It jus keeps coming....today we have the 1st Fantastic Four trailer.
Unlike a lot of people, I have no issue at all with John and Sue Storm being played by people of different races. I am from a multi-racial family myself. I have a cousin who is Vietnamese but her siblings are not. I have a beautiful African American niece, neither of whose parents are her race (my sister is like me, mixed up slav/gypsy/mongol Jew, her husband [a comic book artist] is Puerto Rican). And I am a huge fan of Michael B. Jordan.
But Kate Mara as Sue Storm? I have a problem with that. IMHO that lady cannot act to save her life. And the actor playing Reed Richards, Miles Teller, though a talented actor, is the same age as the actor playing Johnny and is 4 years younger than the one playing Sue? Reed is supposed to be older than both of them. By enough that he had a little grey hair in even very early issues. So much that there are cradle-robbing jokes re him and Sue Storm in some of the older comics.
And sorry, rant coming here.
Marvel, quite famously, had the first three or four characters in the history of comics who were identified as Jews - for a long time, the only such characters. Writers at both DC and Marvel had been members of the tribe from the get-go, but the characters only 'came out' as MOTs in the 70s. And Ben Grimm/ the Thing was in many ways the most iconic. My sister still has the Thing's Bar Mitzvah issue. Yet we can't get a single member of the tribe playing any of the Jewish characters? I guarantee Jack Kirby - that is, Jacob Kurtzberg - is spinning in his grave.
Is it too much to ask to have even one of these characters played by a member of the tribe? Shit, the most famous Jewish character in the whole Marvel Universe, Holocaust survivor Magneto, is being played these days BY AN ARYAN GERMAN!!!!! (Michael Fassbender, despite his UK accent, is from Heidelberg). He does it remarkably well and is a deeply gifted actor, and it does help him deliver lines in German beautifully. But that casting nearly made my head explode. Sorry. My family lost more than 5,000 people in the camps, so it's a little personal.
I also like Ellen Page, but Kitty Pride was the 1st super hero EVER declared Jewish (the Thing didn't 'come out' as an MOT until a few years later).
Wondering how badly they're going to keep this up in Age of Apocalypse. Cuz in the comic, that is all caused by Charles Xavier's son Legion, who is not just Jewish, but Israeli born in Haifa.
Imagine if they had cast Storm of the X-men, not just with an inappropriately light-skinned actress (which they have done twice now) but with a WHITE actress. Or if Black Panther was being played by a white guy. The Thing, Kitty Pride, and Magneto were actually taught to me in Hebrew school as proof that Jews were accepted in this country.
The whole thing reminds me of the fiasco of the Last Airbender movie, where not a single character was portrayed as the race they were in the original. It isn't like there aren't plenty of Jewish actors. Hell, one of the definitely NOT Jewish Marvel characters, Spider Man, has been played by a British Jew, Andrew Garfield, for the past two flicks. Throw him out and let one of my peeps play an actual Jewish character. The one other Marvel hero being played by a member of the tribe, Black Widow, is specifically Russian Orthodox in the comics. (I don't count RDJ, because even though he is Jewish by descent he specifically does not identify as Jewish and hangs out with open anti-Semites like Mel Gibson- and anyway, Tony Stark is also specifically goyishe).
I get making WASP characters into minorities- there have never been enough minority characters in comics. But de-minoirtying the few minority characters you had? When they are the same minority as most of the original writers, artists, and creators?
OK. Rant over.