Last week, Fox revealed the cast that had been selected for director Josh Trank’s ‘Fantastic Four’ reboot: Miles Teller as Reed Richards, Kate Mara as Sue Storm, Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm, and Jamie Bell as Ben Grimm.
The internet sort of blew up over this. It should come as no surprise that I have quite a few opinions on the matter, so here are some thoughts, presented in no particular order.
I.
Fox has a lot of incentives going into this other than just “make the best FF movie we can make.”
In order to retain the film adaptation rights to the Fantastic Four franchise (which includes the film rights to the Fantastic Four, Dr. Doom, the Skrulls, Galactus, and Silver Surfer), Fox must begin production on this film before the end of October 2014.
Additionally, in the wake of Marvel/Disney’s film ‘The Avengers’ making absolutely crazy amounts of money at the box office and drastically increasing the box-office success of subsequent Marvel Cinematic Universe films ‘Iron Man 3’ and ‘Thor: The Dark World’ over their predecessors ‘Iron Man 2’ and ‘Thor,’ most major film studios engaging in superhero film development have been altering their franchise strategies to try to be more like Marvel.
In DC/Warner Bros.’s case, this involves turning what was just going to be a ‘Man of Steel’ sequel into something which might or might not be titled ‘Batman vs. Superman,’ which will also apparently feature cameos from multiple other major DC superheroes and shows a clear effort to railroad the DC film universe toward a Justice League film (in which, rumor has it, the Justice League will face off against Darkseid) as fast as humanly possible.
In Sony’s case, this involves turning the Amazing Spider-Man franchise into something with Sinister Six and Venom spinoffs and more aggressively structured multi-film story arcs.
And in Fox’s case, this involves tying their two X-Men story lines together in the upcoming film ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past,’ setting things up for an even bigger showdown in its already-announced sequel, ‘X-Men: Apocalypse.’
(As an aside - between Thanos, Darkseid, and Apocalypse, one must feel somewhat bad for Sony Pictures in their lack of a giant, powerful, lantern-jawed, purple-grey villain to depict onscreen).
Rumor has it, too, that Fox has been attempting to integrate their Fantastic Four reboot into one or both of their existing X-Men film timelines in order to turn all of their Marvel properties into a single interlinked mega-franchise similar to what Marvel/Disney has and what DC/WB is aiming for.
What this means is that Fox has a strong incentive to rush this film out the door, but that script rewrites have tied the project up badly as they (allegedly) attempt to rewrite the Fantastic Four origin story to make it clearer that it is a part of their X-Men film universe.
Josh Trank (the director of Chronicle) is clearly a talented director who knows how to direct compelling interpersonal relationships and gripping superhero action, but there are a lot of obstacles in the way of this film being a good one.
II.
A LOT of the negative reaction to the casting zeroed in on the fact that Michael B. Jordan is black and that Johnny Storm, as portrayed in the comics and in earlier film adaptations of Fantastic Four, is a blond white man.
This, of course, got ugly pretty fast.
All four actors that have been cast are quite young for their roles as traditionally understood. If anything, Michael B. Jordan is better-equipped to play a young, arrogant, athletic hotshot than the other three actors are to play to their specific archetypes.
Some people argued that a black man and a white woman couldn’t be brother and sister; as someone from a multiracial family, I must disagree, and I’m sure that people from an adopted family would as well. In the actual Fantastic Four text, it’s absolutely important that Johnny and Sue Storm are brother and sister because it defines their entire relationship, but it’s not necessarily important that they be specifically blood relatives (but if anyone can point me to something in Marvel lore where their shared genetics are specifically important and not just their shared childhood, I’m happy to update this post, because I honestly don’t know for sure).
As he is *written*, no, there isn’t that much about Johnny Storm that requires him to be specifically white. He’s a cocky guy who’s used to getting life handed to him on a platter, but Michael B. Jordan did a pretty fantastic job of playing precisely that sort of character in Chronicle.
However, there are some things that actually might be pretty damn problematic about casting a black man as an arrogate athlete who needs to learn some humility - a racist trope if I ever heard one - just like casting a black man as Dr. Bruce Banner, the man whose power is to turn into a big dumb rage monster, would be a colossal political stumble. But I don’t think that’s what a lot of the people who were upset about Michael B. Jordan’s casting were saying.
It’s really important to note that he wasn’t chosen specifically for diversity’s sake (not that there would be anything wrong with doing that). He’s friends with the director, Josh Trank, and they worked together very well on Chronicle. This casting may be nepotism of a sort (though having an established good working relationship between director and actor can pay a lot of good dividends) but it is in no way an attempt to make a statement about race or make the discussion about race.
III.
Comics aren’t only written, though. They are drawn and penciled and colored. This is an art medium that is fundamentally different from the novel in that respect, and a comic book is a text that the artists contribute to just as much and just as importantly as the writers do. It’s easy for people on the outside of comic-book fandom looking in to forget that.
And there are people who grew up reading Fantastic Four comics and dreamed of seeing their favorite characters come to life onscreen. Even though Johnny Storm’s whiteness isn’t important to the story itself, there are folks who grew up looking at these images, and seeing those same images moving onscreen in a huge movie would mean so much to the young geek inside of them. It’s not like the film business allows for multiple concurrent portrayals of the Fantastic Four; if one of them sticks, it’s all you’re getting for the foreseeable future, and even then only once every few years.
This whole cast is not particularly close to what their characters look like in the Marvel comics. This film does not show signs of being a close visual adaptation of the comics at all. The disappointment is entirely understandable.
It’s a bummer that that disappointment zeroed in on Johnny Storm specifically (to the point of near-silence about the rest of the casting), because as much as this is a complicated thing that people are really emotionally invested in, it sure ended up putting a lot of people in the position of arguing some fairly racist things. Because the desire to see a genuinely great adaptation of the Fantastic four onscreen is an understandable one, and this film is really not likely to be that - even on the unlikely off chance that it ends up telling a story that is good on its own.
