Hindsight: A 2015 Cinematic Retrospective

It appears that I saw more Hollywood films in 2015 than I did in 2014. Damn. You win this time, culture industry. As usual, let's begin with some films I didn't see.

Six 2015 Films You Might Have Expected Me To See, But I Didn't:

The Bad Education Movie

It's not exactly top-notch sitcom material, but I quite like Bad Education. It has some funny moments; it's better to watch while a bit drunk. Anyway, the film looked pretty uninspiring: the cringe factor of the show cranked up to a million, and the contrast between the "crazy" comedy characters and the scoffing, eye-rolling "straight man" characters exaggerated to an even greater degree. I don't think it would have ever been shown in cinemas over here.

Ex Machina

Apparently this is quite good. I just haven't seen it. Why haven't I seen this?

Update in 2017: I've seen this now. It was good, and rather challenging to my beliefs. It's odd to think about when apparently the director saw the robot, Ava, as the protagonist, while I viewed Caleb, who ends up trapped in the facility, in this role. Ava ends up becoming a murderer, but in a sense so was Nathan, and Caleb was his inadvertent stooge with a controlling saviour complex. At the same time, I wonder if the film's focus on punishing Caleb for his patriarchal decision-making overlooks the extent to which our actions are influenced by historical and social forces beyond our control. Also, we are left wondering how to view Ava; does she have emotions, but behaves selfishly, or is only following a routine? Is she justified in killing Nathan, who murdered several of her own kind (in a sense) and abandoning Caleb, who tried to save her for arguably selfish, patriarchal reasons of his own, because she was essentially created as a tool to manipulate men rather than as a person with her own identity and individuality? One to think on further, I suspect, and in any modern film that has to be a good thing.

The Hateful Eight

I don't mind a bit of Tarantino and I heard this was pretty decent. I just haven't seen it yet.

Update in 2017: I've seen this now. It was all right.

The Lobster

I understand that this weird dystopian satire is quite good too and I want to see it. It's supposedly a society where if you don't couple up with someone romantically and/or sexually, you turn into an animal. I'd be buggered, then.

Update in 2019: I was motivated to see this after seeing the director's film The Favourite, and I enjoyed both that and this. While as a dystopian text the equally oppressive nature of the City/hotel and the Loners could be construed as a false equivalence, as a reflection on the hypocrisies of both couplehood and singledom it was effective. The dull, stilted delivery really enhances the sense of the artificiality of how many relationships, both romantic and platonic, are navigated, the costuming is simple and effective, and the music and occasional dark humour create a sense of hyperreal oddness that tends to hit the spot for me. It's definitely not for everyone but I enjoyed it a great deal.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

More like the Man from C.U.... etc, am I right? I didn't really want to see this; I can't believe they're still trying to make films by rehashing old twentieth century spy and crime TV shows. Henry Cavill should play James Bond, probably.

Victor Frankenstein

Another horror film featuring Daniel Radcliffe? Can I expect more Woman in Black style quality? Probably not; I understand that this film is quite shit. I still want to see it, but it sounds like Universal is completely fumbling their attempts to bring their classic Horror franchises back to life.

Moving on...

Ten 2015 Films I Did Actually See:

Ant-Man

This was basically the definition of a generic superhero flick. Scott Lang (played by Paul Rudd, but underutilising his comedy potential) is an "honour among" style thief with a heart of (stolen) gold who just wants to be back in his young daughter's life. Thus he is hired to become the new Ant-Man, succeeding his new employer Hank Pym as a superhero who can become tiny and run inside people's ears and so on. The plot is incredibly derivative of Iron Man and Iron Man 2: the villain is an evil Ant-Man with his own, more powerful suit, who is going to cause terrible evil by flogging the suits to the military and/or Hydra. He and Ant-Man have a big punch up; Ant-Man wins. There are some good moments where normal things become tiny or huge, although it doesn't really make sense because the technology is said to just increase the space between atoms; if you turned a little Thomas the Tank Engine toy gigantic, for instance, it wouldn't smash through the side of the house, because it's still the same flimsy plastic, just stretched out further; the toy would still be the thing that broke. Also, if it just changes distance between atoms, how can Ant-Man shrink into subatomic size and risk disappearing into some weird microscopic dimension? Anyway, I believe this started off under the direction of Edgar Wright of British comedy fame but he quit part way through because Marvel kept interfering, and the film was finished by another bloke who played it safe. It shows. Rudd's Ant-Man is more interesting and funny in Captain America: Civil War than in this, his own film.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Ugh. This sucked. You can read my review of it here. At the time I didn't think it sucked that much, but in hindsight (which is the whole point of these annual articles) I'm pretty sure it did. The Avengers run around and have a fight with a big robot. A city gets smashed up in the process. Everything is basically Iron Man's fault, as usual. It feels like a piece of pointless filler padding out the cinematic universe.

