Wherein I Wax Eloquent on Superhero Movies

Okay, the Fantastic Four: they've always kind of struck me as the white bread of superheroes. Boring outfits, only one real villain and he's actually boring enough that I really didn't remember him, a friend had to be like, "Oh, he was this third world dictator with a metal mask and yadda yadda ya," to me the other day. Corny catchphrases like, "It's clobberin' time!"

Which, I have to say, I never read the comics. I base this all on a cartoon version I used to watch. That is how I am most familiar with batman, spiderman, and X-Men too. And from what I hear, the cartoons of most of these are a lot more faithful than the movies, so whenever I'm talking to a comic nerd, I just pretend I used to read the comics and gnash my teeth along with them over all the liberties movies take with whatever comic franchise we're discussing.

I really have troubles with the spiderman movies. Really. And I can't even put my finger exactly on why they bug me. I think if I'd never heard of spiderman before I'd probably enjoy them (except for Kirsten Dunst. She annoys the crap out of me. And again, I couldn't even tell you why). But somehow, I don't feel like the soul of what I know as Spiderman really came through. I love Tobey MacGuire. Love him, in Pleasantville and Wonderboys. But he's really not angsty enough. Or angsty in the right way. Or the proper kind of nerdiness. He's just not Peter Parker to me. Both movies seem wholly cheap and soulless though under different circumstances I would probably enjoy them quite a bit.

Batman... eh, I guess I wasn't as attached to him, or too young when the first round of Batman movies came out to really care if they were horrible or not. But I quite liked the new one. It seemed a little overwrought with it's own philisophical importance, but when you think about it, Batman has always kind of been about that, so it works.

X-men, is kind of mixed for me. The first one I loved. Honestly, it has too many characters to really develop them all. And, I'm going to overuse white bread in this post again, but there's no other way to describe stupid Cyclops and Jean Grey. I know she all becomes the Phoenix later on and all that crap. But until then: most boring personality ever. Runner up: Cyclops. No wonder they love each other so much. And whether or not this particular subplot is canon (I can't remember): I think adding wolverine and making it a love triangle is stupid and unnecessarily soap opera-y. Wolverine's the most interesting character. He's the bread and butter of the franchise! He has better things to do than to long for someone totally boring who is already involved with someone else totally boring. Other mostly unnecessary characters: Sabretooth, that toad guy, Storm. I'm not anti-storm, but they don't give her much to do except hold that dude's hand while he dies. But despite all this, I really enjoyed it, and thought the "not enough character development" thing might work itself out over the course of all the movies given that it wasn't meant as a one-of.

The second one, I liked the first time I watched it, then fell asleep the second time. Seriously, I do not fall asleep watching movies very often, so that says something. Again, pointless characters: Jean Grey, Cyclops, Ladyfingers (or whatever anti-wolverine's name was), Pyro, Iceman... And the sheer wealth of new characters clearly derails my hope for any eventual character development. Despite that, I HAVE to love Nightcrawler. I'm hooked on the angst. And his relationship with Storm kind of made it worth having her around this time around, too (no idea if this is canon, he wasn't a character in the cartoon I watched). And it might've been developed further if we weren't stuck following 800 characters. And the connection forged between Wolverine and Rogue in the first movie is pretty much ignorred.

So anyway, this is a longwinded intro to say: I saw Fantastic Four today and liked it, despite poor expectations. I'm pretty sure it's at least as cheap and soulless as the Spiderman movies, but since I hadn't particularly loved the four beforehand, I guess I didn't care so much. There was only one thing that really irritated me, which was something to do with The Thing, but I'm not going to go into it, because it's part of a plot point. For the rest: it has about the amount of action/special effects/etc. you'd expect, the romantic tension is sort of perfunctory and lame but it doesn't really get in the way of the rest much, and I actually found a lot of the one liners etc. fairly amusing.

P.S. I left out the only other superhero movie I've seen, Daredevil, because I'd never read the comics or watched any cartoon with him in, and I only even watched the movie because it was on HBO and I have no life. But now I feel the need to point out that it's one of the most piece of crap movies ever made, and I doubt a pre-existing familiarity with Daredevil would make it any better. Yes, I realize the only way I could become more like Comic book man from the Simpsons would be to actually read comics. And have an actual job.