IV.
Adaptation is really tricky business.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe (in which the Avengers films take place) is officially designated as one taking place on or around Earth-1999999, not the main comics universe centered around Earth-616. Marvel has made sure to emphasize this so that people know that this is a *different* story being told, not the same one being retold, and that things will happen quite differently. Hell, I’m partly excited about these films *because* I know that they’re a different version of the story and I won’t necessarily know what’s going to happen next or what this version of Marvel mythology will be like.
This universe has Infinity Stones named things like “the Tesseract” and “the Aether” instead of Infinity Gems named things like the Space Gem or the Power Gem.
This universe has an Avengers in which Ant-Man was not a founding member and in which Ultron is looking likely to be invented by someone other than Hank Pym.
This universe’s version of Heimdall, the all-seeing Asgardian who guards the Bifrost, has black skin and is played by Idris Elba.
Now, when this was announced, some people went pretty nuts over it. As it turns out, a lot of white supremacists have a serious obsession with Nordic-Germanic myth (remember that scene at the beginning of Captain America: The First Avenger where the Red Skull invades a Norwegian town looking for Asgardian artifacts? Kinda like that). Turns out they weren’t very happy about a non-lily-white person playing a Norse God.
But Idris Elba had all of the gravitas necessary to make the part work, and he was fantastic in the role. Fears were unfounded. Racists generally shut the fuck up and slunk back to whatever dark corner they came from.
When Peter Jackson made the Lord of the Rings films, they were lauded as a fantastic example of stellar adaptation. They cut out the unnecessary songs and extraneous characters and managed to tell a more-concise version of the story that, for the most part, was astonishingly good at preserving the soul of the text. They were even approximately as racist as Tolkien was! And - bit of trivia for you - when the films were in preproduction, Denzel Washington was almost cast as Aragorn. Of course, the Hobbit films ended up swinging in the opposite direction - injecting as many bullshit songs, bullshit characters, and bullshit action scenes as possible in a naked attempt to put viewers’ butts in seats three times instead of one or two - but that’s a story for another day, assuming that Geeks OUT’s venerable film reviewer Rob Russin doesn’t kill me first.
HBO’s Game of Thrones series has increasingly shown signs of adaptation, most of which make plenty of sense (outside of the unnecessary addition of the Ros character) - they arise from the need to have fewer characters handle more of the story (because casting hundreds of major characters is simply an impossibility) and from the need to work by the dynamics of employing people in shooting-seasons (If a character’s role in the books would have him die in Episode 1 of Season 4, doesn’t it make more sense to kill him in Episode 10 of Season 3 so you don’t have to bring him back next year? If a character’s supposed to be introduced halfway through Season 2 but doesn’t actually do anything of note until Season 3, doesn’t it make sense to wait until Season 3 to introduce her?).
Adaptation, in this sense, is governed in large part by the different storytelling capabilities of different forms of media. Adapting comics for the big screen is no different (and it has been done very well in some cases and very poorly in others). So we shouldn’t be surprised or upset to see some things change (hello, organic webshooters and Tom Bombadil controversies).
V.
What’s really unfair, here, is that we haven’t had enough heroes in comics who were people of color in general, and that ends up putting people in bad positions as the slow-to-change world of comics meets the rapidly-changing world of the global cinema audience.
As much as Stan Lee worked hard to put reasonably progressive ideas into comics (witness the X-Men in particular), the Fantastic Four that he created still arise out of a broader 1960s context in which superheroes and comic-book characters were white men by default. Marvel’s got a decent stable of nonwhite heroes (Blade! Storm/Ororo Munroe! Monica fucking Rambeau! Black Panther/T’Challa! Luke Cage! Brother Voodoo!), and it’s notable that, outside of Blade and Storm, pretty much all of the black Marvel heroes shown onscreen have come directly from Marvel Studios (Nick Fury, War Machine, and the soon-to-be-onscreen Falcon). DC only has the forgettable Steel film to their name (no thanks).
White male heroes are still seen as the general default both in the comics industry AND in Hollywood; where there are black heroes and heroines, their personalities are often “about” being black (cough cough, ‘Brother Voodoo’). While blackness is absolutely something that marks people’s childhoods and lives pretty indelibly - we live in a world where racial politics are inescapable and are absolutely not ‘over’ in any sense - this is just as true of whiteness, and yet white superheroes are generally not “about” being white.
The safe, risk-free choice for casting Johnny Storm would have been to cast a blond white man to play him. As much as racial diversity can be found in comics if you look in the right places (though, for a newcomer, it *will* take some looking), we may live in a world where the only way for young women and young people of color to see superheroes who look like them onscreen is for this sort of casting to take place.
Remember, DC still hasn’t made a Wonder Woman film because female superheroes are apparently too risky (even though ‘Thor’ set out a perfect, simple precedent for how to tell the story).
In closing: give me my goddamned Black Panther movie, Marvel. T’Challa is like Batman except not emotionally crippled and I want him in a movie immediately.
Wait, no.
In closing: we need to demand more of our geek artists, in comic books and in film alike. It’s apparently considered a huge risk to put out films about superheroes who are women or people of color (look at the box office flop that was Halle Berry’s ‘Catwoman’ - Hollywood accountants likely find it easier to blame its failure on race and sex than on the fact that it’s a terrible movie, which, to them, shouldn’t matter). That needs to change. Our adaptations should be better and understand the difference between being faithful to the precise letter of the originals and faithful to the soul of the originals, and it shouldn’t be so damn hard for nonwhite kids growing up geeky to find a big-screen hero who looks just like them.
