Movie Review: Fantastic Four

Fantastic Four (2015)

It took me this long to watch the movie, not having caught it in theaters when it came out. It's famous for absolutely crappy reviews and zero approval from literally everyone from professional reviewers and casual moviegoers, and is the movie to point to when you want to show that simply adapting characters from a well-known comic book does not guarantee success. Everyone derides it, and granted the show does have one hell of a troubled production (but then, so did Ant-Man, and that movie was awesome), something I am not bothered to write up but I'm sure a google search will give you the answers you're looking for. 

But let's just review a movie as a movie. Is Fantastic Four the 2015 movie that horrible to deserve all those memes and 0/10 reviews?

Well, after watching it... it's not that bad. I mean, Fantastic Four 2015 is certainly a bad movie, and a bad superhero movie, it's a rather poor adaptation of the Fantastic Four comics, I definitely prefer the older 2005 version and any sane person should. But it's still watchable. It's just... well, extremely problematic. It's a very dull and boring movie, which is a big problem when your main characters are supposed to be bright and colourful. It has been a problem that plagued a lot of superhero movies, but while it thematically suits heroes like Batman or Jessica Jones, it certainly does not fit Fantastic Four. There really aren't much about this movie that is pretty, beyond that one scene of Dr. Doom's portal sucking up the trees and scenery... the Thing looks ugly as hell, making an already intentionally-gonky design look utterly horrendous. Dr. Doom is an utter embarrassment to his classic design, taking 'realistic update' way too far and none of the three humanoid Fantastic Four members look decent, being forced to spend the entire movie in either dull black suits or with their faces hidden in these astronaut suits. 

Plot wise it's your average superhero origin movie that really should've not lasted an hour and a half. The movie takes too long to get started, and we never really get a proper payoff. We spend too long just detailing how Reed and Ben met each other, then how they met the Storms, et cetera, et cetera. It's nice to see how the gang came out together -- ensemble movies like Guardians of the Galaxy and Star Trek did the same thing -- but generally you spend the first fifteen to twenty minutes getting the dudes together and then showing the audience why you should care about them, instead of going into boring minutiae. A good chunk of the movie is spent on the alien planet, and another good chunk is just the Hunt For Reed while Ben and the Storm siblings are being used by the military. The Fantastic Four don't get their powers until like halfway through the movie, has to spend a quarter of the second half controlling it and/or in chains. Then Doom comes back in the last ten minutes for no proper reason, and we get the most generic superhero showdown with a big glowy portal in the sky that's been overused ever since Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Avengers did it in the same year. Doom's plans are bland repetitions of his 'the government can't be trusted' stuff he spouted before, and he's as dull a villain than Malekith from the second Thor movie... but that Thor movie had the utterly awesome Loki to compensate for a dull Malekith.

Worse-looking than even Jar Jar Binks

Doesn't help that Dr. Doom looks almost as bad as Red Tornado from Supergirl, but honestly this version of Doom just looks so cheap and when people in cosplay can make a better Doom costume than this... this fucking disgusting thing, well, who honestly thought that it would be something that the audience would look at and go "yep, that's cool"? Seriously? You spend a big movie's CGI budget for this? Some people say that Doom walking through that corridor while everyone dies around him is one of the better scenes in this movie... no, not really. Any sense of horror is kinda muted when Doom looks absolutely ridiculous. 

It tries to be Darker and Edgier when Fantastic Four is really the last franchise you should throw that trope on. Also it tries too hard to avoid being a superhero movie, doing away with Doom's far more attractive and flamboyant costume, does away with all the blue spandex (and Thing's pants), and doesn't give anyone codenames. Hell, generally movies at the very least throw the heroes/villains' comic-book codenames as an in-joke. Mr. Fantastic is obviously a horrible name and I can understand the movie not wanting to use it... but honestly, you can't throw Dr. Doom, the Thing and the Human Torch earlier on? It would be so easy for Ben to angst about being turned into "a thing". But no, it's not until the last ten seconds of the movie for Thing and Human Torch to be thrown out like in-jokes, whereas the Fantastic Four name isn't even said on-screen. Hell, apparently Victor Von Doom was changed into the utterly stupid-sounding "Victor Domashev" during principal shooting before it was changed back.

The dialogue in this movie is also extremely basic and I honestly can't think of a single clever exchange. Add that frankly insulting tirade from Doom against Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and I just cringe at this movie.

