WTF was the point of THAT? Why did they make him get powers along with the F4? Why did they make his skin turn to metal? Lightning? WTF??
Dr. Doom is by far my favorite Marvel Villain of all time and I was so disappointed with his portrail in this movie. I think they got Torch and Thing nailed pretty well, Sue Storm was decent. Most problems with her were related to Alba’s acting. Reed Richards was made out to be some sort of bumbling idiot and had no confidence at all.
I just don’t understand why these studios feel like they have to mess with well documented origins when the original is perfectly fine?? (ie Hulk, Doc Doom, etc…)
Because what works in comics DOES NOT usually work in movies.
Spiderman was bit by a radioactive spider in the comic… that’s RIDICULOUS in a movie. So they changed it.
Dr. Doom’s origin is convuloted at best in the comics… he’s a brillant scientist AND ruler of a country AND he wears a suit of armor AND he has a background in the occult AND he hates Reed Richards.
They streamlined it and made it work within the context of a movie.
The movie is flawed immensely. But don’t fault it for storytelling necessity.
They nailed the Torch. They got the Thing pretty well. I think they did well with Reed. [Reed in the comics is not a likable character or even remotely sympathetic, so they made him intelligent but socially retarded for the movie. That’s fine]
They miscast the Invisible Woman so there was no way she would turn out well.
And Dr. Doom just wasn’t right but I can understand why they went the way they did.
Looks like they got the go ahead for a sequel and are going to not use Dr. Doom again. The problem with that is… which FF villain should they use? Mole Man might be okay. Frightful Four might be cool with Wizard but they can’t use Sandman.
Movies so often massacre the original story line, that I just flame them automatically or if I’m especially mellow, merely snort in disgust.
I haven’t seen “Fantastic Four” yet, so I won’t comment on that. But Push You Down’s post actually caused a mini-revelation moment in me. (Good point and thanks, Push You Down!)
I was thinking of the second “Spider Man” movie when Spidey, having a crisis of confidence,
loses the ability to shoot webs. I didn’t get it at first and was thinking “Why doesn’t the fool reload his dispensers?” Then I realized as the movie went on he didn’t HAVE any! The web ability was part of his biology, no a contraption he invented. So, as usual, I thought there was another example of Hollywood screwing the story up. But now I am thinking, maybe they actually tried to get rational here! Which is more unbelievable: A high school kid (even if he is a genius) inventing something like the web apparatus and the chemical that works llike what real spiders use and in just a few days, or just another spider-ability acquired by the same spider bite as his other abilities?
Thanks to this thread, I suddenly realized that THIS time Hollywood went with a more believable story line, and that Marvel probably should have done likewise way back when.
A radioactive spider done did bite Tobey Maguire in the first movie. Were you thinking of the web-shooter debacle of biological shooters versus Spider-Man-made ones?
Ah, hell, what movie was I watching? I forgot it was a genetically-altered spider instead of a radioactive one. My bad.
I would have been fine with a radioactive spider, though; of all the impossible things we had to swallow to enjoy this movie, a radioactive spider wouldn’t have been a blip on the screen.
Actually, it was a spider bite, but IIRC they chose to make it a genetically modified arachnid, not an irradiated one. A small change and one that I think worked well as an updating of his origin story.
First of all, it’s not mandatory that you have some big origin backstory for every character in a 2 hr movie.
Second, a character that is pretty well established in the comic world doesn’t need to have a visual origin. We could have learned his backstory from some exposition or something. If the movie was called “Dr. Doom” then I see the need to go into great detail about why Doom is Doom, but it’s not. It’s called Fantastic Four.
Third you should never dramatically change an established characters basic traits. Metal Skin? Electricity Absorbtion?
Fourth you’re telling me that Peter Parker being bit by a genetically altered Spider and turning into a Spider/Human is more believable than being bitten by a radioactive Spider and turning into a Spider/Human hybrid? Lol. Please… Hulk is a great example of why you shouldn’t mess with established stories. They should have have some Gamma accident in the first 10 minutes of the movie and gave us more Hulk instead of 80% aweful story and 20% awesome Hulk.
The changes to Doom weren’t neccessary at all and they tainted a good character.
Shut me down? Whatever.
You tell me. Which parts of Dr. Doom’s origin would you have kept and which would you have cut. Also explain a better way for them to have worked Dr. Doom into the plot.
He was worked in fine in the comic books and it would have translated easily to this movie.
