Fantastic Four (2015)
"You put a lot of faith in these guys... I put all of my faith in them." -Dr. Franklin Storm
"Bad idea." -C Lo
"Bad idea." -C Lo
Comic book movies have really been picking up in the past decade. 20th Century Fox especially has been increasing the quality of their movies with X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days of Future Past. Of course both of those are X-Men movies though. But does the new version of the Fantastic Four become the superior to the incredibly bad 1994, 2005, and 2007 films?
Well the answer is far too simple: Absolutely NOT.
^Yes Ben Grimm. I said it.^
Fantastic Four, directed by Josh Trank, stars Miles Teller as Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic, Kate Mara as Sue Storm/Invisible Woman, Jamie Bell as Ben Grimm/The Thing, and Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm/The Human Torch (such a good cast, right?).
The film starts out as Reed Richards giving a presentation to his middle school classroom. He has dreams of aspiring to create a way to teleport. As everyone laughs and mocks him for having such an absurd dream, the struggling Ben Grimm is interested in Reed's dream, so he helps him build a machine that can teleport things. 7 years pass, without any changes to the characters' personality, and we now have the now Miles Teller and Jamie Bell. Reed is discovered by Dr. Franklin Storm at a small school science fair (and I don't even understand why the rest of the contestants are clearly younger than Reed and Ben) and give Reed a scholarship to help Dr. Storm build a similar machine that can teleport people into another dimension. With the help of Johnny, Sue, and Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell) they build the machine that sends Johnny, Reed, Victor, and Ben to the another planet in a different dimension. In a drunk stupor, Reed calls Ben to come to the lab where the machine is so that he can go with him to the other dimension along with Johnny and Victor, who are also drunk. The four of them go to the other planet, Sue comes into the lab and tries to bring them back, bad stuff happens that really doesn't make any sense, Victor falls into this green energy goop and "dies", and then the three guys that remain come back into our world and Sue gets hit with a wave of "energy", I guess you would call it, and they all faint from the disastrous event that happen on the other planet.
I'm sorry to you guys that are reading all of this. I didn't want to make this review too long, but you need to understand how ridiculous the whole plot is.
The tone of the movie changes completely, which up until this point was kind of like an action/adventure, to a horror kind of vibe. The four protagonists are in a government facility being held and experimented upon because of their just given powers that they don't know how to control. Reed somehow escapes and the others are left behind. 1 YEAR PASSES! Johnny, Sue, and Ben have suits, work for the government, and have control of their powers (wait...what?!?!).
The government finds Reed and he is brought back to the government facility to help with the process of going back to the other planet, called Planet X now. Four random scientists go and find that Victor is not dead. He kills them and crosses over back to Earth. He kills a bunch more scientists, soldiers, and Dr. Franklin Richards. His plan is to destroy Earth. Just obliterate it by sending it into a black hole. Reed, Johnny, Ben, and Sue team up to kill him and save humanity.
OK. Now here's a picture of a funny cool cat to take your mind off of all this ugliness:
^Yeah. Cool cat.^
Now before I get into why this movie is bad, I just want to say that as a moviegoer, I did not like this movie at all. As a comic book fan, I...I don't even have words to describe my hatred and discontent for this movie.
^Stan Lee is so upset at this failure^
There are so many problems with this film, but I'm only going to talk about the top 2 things that made me furious:
The first is Doctor Doom. He isn't even called Dr. Doom in this movie. So I'm just going to call him Victor. Victor is really underutilized in this movie. He shows up in what I believe is 1 hour and 5 minutes into the movie. Even then, he isn't a good villain overall. His motivation to destroy Earth is because he believes that everyone on Earth has done him wrong even though it was only Dr. Franklin Storm's company that he had a quarrel with. Also, Victor had really random super powers. At first he could just explode peoples' heads just by looking at them and then at another point he could control rocks. The most common known power of Dr. Doom is the electricity power he possesses. There was none of that in here. Worst of all, he doesn't look like the comic book Doctor Doom at all. Now, it's fine if Hollywood wants to change his look a little, but this?!?!
^Wha-Why???^
The second thing I disliked was the complete third act of the movie. The third act of Fantastic Four lasted about 20 minutes. There was no suspense, I never felt like Earth was actually in peril, and the fight between the Fantastic Four and Victor is so uninspired and not even remotely fun. A fight between a team of superheroes versus a super villain? Can this even be done?
^Yes. YES IT CAN!^
Oh! And these are just two of the factors that made this movie such a flop. Things like the chemistry between the Fantastic Four didn't look at all genuine (they probably knew this film was going to be bad), the death of Dr. Franklin Storm was an unnecessary death, I could definitely tell there were some creative differences between Josh Trank (the director) and 20th Century Fox, and many other parts that caused Fantastic Four to bomb. I mean, the four main actors who play the Fantastic Four didn't even see the movie. Now what does that tell you?
So as you can tell, I didn't like Fantastic Four very much. I guess the saving grace is the premise of the origin of the Fantastic Four going into a parallel universe and getting their powers that way instead of cosmic radiation. However, the more I think about this movie, the more I dislike it. I can only imagine people who have never read the Fantastic Four comic books seeing this movie.
Again, I'm sorry this review is so long. I just wanted to express my rage as a film and comic book lover.
Pro
- The premise is pretty interesting
- Victor Von Doom
- The plot/pacing/tone of the movie
- One of the worst third acts I have seen in recent memory
- Chemistry between characters
- Did not stay true to the comic books
- And more!
0.5/5
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