I had a plan going into this movie. I wasn’t feeling all that positive going into this new Fantastic Four movie, so I wrote down a list of predictions. If the majority of the predictions were fulfilled, then the movie was probably as bad as I had imagined that it would be. If they were rejected, than this would be a pretty enjoyable experience. But after having seen the movie, I realized my one fatal flaw: I made all of my predictions based on the belief that this was going to be a movie about, ya know, the Fantastic Four, and also that this was a film that would behave in ways that were rational and not completely stupid.
So here’s the story: Reed Richards (Miles Teller) and Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) build a teleportation device when they’re kids, but it later turns out that it actually transports things to an alternate dimension. Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) recruits Reed to come study at the Baxter Institute and work on a bigger version of his device, along with his kids Sue (Kate Mara) and Johnny (Michael B. Jordan), and a troubled former student named Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell). Their teleporter is a success, and in a desire to be the first people to walk on this new world, Reed, Johnny, Victor, and Ben use it themselves without permission or supervision. Things go wrong almost instantly, Victor is left behind, and the other three, along with Sue for some reason, are greatly affected by that realm’s energy. They are taken to a government lab where Reed is able to escape, but the others get trained to be commandos for the military. Sue eventually tracks Reed down, he helps to create a second version of the teleporter, and fifteen minutes later the movie is over.
Did that recap end a little suddenly for you? Yeah, well, the movie ends a little suddenly. I’m not worried about spoilers here because fuck this movie and fuck you if you care about this movie being spoiled. There is a final confrontation with Von Doom, who basically has telekinetic powers now, but it begins so quickly and ends with so little fanfare that I spent a minute unable to believe that this was really the end of the movie. How is it possible that an action/comic book film can have exactly ONE set piece fight scene, and an abbreviated one at that?
But the sins of this movie go deeper than just the ending. Why does Von Doom decide to try and destroy the world? Eh, that’s never really laid out. Why does the entire team instantly forgive Reed after he returns from his time on the lamb? Who cares! Not a single character in this movie has development or motivation and everything they do happens for no reason that I can discern. And this all wouldn’t even be that bad if the performances were at least good, but I’m here to tell you that director Josh Trank somehow managed to get some abysmal acting out of people like Teller and Mara, whom I know to be talented. How the fuck did this unbelievable hack manage to do that?!
Even with all of that baggage, the least that Fantastic Four could do is to be a fun and bombastic kind of bad, but what it ends up being instead is boring as all hell. Seriously, as I was driving home from the theater, I was having trouble remembering some sequences because they were all so dull and samey that they blended together into a katamari of formless nothingness. So much of the run time consists of people sitting around in labs doing nondescript science shit. The closest we get to seeing action (before those final fifteen minutes) is some satellite footage of the Thing wrecking some tanks and the Human Torch blowing up some drones. That’s it. I wish I was kidding you.
And getting back to that final battle, have any of you out there read the Fantastic Four comic books? If you have, then you know that they are kind of the front line of the Marvel cosmic universe. They, more than almost any of Earth’s other heroes, deal with forces like Galactus, who threaten to cause destruction on a grand scale. Their adventures allow them to traverse the cosmos and they are usually rendered in a psychedelic, flamboyant art style. So why is it that the end of this movie, this ultimate confrontation, takes place in the most boring desert wasteland that has ever been seen?
The 2005 and 2007 iterations of the Fantastic Four are bad. Very bad. But by comparison, they look like modern masterpieces next to this pile of filth. At least those films had color, and personality, and actually featured THE FANTASTIC FUCKING FOUR. Those two movies set a low bar, a bar that would be almost impossible to not clear. Trank’s movie looked at that bar and did this:
*By the way, this is my subtle plug for Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp. If you haven’t watched it, watch it.
I’m a Marvel fanboy. I want nothing more than to see the characters I grew up with succeed on the big screen. I want the rest of the world to look at them and see what I’ve seen all these years. But this is a movie that makes me ashamed to have ever read a Fantastic Four comic or to be associated with their fandom. If Fantastic Four co-creator Jack Kirby could see this movie, I’m sure that he would be livid. I didn’t even see Stan Lee, who cameos in almost every single Marvel film, in this movie. I suspect its because he didn’t want to associate himself with this production.
There is nothing good to be said about this movie. I don’t even like calling it a “movie.” It’s more like an uninspired origin story that was supposed to be the first twenty minutes of a better film, but was padded out so that the studio could expand it into two pictures, without actually having to make the second one. This is an abomination. It is an affront to Marvel’s First Family and the art of cinema in general. Fuck this shit so hard. I’m done.
There are 1 comments. Add yours