‘Fantastic Four’ Reboot – Final Trailer Released 0 1660

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It’s been ten years since the release of the first film in Marvel’s Fantastic Four ‘franchise’, which ran for just two films. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, released in 2007, failed to build momentum, despite taking over $131m at the box office, and after that, things just fizzled out for the original comic book heroes.

fantastic four reboot final trailerHowever, the X-Men franchise is living proof that good comic characters never die, and so Fox are having another crack at bringing the Four to life. There are some big names on board, too – Josh Trank, who was at the helm of superhero film Chronicle, has taken over as director, with a screenplay by Simon Kinberg (X-Men: Days of Future Past and X-Men: Apocalypse). The soundtrack is by Phillip Glass, who is not usually associated with movie scores, but given the scope of his previous projects (cellists in helicopters beaming down music for stadium audiences, etc) there’s little chance that the music will fail to deliver.

The official trailer has now been released, and the first impression is that this is – different. It’s an original story for one, so there is nothing of the previous Fantastic Four films to be seen here, apart from the characters themselves; Mr Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Thing and Human Torch. The cast is largely young and little known, and the special effects look absolutely spectacular. The story takes us back to how the Four acquired their super powers – people in a lab, trying to crack the secrets of interdimensional travel so that they can save the world, which they ultimately achieve fantastic four reboot final trailer – up to a point. There is little of the villain, who is now known as Victor Domashev rather than Victor Von Doom – in this version of events he is a hacker with a penchant for world domination.

We get to see some of how the new powers affect out superheroes as well; The Thing is, understandably, bitter about being turned into a pile of rock, and the Human Torch even miscalculates at one point, appearing to burn up. We do not see Mr Fantastic strutting his stuff in the trailer, but the graphics surrounding Invisible Girl are beautiful, and will undoubtedly make her a teen icon once again.

Fantastic Four will hit cinemas on the 6th of August, and the sequel, Fantastic Four 2, is already scheduled for release on the 2nd of July in 2017, so Fox are clearly willing to run with this one. If you want to take a closer look at the character’s individual traits, then you can click here to take the Fantastic Four quiz or head on over to the official website, which contains teaser trailers and information about the world of the Fantastic Four.

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I'm a freelance film reviewer and blogger with over 10 years of experience writing for various different reputable online and print publications. In addition to my running, editing and writing for Thoughts On Film, I am also the film critic for The National, the newspaper that supports an independent Scotland, covering the weekly film releases, film festivals and film-related features. I have a passion for all types of cinema, and have a particular love for foreign language film, especially South Korean and Japanese cinema. Favourite films include The Big Lebowski, Pulp Fiction and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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Movie Review: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 0 1745

After so many sequels and reboots of the Spider-Man character on the big-screen, from Sam Raimi’s trilogy to the character being integrated into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it’s hard to see what else they can give us that’s going to surprise. But along comes an animated Spider-Man to do just that.

Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is a normal teenager living in New York with his parents; loving but fairly easy-going mother Rio (Luna Lauren) and loving but tough police officer father Jefferson (Brian Tyree Henry) – the film has a surprising emotional through-line in how it depicts the father-son relationship.

One day while doing some secretive spray painting with his chummy uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali), he is bitten by a mysterious spider that gives him special powers from web slinging to a tingling Spidey Sense.

This leads him to eventually crossing paths with Peter Parker (Jake Johnson) who, due to the villainous Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) meddling with a dimension-altering weapon, has inadvertently been sent over from a parallel universe and who eventually teaches Miles how to be Spider-Man.

But it doesn’t stop there;many other diverse versions appear, from Gwen Stacy AKA Spider-Woman (Hailee Steinfeld) to Spider-Man Noir (Nicolas Cage). Sony’s dazzling animation is as fun because it takes that idea and just runs with it.

Anyone can wear the mask seems to be its mantra, conjuring the everyman wonder that drives much of comic book fandom. For all its eye-popping, modern visual aesthetics, it has a refreshingly old-fashioned spirit. The old and the new meet in the film’s beguiling combination of traditional hand-drawn animation and contemporary bells and whistles computer rendering. It’s about as close as a film has come to feeling like a comic book come to life.

Inventive direction by trio Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman works in lovely harmony with the eclectic, knowing style of scriptwriter Phil Lord (The Lego Movie, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) to find quite a miraculous way of breathing new life into the overflowing comic book genre.

From its sharply-written dialogue to its very animation style itself, the film is beautifully self-aware of its own station within the overall comic book movie catalogue, cleverly lampooning yet dotingly celebrating the attributes that have become such a part of pop culture. And yet it feels like it puts its own fiercely original stamp on that most famous of heroes.

This is a visually stunning, innovative incarnation of the character; propulsive in its energetic action, engagingly voiced, tightly written as a heroic narrative arc, reverential yet forward-thinking in its ethos and with a real sense of heart and soul at its core. It’s a particular treat for fans and a welcoming,imaginative embrace for everyone.

8.8 out of 10

Movie Review: Mortal Engines 0 1603

Few films in recent memory have demanded a big-screen as much as this high-fantasy adaptation. It compensates for a fairly generic hero story beating at its heart by giving us good mythologizing and just being the biggest one in the room.

Based on the 2001 young adult steampunk novel series by Philip Reeve, events takes place hundreds of years in the future. Humanity has all but completely fallen thanks to something called the Sixty Minute War, wherein a series of quantum bombs were set off that left the world a wasteland where resources are scarce.

In order to survive and assert dominance, humankind came up with the idea of making the world’s great cities into mobile machines that traverse the land in perpetual war with one another. The larger cities “absorb” smaller surrounding communities whose on-board societies live hearing stories of, and scavenging old tech (iPhones, computers, toasters) from, a time gone by.

Our hero is an enigmatic young woman named Hester (Hera Hilmar) with a scar on her face who boards the almighty London to exact revenge against leader Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving), whom she blames for the death of her mother. There she meets wide-eyed Tom (Robert Sheehan) who, after they are forced out into the wilderness, band together in a larger fight.

The idea of mechanised cities roaming the earth is a bold concept indeed, one that that takes sometime to convince. But it gets there after an iffy warm-up act thanks to a nice,tangible sense of world-building (despite its CGI-heavy aesthetic) and an eye-popping epic scale.

The film’s greatest strength is the sheer size of it; these humungous mechanical cities with ever-moving parts and on ground-shaking wheels are a sight to behold. It’s a spectacle that does a lot of the heavy-lifting, so to speak, as the quest that propels the story forward leans on the familiar and doesn’t have a great deal of chemistry to speak of between the two leads; Sheehan has a fairly thankless, put-upon role compared to Hilmar’s more action-packed one.

Directed by first-timer Christian Rivers – a former storyboard artist talent nurtured by the film’s long-time developing producer/co-writer Peter Jackson – it also solidly works on its own terms as an escapist yarn propped up by an imaginative and intriguing mythology that feels lived-in and “believable” as far as these things go.

It has flaws to spare, not least an over reliance on a pedestrian hero arc bolted onto a quite standard adventure story. But it’s fairly rewarding in its sense of immersion in a well-designed world and a sense of towering scale that reminds us why the big-screen is referred to as such.

6.1 out of 10