the better; Michael Clarke Duncan was an awesome Kingpin, the best part of Daredevil. But any justification for making Johnny and African-American falls apart when they cast a white woman as his sister, drawing attention to the fact that the character's race was changed by almost explicitly stating that the reason for it was to market the movie to the "urban" audience and avoid accusations of racism. Tokenism at its worst.


 * Jamie Bell - Tintin? Seriously? I guess it doesn't matter too much what the body build of a person cast in a role that's going to be 90% CGI, anyway, except that it means this thing is going to be super expensive. You know why the 2005 movie and its sequel put Michael Chiklis in a body suit instead of making the Thing CGI? Because it's practical. All that CGI work drains up a budget, which is why you only only see the Hulk as the Hulk for a small number of scenes in even his solo movies. But at least the Hulk turns back into Bruce Banner; Ben Grimm doesn't have that luxury. So expect either a Ben Grimm sidelined for much of the movie, really shoddy CGI, or a budget so hyper-inflated it turns this Fantastic Four reboot into 2015's answer to John Carter or The Lone Ranger. And, like Miles Teller, he's too young.

The 2005 cast was better. And that one had Jessica Alba in it.