Here Are All The Hints Hidden In The ‘The Fantastic Four’ Teaser

The Fantastic Four has finally released a teaser and, to be honest, it puts a substantial number of fears to rest. It’s also packed with interesting hints about where the movie will go. And also the Thing is going to run around bare-assed. Let’s break it down shot by shot, shall we?

First up, a montage, overlaid with dialogue about natural human curiosity. The first sign this is a Fantastic Four movie comes early, though:

And right away, we see this movie is taking a lot of cues from the Ultimate books, because here’s Reed and non-rocky Ben in a garage, screwing with God’s domain. Also of interest? There’s no found footage feel or style to this, so thanks for panicking us about that, Fox.

Reed being Reed, this naturally transitions into the standard Superpowers Granting Device, a giant tube you can recline in hooked up to a generator.

If you look closely, the way that device is laid out, there are four tubes. Which, shocking, we know. Interestingly, this somewhat resembles the MacGuffin in the Ultimate books, something the next shot only reinforces. Also of interest, though, is that this doesn’t appear to be the device that makes the four, well, Fantastic. It looks to be a test device, instead. Perhaps Reed and company discover the Negative Zone before they get their superpowers?

I’ve cropped it and kicked up the contrast, but the resemblance is clearly intentional, and the fact that Reed’s getting his research money from the military is, one suspects, also an important plot point. After that, we get a look at each of our team.

Reed (Miles Teller), who appears to be the hardware guy:

Sue (Kate Mara), who is working mission control:

Ben (Jamie Bell), who apparently has nothing better to do than play pick-up baseball at a high school:

And Johnny (Michael B. Jordan), who, well, yeah, he would be working on a car:

The next cut is particularly interesting: There are not four, not five, but six people getting onto the more refined dimensional gate/ship/whatever:

We know who four of them are, the fifth is almost certainly Hacker Doom… but who’s the sixth? A redshirt? A sequel hook? Wolverine, because Fox has to cross over universes?

Anyway, if you were wondering, it was Sue who was adopted. Here’s Franklin Storm!

It’s at this point the trailer just goes into straight “random shots from the movie” mode. The main takeaway here seems to be two-fold, the first being that the team is going to be in the Negative Zone for at least a brief while before the wheels come off, and that once they come back to Earth, the facility their dimension gate is located in is going to be the source of a huge fight. Pretty much all the footage from this montage would seem to come largely from those two sequences. But breaking it down in order…

We see a cargo plane flying over what might, in fact, be Latveria; Reed in the woods wearing what appears to be a destroyed version of his dimensional travel suit:

The first GIFable moment in the trailer, Ben Grimm waking up to realize he’s going to have a really bad day:

There’s Sue Storm crying over her brother in what we’re assuming is the Negative Zone:

We see Johnny catching the hell on fire:

There’s a bomb going off in New York, although of what kind and its nature is a good question.

It sure looks like the epicenter is on the street, but it can’t be Sue: She projects force fields, and she’d be destroying buildings with a field that large. Could this possibly be something Doom is trying to pull off?

Also, it appears the Negative Zone sucks in many, many ways:

That’s followed by what’s almost certainly our first look at Doom, although it’s not much of one:

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Johnny and Sue going head-to-head:

And Reed stretching:

Probably the most intriguing moment, though, is a brief line of dialogue between Reed and who we’re assuming is Doom, where Doom hints that he’s just the preview, and this final shot:

Notice that Ben isn’t wearing pants. In fact, none of them are wearing uniforms of any sort. That’s an interesting take on things.

That, by the way, is the dimensional gate from Ultimate Fantastic Four, just in case the fact that they were pulling the plot fairly directly from the comics wasn’t obvious enough.

In short, there is a lot here and it’s all pretty interesting. If you love the Four, this is starting to look like the first movie that really tries to get them right… but, of course, we’ll know in August.

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