Back in Time

I wouldn't have thought of this as a 2015 film but Wikipedia said it was, so let's say it was. This was a documentary about Back to the Future, because 2015 was when Marty came to the future in the second film. The bits in this where they were interviewing the actual cast and crew of the films was quite interesting, but loads of it was padded out with pointless bullshit like: fans at conventions who build their own DeLoreans (who cares?); some company trying to build a real life hoverboard (who cares?); the bloke who made that cartoon show "Rick and Morty" banging on about "Rick and Morty" (what does this really have to do with Back to the Future?) They should have made this just about the making of the films and reflecting back on it 30 years later, and relegated all the stuff about the tedious fans and the Rick and Morty guy patting himself on the back to a separate "fan" documentary that no one would have to watch.

Cinderella

I thought this was okay, to be honest; nothing special, but a pleasant enough way to pass the time. It's just a live-action remake of the classic Disney cartoon, which might seem like sacrilege to some but I'm just not nostalgic enough about those old Disney fairytale cartoons. It just felt a bit generic, kind of like that Gaiman adaptation Stardust. If they wanted to update the film, they could have provided a more realistic motivation for why the evil stepmother is so horrible. By contrast, if they wanted to keep it a bit absurd (as it still was at points, like when the fairy godmother appeared), they could have had the mice talk and stuff as well. Bonus points for having Hayley Atwell as the mum, but then negative bonus points because she gets killed off five minutes in.

Fantastic Four

Jesus. This was really terrible, and I'm honestly not saying that to go along with the crowd or something. I consider myself more of a Fantastic Four fan than your average punter (I have a medium-sized collection encompassing parts of the Lee/Kirby, Byrne and Hickman eras and, for whatever reason, the whole Waid era)  and this somehow was even worse than I expected. In some ways it tries to be its own thing too much, sort of like a B movie about teleportation rather than a superhero film, but it's also way too similar to the equally derided 2005 adaptation, with Doom having superpowers and the thin characterisation. I reckon this was done on the cheap, too, because huge amounts of it takes place in a single lab set. If you want more of my thoughts, see here, or listen to this podcast for thoughts which suspiciously coincide with mine. This probably gets my "worst film of 2015" award.

It Follows

This premiered in 2014 but come on, it's a 2015 film. Everyone saw it in 2015 (I actually only saw it this year). This was an interesting premise: a murderous "thing" is following a person; the only way they can fob it off onto someone else is by having "sex" with another person, and then the thing will start hunting them instead. They too must copulate furiously with someone to pass the curse or whatever off again. In contrast to The Lobster mentioned above, this wasn't too scary for me because I'd be completely safe from it wahey. Anyway, the idea is engaging and ominous, although the film isn't that scary in general. What it benefits from the most is an unsettling electronic soundtrack (by the same composer as that of the very pleasant soundtrack of the indie game Fez) and a curious dreamlike atmosphere in which the decade and time of year is very hard to pin down; it's sort of the past and the future at once, and the seasons seem to change between scenes. It's a film worth watching even if the premise is rather contrived.

Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension

Much like The Farked Ones last year, I, uh, didn't see this at the cinema. I only saw it the other day, in fact. It concludes the franchise, supposedly, and in a sense it does a decent job in wrapping up the plot: apparently everything that happened was in service of giving the demon a body... in 1992, despite this being set in 2013. As such, the time travel used in The Marked Ones continues here, and permits some unsettling moments. It also follows up the plot of the third film, giving a reasonable sense of closure. My main issue with the film was that there was way too much CGI; a special camera is introduced that allows us to see the invisible supernatural things, and it turns out that Toby the Demon just looks like a mass of CGI smoky shadows with a Voldemort face in the middle. A bunch of big CGI tentacles are used to kill some of the characters, and little girl du jour is abducted to the past through a big CGI time tunnel. That wasn't my cup of tea. It's no better or worse than the last two, really, and more or less gets the job done, but its use of CGI hampers the suspension of disbelief a bit. There are also two secondary protagonists, the main male character's brother and the main female character's friend, who exist purely for comic relief and fan service respectively, which makes this instalment feel perhaps the most "generic horror" in terms of the scenario of all the films.

