fantastic

Entertainment Weekly has unearthed details about a scene that was featured in many of the trailers, but didn’t end up in the movie. Remember when the Thing drops from a plane at night time? Yeah. Apparently, there was a scene in which Grimm drops right into a Chechen terrorist camp. Everyone screams and shoots at the behemoth, and he just casually walks around nude and smashes them. The terrorists begin to flee, only to get mercilessly mowed down by US soldiers. Who then close in on Ben and high-five him in celebration.

Would this made the movie any better? No, it would probably have made it even worse. See, Jamie Bell’s Thing already is the worst possible incarnation of the character. A self-loathing, depressed mutant with no friends or family, or pants. Remember when Chris Evans had harmless fun pranking Michael Chiklis in 2005? This time, the Torch spends about no time with Grimm and even Reed doesn’t do much with him. His catchphrase is derived from domestic violence and the only pleasure he ever seems to get is punching that Doombot (c’mon, that couldn’t have been the real Dr. Doom) in that one scene.

This scene would have showed him as a tool. Fighting terrorists is obviously a good thing, but none of the Fantastic Four seemed to be into killing people in the first place, or into helping others to kill people. Maybe there’s another twenty minutes of scenes showing how the human Ben had his best time while on duty before all of this happened, or how the Army could give that rock monster the support, friendship, and understanding his colleagues never visibly offered. Maybe this version’s Alicia Masters (Ben’s love interest in the comics) is an officer who entices him to join. Otherwise, it would have been a simple extension of the tests we already saw in the movie, only with actual humans getting shot to death and one of our heroes nodding in approval.

And that is wrong on so many levels.

It makes Ben look bad. It makes the Army look bad. It makes super heroes look bad. It makes shooting escaping terrorists in the back look right. Remember the Vietnam scene in Watchmen? That is pretty much the same, only that Snyder wanted both the Comedian and Dr. Manhattan to look wrong and to show the utilization of super heroes in wars as ugly. Remember when Iron Man faced terrorists? He did shoot everyone who shot at him or who aimed guns at hostages, but Tony never outright flew around just to seek and kill enemy forces, and he would really never high-five commandoes.

Hopefully, we’ll get to see everything that was the earlier version of this. Let’s see whether Victor von Doom actually was flaming blogger Victor Domashev.

(for the record, I don’t really enjoy bashing this. I really liked Chronicle, Whiplash was my favorite movie of the last year, I loved Kebbell’s work on Apes 2 and I really think Mara, Jordan, and Bell are truly gifted. All of these talents will have a future and I’m looking forward to enjoying that, but this… this movie.)