Doom was always a step behind Reed in life and held a major grudge against him, just as in the books. In the movie he would already be filthy rich in charge of Latervia and agreed to finance the space trip with plans to sabatoge the experiment to make Reed look bad. End result is the same, the 4 get their powers during the botched experiment. The only difference is Doom doesn’t get super powers (THE major screwup in the screenplay IMHO) and the rest of the movie plays out the same way.
No need to expand on the Latervia angle in a 2 hour movie. If he comes back in a sequel they can delve into that (which it looks like they will do at some point).
Don’t give a character super powers they never had to begin with just to make the movie easier to swallow for the noobs.
I’m not saying that they shouldn’t take a little creative license once in a while to make the movie work in the time frame allowed (ie organic webshooters) but don’t make fundamental changes to a MAJOR character especially when there is absolutely no reason to do so!
(Hulk’s changed origin is by far the worst case of this. I’m a Hulk nerd and wa very hurt by that 45min crapfest at the start of the movie)
So what’s the big confrontation in the movie then? They all discover that Doom sabotaged the project just to get Reed and sue his pants off? They confront him but nothing happens or Thing just threatens him? They HAD to have a big showpiece action sequence, to show off the powers and in case there wasn’t a second movie. What explanation would you give for Doom’s armor? He’s just an eccentric nut?
And the “noobs”, as you so generously put it, are part of the people they’re trying to reach. Spider-man’s an internationally known symbol. The 4…not so much, so they need to ramp up the excitement.
I agree as a comic fan they shouldn’t have changed it. However, as a movie-goer I understand why they did it.
One sentence, and a visual. <Narrator> In his all consuming quest to rule the world, Doom swore his allegiance to Dark Powers who care little of our fate.
<Shot of him forging armor, with exposed circuitry. Maybe have him poor something, prob. blood all over the armor, which seems to visually enhance it.>
I should point out that the movie version of the FF is, in fact, more closely based on the ‘Ultimate’ Fantastic Four story than the original. As is the Spidey movie. The web shooters are organic in the comic, and Doom has the metal skin.
I wondered if that was an Ultimates thing. I can kinda understand. Doom was a bit silly in the comic books. Eccentric genius/mystic who has his own country and an armada of robots that look and act like him so much so that nobody knows if it’s Doom or Memorex.
I still don’t like it though. You could’ve had a Doom, broken by the failure on the space station and powerless while his hated rival and his group of friends become super powered and loved by all. Thusly he spends the last of his moneys or whatnot to build a powered suit of armor and a doomsday weapon of some kind. Not that much more unbelievable than Iron Man.
I suppose that it’s different cause I’m so durn old. I 'member how things were back in the day, and that’s the way I liked it…except for the whole walking uphill both ways through the snow to go anywhere and wearing onions on my belt.
Good grief. I’m not trying to rewrite the movie on a message board here. There are millions of different conflicts that could have been there. I’m just saying that they didn’t need to change his origin.
And we’re saying that …well… you’re wrong. There needed to be some revisions.
From an adapting writer’s point of view, if you have the option to streamline a convulted or outdated origin, you are going to take it. Doom being jealous of Reed because Reed is smarter isn’t going to grab an audience the way that making Doom jealous of Reed because Reed effortlessly has the love of the woman Doom wants. This strikes a much stronger chord with the viewer.
Positioning Reed as the underdog and Doom as the perfect man (rich, successful, intelligent) makes Reed, an otherwise unlikable character in the comics, more relatable to the audience.
They tried to make the story as realistic as possible for a comic book movie (science hawks who frequent the “science mistakes that ruin movies” threads please pipe down). Having a despotic ruler of a fictional country forge a suit of armor and make pacts with dark forces is just WAAAAY too much for people who aren’t coming to see Hobbits and Elves. So they made Doom a successful business man and scientist, he’s the better version of Reed. They paid homage to the comics by making him have some connection to Latveria. Now going with Doom getting his powers at the same time as the FF ties them even more together. Its the reason why the Joker killed Batman’s parents in the first Batman movie. It’s why Lex and Clark Kent were friends in school (especially with Smallville tying the meteror shower during Clark’s arrival and young Lex losing his hair). Two sides of the same coin. The FF went through the same experience and became heroes. Doom became a villain.
Now why the lightning? Well, a suit of armor isn’t good enough. You can’t really have him shoot fire can you? Torch does that. So have him have another primal power that ties into technolgy. Give Doom electric powers.
The FF movie was flawed. But there were very good reasons for some of the choices even if the execution …well sucked.