Spectre

It's a crappy James Bond film starring Daniel Craig with a completely misconceived attempt to reintroduce Blofeld and the eponymous evil organisation. Read my full review of it here and some further thoughts here. The plot and the climax are a complete rip-off of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. It's not worth discussing any further. First Craig was leaving, then he wasn't, and now he is again. Who knows anymore. I don't have high hopes for the next one.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Am I still talking about this? See my initial thoughts here and my full review and recap here. It's a mediocre film with a few memorable moments. I rewatched it recently and found it quite dull, especially the middle act on the planet Takodana. The performances and screenplay are all tolerable but the story is cynical and lazy and it doesn't really tell much in the way of a complete story, making it feel far too much like a piece of product designed to keep consumers on the hook (which of course it is) rather than a logical and necessary continuation of the narrative of the original films (which it isn't). Is it better than the Prequels? It's directed in a more interesting way, but feels "off" - it feels like a J.J. Abrams film that happens to be "Star Wars", rather than a Star Wars film that happens to be directed by Abrams. The screenplay is probably less clunky than those of the Prequels, but again, a good deal of that is to do with the direction. In many respects it feels far less original because it relies so heavily on call backs to the original film and The Empire Strikes Back. Its use of practical effects also makes the use of CGI, when it does appear, more noticeable and very irritating. I want Episode VIII to be better than this.

By a process of elimination, because the above films were all mediocre to bad (except for It Follows, which is decent), my top film of 2015 is:

The Witch

This is a weird, disturbing horror film about colonial settlers in North America succumbing to their own isolation, paranoia and religious fundamentalism. It's atmospheric and creepy, exhibiting clearly the traumatic consequences of severe puritanical practices and the repression of human nature. A family of seven are exiled from their colonial town because of the father's heresy and they try to eke out a poor living in the woods, but accusations of witchcraft begin flying around among the family members when the youngest child, a baby, disappears. The characters speak in an early modern idiom appropriate to the time period, night scenes are really dark, and everything feels eminently realistic and believable, even as apparently supernatural things happen. In keeping with some of the best horror narratives, it's never completely clear whether the supernatural events are real or just paranoid hallucinations. Overlaid with this are traditional themes of spiritual terror about the theological complexities of salvation and damnation. It's good.

That's twice now I've given a horror film my "film of the year" award. Do the "good" horror films somehow get more exposure than the "good" films of other genres, like sci-fi, for some reason? Are other genres too saturated with Hollywood action hybrids, so we don't notice when the more cerebral stuff comes out? I guess so. I need to see Ex Machina. (Seen it now, but I think I still preferred The Witch)

A Brief Comment on Fantastic Four (2015)

It's bad. Yeah, everyone is saying that (but not everyone), but what makes it bad? I'll sum up:

1. The plot never stops setting up. Meet Reed! Meet Ben! Meet Sue! Meet Johnny! They build a teleporter! They use a teleporter! They get powers! The government exploits their powers! They build a new teleporter! Doom got powers! What's going to happen now? Oh, we beat Doom. The end.
2. There's no sense of "family". They're a bunch of thinly-written characters who barely relate to each other. They never even work as a team until the very end. Part of the point of the comics was that the Fantastic Four expressed the idea that your "family" is a group of people with whom you have a shared experience. This never comes across in the film, and Sue never has their experience. If anything, the 'Four' in this film is Reed, Ben, Johnny and Doom. This leads me to:
3. It's kind of sexist. Yeah, the old comics are sexist too, but so is this. Sue never goes to the other dimension until the very end. She gets her powers in a very arbitrary way. None of the men even think of bringing her along even though she was part of the team that built the teleporter, and it's never brought up that they didn't.
4. They make exactly the same mistakes with Doom as in the 2005 film. He's attracted to Sue, so he fails as a reflection of their embrace of family: remember the classic line "Doom needs no one." Doom rejects the society of others because of his massive inferiority complex. In the film he also has superpowers. Thus instead of being a character who pursues power, he's simply a character who misuses power, making him just an arbitrarily evil version of the other main characters. There's no explanation for why he's that way.
5. The film is grey, flat, boring and colourless.

This might have worked as a crappy sci-fi film about teleportation and body horror, but there was no need to waste the characters of the Fantastic Four on such a concept. Even an incredibly generic film where the Four got powers and Reed's old colleague Doom, now a power-hungry tyrant, attacked them because he thought they were the biggest obstacle to his taking over the world/becoming a god/whatever, and they had to defeat him, would have been better. I didn't mind that they made Johnny and Sue into more active characters in the plot, but they could have done a lot more with it. You'd be better off watching the 1994 one than this.

