August 7th still feels a long way off, but that isn’t stopping Marvel from teasing out their giant summer tentpole. Having already released the first trailer, a new wave of TV spots for Fantastic Four is underway, with the latest focusing on showcasing the team. Titled Extraordinary Subjects, it also provides a glimpse of Tim Blake Nelson in character.
As a superhero team, Fantastic Four first appeared in 1961, and featured a group of friends and family with super powers and heroic alter egos. Reed Richards would become Mr. Fantastic – a stretchy scientific genius; Sue Storm would become The Invisible Woman – who could create powerful force-fields, as well as becoming invisible; Johnny Storm would become The Human Torch – brother to Sue, with the ability to fly and generate fire and Ben Grimm would become Thing – a talented pilot with super strength due to stone-like flesh.
Directed by Josh Trank (Chronicle), from a screenplay he wrote along with Simon Kinberg (X-Men: Days Of Future Past) and Jeremy Slater (The Lazarus Effect), Fantastic Four is a reboot of that franchise – intended to give the superhero story more of a grounded, updated atmosphere than that of the film versions released in 2005 and 2007. The movie sees each of the roles recast, with Miles Teller (Whiplash) as Reed Richards, Kate Mara (House Of Cards) as Sue Storm, Michael B Jordan (Fruitvale Station) as Johnny Storm, and Jamie Bell (Filth) as Ben Grimm. It also stars Tim Blake Nelson (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt) and Toby Kebbell (Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes).
This latest, brief TV spot manages to provide a good sense of the characters, the action, the special effects, and – crucially – the humour we can expect to see in the film. While a big criticism of the previous two film versions of Fantastic Four was that the humour was too overbearing and flippant, here, we seem to have a better executed style of amusement. Hopefully, Marvel will employ a little restraint when it comes to the use of any further trailers and TV spots however, because, with just less than two months to go until its August 7th 2015 release date, we don’t want to become over-familiar with the rebooted versions of these characters.