Concerns before the 2015 "Fantastic Four" film adaptation

Fun fact: in Portugese, Doctor Doom is called 'Doutor Destino.'

Apart from the fact that it simply doesn't look like it's going to be very good, I'm reasonably convinced that the next attempt to realise Marvel's First Family on the silver screen is going to be little more successful than the one before. We already know that the reason this is going ahead is largely so that Fox can avoid losing its film option, which makes this 2015 production in some respects a high-budget reiteration of the 1994 ashcan copy which, if anyone's seen it, occupies an uneasy space between "so bad it's good" and "actually just very bad." The best thing that can be said of that rare cinematic experience is that Doctor Doom's costume is quite good, although the actor, Mister Joseph Culp, is partially muffled by the mask. Did they not put a microphone inside? Anyway, it's Doom I wanted to talk about.

Sorting out the Fantastic Four themselves is never going to be a huge stretch of the imagination for filmmakers. Inevitably, Reed will be the stretchy smart guy who lacks certain social graces or takes life too seriously, Sue is the strong core of the group who can turn invisible and project force fields, Johnny is a hot head who can fly and set himself on fire and Ben is the tormented one who's been turned into a monster. I'm not saying that's all there is to the characters, but that's what filmmakers are going to see.

The reason why Doom works in the best of the comics, and the reason why he's never worked in a film, is because he functions most successfully as a dark reflection of the Fantastic Four: a Jungian shadow or nemesis figure, as attested on the website The Great American Novel which analyses the comics from the 60s to the 80s. Doom is never used this way in the films, and as such he doesn't work at all. To be specific, Doom reflects each of the four heroes individually and as a whole:

1. Like Reed, Doom is an intellectual, but he is not a purely rational character. He supplements his scientific expertise and technological resources with magic, injecting an element of superstition into the framework. The fact that Reed does not dwell on his own genius is also reflected by Doom's arrogance and pride.
2. Sue's conviction and strength of character are reflected by Doom's stubbornness, obsessive nature and warped code of honour.
3. Johnny's extroversion and passionate, energetic behaviour is shadowed by Doom's grandiosity and his short temper (as well as his showy costume).
4. Like Ben, Doom is deeply insecure about his appearance, but while Ben tends to confront the world openly and dares the world to react, Doom hides behind a mask and an elaborate costume intended to inspire dread and awe.
5. The Fantastic Four are intrinsically a family. Doom is ultimately alone, emphasised by his tendency to surround himself with robot duplicates made in his own image. His closest confidant, his seneschal Boris, fears him, his adopted son Kristoff is forced to become him in case of emergencies, and his childhood sweetheart, Valeria, rejected him when she discovered what a tyrant he had become as an adult.
6. The Fantastic Four are something of a capitalist-democratic success story, embodying how hard work, talent and a little luck could allow one to achieve prosperity, freedom and happiness (apart from all the villain-fighting). Doom is an autocrat who used his skills to seize control of his homeland and rule it. How benevolent Doom is seems to depend very much on the author, but Doom contrasts to the Four in that while their lives are about gaining power over themselves and their own lives, Doom is interested in power over other people.

I'm not claiming to have some particular insight into the character of Doctor Doom that other people lack, but I think that gives at least a sense of why Doom is so successful in artistic terms as the archenemy and sometime begrudging ally of the Fantastic Four. Obviously the reason he's been a villain in other comics, the Avengers and the like, is because he looks cool, is powerful and has reasonably clear motivations, but that's why Doom works in the best Fantastic Four comics.

The reason why Doom doesn't work in adaptations is because they always change him to such an extent that he becomes irrelevant. In the 1994 ashcan he wants the FF's powers because he believes that the cosmic radiation, which he was studying in the film with Reed, should have been experienced by him but the accident got in the way. In the 2005 film he's made similarly irrelevant because, like his form in the Ultimate Comics, he actually gains powers in the same way as the FF, in the same incident, which means that instead of being a reflection of them, he just is one of them, but evil. One facet of Doom's character which also makes him an effective foil to the Four in the comics is that he doesn't have powers, but has gained power through his study of science and magic. As a combatant, Doom is basically the same as Iron Man, a human being in a powered suit of armour that can fly and shoot lasers out of his hands. The FF are about dealing with and managing the powers they received by accident, while Doom is focused on giving himself more power intentionally.

Approved by the Comics Code Authority.

Doom also doesn't work in the 2005 film because he has no motivation beyond revenge. While Doom in the comics is partially motivated by transferred self-loathing which manifests as resentment towards Reed, a major part of his characterisation is that he desires rulership, initially over the world and later merely over Latveria so that he may order it. In the 2005 film I suppose you could say that Doom represents, however blandly, the corporate world which only values profit while Reed represents purely scientific academia, but it's hardly borne out through the film. He is also motivated in the 2005 film by a lust for Sue, which means that he fails as a foil for the team: Doom in the comics is a loner by choice because he has such contempt and mistrust for the world around him.

So what does any of this have to do with the 2015 film, I hear you ask? Well let's take what we know about Doom in the new film, derived from some websites I saw: supposedly Doom is a "very anti-social programmer" who is known on blogs by the username "Doom."

Right.

Y'know, I don't want a big fanboy about it, because they're just film adaptations. Fantastic Four is a comic. That's kind of an issue with this whole superhero film market at the moment. Comic book characters work best in comics because that's their medium. And there are a bajillion good comics with good, proper Doctor Doom in, many of which I have read. But the thing is, I'm very sceptical about this being a good direction in which to take Doom.

Doom is the shadow of the FF. He's the fifth member of the Fantastic Four. He needs to reflect them, to be like and yet unlike them. If he's doing that, then he's doing his job, and it doesn't matter if he's a programmer or whatever. But the thing is, this situation seems to me like they want Doom to be "modernised," and I think this isn't the way to go.

One of the important elements of the Fantastic Four is that they embody forward-looking attitudes, optimism and futurity. Doom is a monarch, and represents a different kind of society. He's a scientist who also uses magic, which suggests something both old-world and new-world about him. This is also embodied in the fact that he is European while the Four are American. A good example might be in the classic "This Land Is Mine" issue of John Byrne's run on the comic, in which Doom is simultaneously the enemy of the Four (who represent capitalism), the enemy of Zorba, the King of Latveria who seized the throne from Doom by claiming inheritance from his brother, and the enemy of the Soviets - one of the reasons he wishes to rule Latveria is to better protect it from being absorbed into the Eastern bloc. So Doom is an anti-capitalist, anti-communist and anti-traditionalist. Possibly this makes Doom a fascist, if anything. At the same time Doom is Romany, and therefore naturally an enemy of racist fascists like the Red Skull.

What this means is that in a sense Doom embodies that idea which lurks inside of many people which is a form of introspection bias: "I can see how the world should work, but no one else seemingly can. If only I was in charge, everything would be put right." In that sense it might be appropriate for Doom to be an "anti-social programmer." But the point of Doom is that he's anti-everything, except Latveria and himself. For this reason I think putting Doom into this modern mould risks rendering him irrelevant, because it makes him part of an existing cultural structure - internet culture. Another reason Doom is the shadow of the Four is because the Four are about forging a path, and about freedom, while Doom achieves this not in his actions but in his attitude: while he achieves a great deal, he is interested in rejecting, denying and belittling all existing structures. This is obviously represented in how regularly Doom tends to abuse his diplomatic immunity when he's in the United States.

"Only one of us has enough fanboys to triumph!"

On the website I mentioned previously, The Great American Novel, it's argued that Doom's fundamental motivation is simply that he wants to feel important. Now this again seems like a reasonable idea to be applied to an online figure, given the notion that many trolls and online commentators do so because yelling uselessly into the void of cyberspace is the only way they can deal with their crushing feelings of unimportance and irrelevance (the irony is not lost on me incidentally). This is a fact borne out every day, of course: the people at the top of the chain in most online "controversies" - that is, multinational corporations and their decision-making bodies - have probably no knowledge and certainly no interest whatsoever in the demands or arguments of online nobodies. But Doom is not a character ruling over a petty little online kingdom of misery but a man who wishes to impose himself upon the world in a public and spectacular way.

Now I might be proved wrong by the characterisation of Doom in the film. I might be, although I highly doubt it. I suppose my point in the end is this: Doom is the archetypal super-villain. One of the biggest problems in my opinion is that Marvel Studios don't have the rights to the character. I'm not one of those people who thinks that everything Marvel Studios does is gold - in fact I think a lot of it is well-presented mediocrity - but I think they would have got Doom right. I mean, he's so hard to get wrong. He's a tyrant in power armour who calls himself 'Doctor Doom.' You can basically put him in anything and he'll work - as long as you keep him that way. But I don't think many modern Hollywood studios are too interested in the subtlety which can be derived from a character like Doom. It's a mistaken impression, obviously. Look at the enduring popularity and cultural resonance of Darth Vader, a character partially modelled on Doom. I haven't even touched on another part of Doom's characterisation in this, his relationship with his parents, which is another effective element of his characterisation which remains untapped onscreen. I think it's a shame that there's all this interesting stuff happening in source material which has never survived the adaptation process, and continues to not survive. Why not try Doom in his original state? The only time it's ever been attempted is in the 1994 ashcan which was never intended to be seen by anyone.

Compelling villains have been all the rage since The Dark Knight and Doom could easily be no exception, even from a bottom-line marketing point of view: a grandiose antagonist in a fancy costume who could be the subject of any number of t-shirts, toys and internet memes. It's actually something Marvel have generally bungled in my opinion. The only villain they've come up with, across Fox, Sony and Marvel Studios who has gained any mileage is Loki (the only other memorable one is Ian McKellen's version of Magneto, and that mostly works because Ian McKellen is a very good actor). Doom needs to be evil, but also visually impressive and charismatic, the kind of guy people will quote as they're leaving the cinema. He needs to be the guy who you kind of want to win.

At the end of the day though, comic books are comic books, and not movies. One of their failings in the modern day is that they're trying to be movies, which they aren't. Doom works as a comic book villain. He especially works as a comic book villain in the 60s, 70s and 80s - these days he's practically a good guy half the time. His value could extend outside that, but only if filmmakers and the like recognise why the character is so distinctive and effective, which they rarely seem to do. It's not about treating comics that only a handful of people these days read with "respect"; they're not sacrosanct and only the fanboyism of naïve consumers treats them that way. It's about the fact that these ideas were assembled originally in good faith for an artistic reason, and for an adaptation to succeed it really needs to be making similar artistic decisions to its source material. One of the reasons adaptations so regularly artistically fail (even if they succeed commerically because the average consumer neither recognises nor cares about this problem) is because they are simultaneously trying to be one thing (the source material) and another, different thing, usually in another medium (the adaptation). But one thing is not necessarily another thing, and altering the first thing can easily mean that none of it makes sense after the alterations are made (it's one of the reasons Peter Jackson's Hobbit films don't remotely function at all as any kind of story).

If you want good Doctor Doom, read any of the following: Lee/Kirby era Fantastic Four featuring the character (you'd be surprised how much was introduced straight away: Doom went to college with Reed, he was injured in a magical experiment, he likes living in castles, he has a time machine), John Byrne era Fantastic Four featuring the character (like Chris Claremont with Magneto I'd argue he was more interested in the villain than he was with the actual main characters of the comic he was writing), the one shot "graphic novel" (more correctly known as a 'long comic book' - "graphic novel" is marketing speak for men in 80s business suits) Emperor Doom, and if you want something more modern, Ed Brubaker's Books of Doom if you want a sympathetic view of the character, or Mark Waid's run on Fantastic Four if you want a really unsympathetic view of the character (he murders his aforementioned childhood sweetheart and makes a suit of magic armour out of her skin). There's also Super Villain Team-Up from the 70s but while that's essentially Doom's comic (he was the main character for most of it) it's mostly just him acting like a moustache-twirling villain and most of the "teaming up" actually involves him having slap fights with other villains with whom he can't get along. Maybe that was the point.

Long story short, "Fantastic Four 2015" probably won't be very good and their modern take on Doom, whether it's good or bad, will probably never be as good as making an attempt to actually use the original character as he is, which has never been done and has more artistic relevance and merit. How am I able to write an article this long about a comic book character? What am I doing with my life?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWxo1VV3QyY#t=0m47s
The only good 'Doom' moment ever in live action.
'Nuff said.

Marvel Legends: Doctor Doom

As you may know, I'm a sucker for a well-characterised villain, and when it comes to well-characterised villains, or rather super-villains, there are few better than Victor von Doom, arch enemy of the Fantastic Four and especially its leader, Reed Richards. A perfectionist with a monstrous ego, he craves power - power which he has demonstrated to be able to competently wield for the good of society in the case of his homeland of Latveria but which he believes he should wield heedless of the choice of others. Perhaps he is right, because when Latveria has been under the rule of Doom it has generally prospered, but the rest of the world isn't so willing. On the one occasion in which he did successfully conquer Doom found himself bored and frustrated by the tedium and minutiae of administration, as he constantly desires challenge and, in a sense, adventure. Hence his repeated clashes with the Fantastic Four. Much like Marvel's other great villain, Magneto, he comes from an oppressed minority, in this case the travelling Romani of Eastern Europe, and their harsh treatment has greatly motivated his desire for a just and prosperous society. Coupled with the accident which caused him to hide his body from the world and the loss of his mother to the demon Mephisto and we get a character who wants what's right but really has a bone to pick with the world. In another parallel with Magneto, he too recently found it advantageous to join his erstwhile enemies, and became a member of the Fantastic Four when they expanded into the Future Foundation. This has lately provided the opportunity for a lot of good character interaction between Doom and his opponents, although it's not the first time he's formed an alliance with the Fantastic Four in pursuit of the common good.

This brings us to the figure. Like the other Toybiz Marvel Legends figures I've encountered, this is a very detailed toy which is sure to please enthusiasts of the character. One of the fortunate things about Doom is that he wears armour over his limbs, so there's no need to disguise or worry about joints for the articulation of the figure. Nonetheless he's not quite as poseable as Magneto or the other figures I have, Captain America and Red Skull, but I can make him to an extent looking like he's haughtily crossing his arms so I think that's still pretty good. The cloth of his tunic is very detailed, as are his belt and mask. His hood and cloak are completely removeable and indeed easy to take off. His face mask is removeable too; this figure utilises Jack Kirby's original conception of the character in which he greatly exaggerates his own disfigurement; he actually only has one scar across his right cheek, which is still too much of a marring for the perfectionist Doom. I believe there's some kind of Fantastic Four combo pack in which Doom's face is completely ravaged but I kind of think I prefer this version; it's more subtle. The mask has its own set of eyes sculpted on so you don't have to worry about the face and the mask not matching up; it's maybe a bit of a cop out on ToyBiz's part but I think it works nonetheless.

The other accessories with which Doom is equipped are a Luger in a holster at his belt, which I can only really associate with the laser pistol he uses occasionally in Marvel vs Capcom 3, and a turret stand presumably from Castle Doom in Latveria. Like Magneto's stand it can be hooked onto the wall if for some reason you want your action figures to hang from the wall and it too is very nicely detailed. There's a prominent crest featuring the sombre visage of Cynthia von Doom, his mother, she of the character backstory. This way you can have Doom so that he's brooding or plotting or, depending on how you like your villain, speculating hopefully on the future of Latveria and the world, probably while concocting a zany scheme which will bring the ire of the Fantastic Four.

The paint on the figure's a game of halves. In principle, in a perfect world, the paint scheme itself is extremely impressive. The armour's given a wash so that it looks a bit battle-worn and not excessively polished and shiny. The texture on the tunic is very strong, with lighter highlights on the folds. The cape, while of course darker, has this too, along with gold on the clasps. However that being said, it's not a perfect world, and on my Doom there are a few slightly sloppy bits on the face, the pistol and in one spot on the skirt of the tunic. They're hardly dealbreakers, however. Doom's face under the mask is extremely detailed, with individual teeth and haughtily cocked eyebrows. One other nice detail is that behind his cape, on his back and sticking out from his tunic are the two little booster jets that let him fly. They really didn't miss a trick with these figures. His joints are a little stiff but he has been sitting in a plastic clamshell for ten years so I can't really begrudge him that. If I'm going to make any particular criticism it's that on his arms and legs the armour's not especially detailed. It gets the job done, but it lacks some of the ridges on the gauntlets and feet with which Doom is normally depicted.

As I mentioned earlier he's pretty poseable. The cape and tunic skirt obstruct some potentially wilder positions but he's advertised as having twenty-seven points of articulation, which isn't too bad. He's got ball jointed shoulders, hips and neck, swivelling upper arms, wrists, waist and upper legs and hinged fingers, toes, knees, elbows and feet. He's not quite at the level of Magneto because he doesn't have the hinged chest, double-jointed elbows, knees and shoulders, swivel ankles or hinged wrists which are kind of commonplace, but this is due to his unique design with the tunic and armour. It's not really a great loss. You can still pose him pretty well; some of the articulation on the really heavily jointed ToyBiz figures is kind of extraneous to be honest. He's certainly not up there with the insane levels of a toy like Face-Off Cap, who has individually poseable fingers. As I say, it's more than compensated for by the wealth of accessories and the level of detail.

It's also worth noting that like all ToyBiz figures from this era Doom comes with a complementary comic showcasing the character at his finest. In this case it's a reprint of Fantastic Four Vol 1 #247, written and illustrated by John Byrne and originally published in 1982. In support of my brief discussion of the character above it's a famous story in which Doom enlists the help of the Fantastic Four to assist him in overthrowing Zorba, the very monarch the Fantastic Four helped into power to replace the apparently-tyrannical Doom. Upon arrival they discover that Zorba's actually a good deal more unpleasant in power than Doom ever was. It marks the first appearance also of Kristoff Vernard, Doom's ward and heir apparent. I think the ending's a bit rushed but it has some interesting character moments, such as when Sue Storm the Invisible Woman notices what a dangerously competent and charismatic natural leader Doom is when he's put in charge, and when Doom remarks that the only freedom he denied his subjects is "the freedom to commit evil." It really colours Doom in an ambiguous way, culminating in his murder of the defeated tyrant Zorba.
In case you're wondering, the chase figure for this is a Doombot. As far as I'm aware the only difference is that under the mask it has a metallic, mechanical robot face rather than Von Doom's own appearance. I've heard from a couple of places that ToyBiz's original plan was to release the figure with the mask on, so that you wouldn't be able to tell if you were getting Von Doom himself or a Doombot. This was meant to mimic the recurring situation in the comics in which the Fantastic Four or whichever heroes are present, thinking they have defeated Von Doom himself, discover that it was only a robot duplicate: it was often difficult to discover which armoured, green-clothed baddie in the area was the real Doctor Doom. The Doombots were therefore going to be the main production and Von Doom would be the rare chase variant. One source I've read claim that the complaints of overly-entitled fans dashed this plan. Personally I think I'm more willing to believe another account I've heard, which was that simply common sense ruled the day - people want Von Doom himself, not a robot duplicate, and making it impossible to tell was either cruel or a money-grubbing endeavour in itself: how many figures would you have to buy until you found a real Von Doom? I know I'm the kind of slightly obsessive-compulsive person who wouldn't have been satisfied with a Doombot even though they look identical with the mask on. As intellectually clever as I think the idea is of emulating the comic scenario with the distribution of the figures, it makes no business sense. You'd either be seen as greedy, encouraging multiple purchases of the same toy, or it would backfire and people would stay away for fear of getting the one they didn't want. Buying an action figure shouldn't be a gamble, and it makes sense to me that his face is visible.
It's probably worth mentioning that once Hasbro took over the Marvel Legends franchise they produced their own version of Doom which a quick Google Image Search will swiftly reveal. While this certainly has some better or at least more accurate detailing around the legs and feet and has a perhaps slightly more standard face plate design (without attached eyes) the level of detail on the tunic and cape is significantly less and compared to this Doom the cloth looks overly smooth, shiny, plastic-like and ultimate cheap. I've avoided Hasbro Marvel Legends because their paint jobs and level of detailing are simply not up to the standard of the earlier ToyBiz figures. Despite lacking a torso hinge the ToyBiz figure is also superior in terms of articulation to the Hasbro Doom. The addition of the cracking Latveria turret stand and a nice showcase comic compared to getting a build-a-figure piece for some guy I've never heard of means that this figure, the ToyBiz one, peps the Hasbro Doom to the post completely. The thing I like about the good ToyBiz Marvel Legends, and this Doctor Doom figure in particular, is that the level of detailing in both the sculpting and the paint are combined with good accessories and articulation to produce figures which comfortably exist in the worlds of both collectable statue and toy. I see that a lot of people online think the Hasbro Doom is better but I can honestly say that when it comes to ToyBiz Doom vs Hasbro Doom, unless you like cheap-looking stuff the ToyBiz Doom has got to win the day. Maybe some kind of hybrid of the articulation and paintwork of ToyBiz Doom with some of the better details and design choices of Hasbro Doom would create some kind of ultimate Doctor Doom figure but until that day comes this one is my pick.

One last remark I'll make about the figure is that it has some very nice detailing on his head, especially the rivets of the mask and the many layers of the neck armour. Overall, like all the Toybiz figures I've encountered, I must say I'm impressed with this figure. There are quite a few floating around on eBay and they're not too expensive, all things considered. I'd definitely recommend this to anyone who's a fan of the monarch of Latveria. Your shelf will assuredly look a bit more snazzy with a touch of Doom.

UPDATE in 2015
This is really late but I've meant to write this down for ages and I only just got around to thinking this would be the best way to do it. You see how up there I said that a Doom figure with the paintwork of ToyBiz plus the design of Hasbro would be good? Well in 2013 Hasbro released a re-issue of their 2007 Doom figure (the one I didn't have and thought looked cheap) with an updated paint job closer to that of ToyBiz Doom. This solved the main problem with the Hasbro figure and I bought it. It's a good one, and a fitting take on the character in my opinion. It's probably not too hard to find these days so if you want Doom, get the 2013 re-issue with the better paintwork from Hasbro if you can't find or don't want the ToyBiz one. There was a variant in Doom's white Future Foundation outfit from the Hickman run on FF but I could never find it in Australia and it's incredibly expensive online. Nonetheless, Hasbro did well by Doom in the 2013 re-issue so I guess that proves I have the power of accidental prophecy.