The four main characters never really interact as a group proper, with Ben only ever interacting with Reed, and Reed himself felt like a pretty bland character to hold the four together. He's smart, and, uh... I'm hard-pressed to say anything much about him. Johnny, Sue, Reed and Victor worked together to build the portal, of course, but other than that, again, there's not much to talk about their relationships beyond the short-lived hints of Doom's attraction to Sue. Ben gets angry at Reed for leaving him behind in the military facility, but they make up like they're best buddies for no reason at all. Ben is bullied as a child, with his brother apparently being the source of the Thing's signature "it's clobberin' time" catchphrase... but this is never brought up even once in the movie. Reed's exile also ended up being honestly a pointless plot point and I'm not quite sure where it's supposed to go.

I'm honestly not sure what was the point for the film to exclude Ben from the portal-working project... IIRC Comics Ben was a scientist himself, so why make him be excluded from the group? If it's to give Victor, Johnny and Sue more focus, then it sure as hell didn't work. Ditto for Sue not going along with the group to the planet, which just seemed like poor writing all around.

Making the team drunk when they do the journey also makes them rather... moronic. They apparently lose their drunkenness when they arrive on the Negative Zone (I'm not calling it... whatever anal name the movie called it. Mostly because I forgot) but instead of just taking samples and inspecting what's nearby of course they jump down a cliff and dip their hands into glowing green pools. Paragons of science, these people are.

Also how the hell is Sue affected and turned into the Invisible Woman when she didn't go with the boys to the other planet? Also, other than a short scene about being the responsible sibling, and her ongoing gimmick of using music to concentrate, Sue never really developed a personality either. She's bland, with neither the sibling connection with Johnny nor the apparent attraction to Reed, or even Doom's crush on Sue, get explored at all. Yes, there's a couple of stilted obligatory scenes to show that, hey, Johnny and Sue are siblings! Sue kinda likes Reed! But they are so devoid of any emotion and end up not mattering whatsoever. There's a nice point being brought up about Sue being adopted, and Johnny having a bit of jealousy towards Sue for being the good child, but again, not explored. Johnny's daddy issues were set up quite well, with him being really talented but wasting that on racing cars and shit simply to rebel against daddy, gets a nice continuation when he agrees to be a government weapon, his father died before he could make any meaningful changes... and ends up not getting that resolved either as his character ends up being reduced to nothing buy 'guy that shouts Captain Obvious things' when the climax rolls around.

Honestly, I'm not sure about the wonky pacing of the movie. The first half was half-decent, as poorly paced as it was. Did we really need the kiddy scene, or the high school science fair thing? Could've just reduced it all to ten seconds of dialogue from Reed. And all the buildup about character interactions that you'd expect -- Reed and Sue's not-flirting, Victor's jealousy at Reed, Reed and Ben's friendship, Johnny's estranged relationship to his father, Johnny and Reed being quick buddies... none of them really pay off. They go to the other dimension, which in itself took way too long and felt moronic considering it's a drunken spree... and then Doom gets left behind, they get captured by the government, Reed escapes...

I should probably say something about Dr. Franklin Storm and government man whose name I can't remember... but honestly they make such a little impression on me that I can't think of a word to say about them. They both die, and I just shrug. Considering Franklin's two children don't even react much regarding his death beyond the crying "DAD I'M SORRY" scene right after his death... Franklin is immediately forgotten about by both the cast and the audience.  

An overload of angsty character posturing is bad for a work of fiction (RE: Arrow), but the alternative, which is to have lifeless caricatures of characters who barely react to anything emotional around them ends up causing me to really not give a fuck about any of these characters. Darker and Edgier only works if you care about the characters... and I don't really care about any of them beyond the first act. As dark as stuff like the Nolan Batman trilogy or Man of Steel can be, they take time to make Batman and Superman... well, human, and retain character arcs for most if not all of the other supporting characters throughout their movies. Fantastic Four does no such thing.

And a random timeskip to one year later, and both Ben and Johnny seem happy to be used as weapons by the military. We could've explored how Ben felt about being used to crush tanks and soldiers for the government, or we could've explored just what Reed did while in self-imposed exile, but no. We just skip straight to setting up the finale, with the dull embarrassment that is this movie's Dr. Doom, and it ends up falling apart. None of the character threads set up in the first act are followed up upon as the characters just stand around and sulk, before Doom attacks, and then they attack Doom and sulk. There's no sense of fun or camaraderie between the titular Fantastic Four, when in the comics they're like this big happy family, and that is something the 2005 movie got right. 

Not that the third act was any good, mind. Superheroes saving the earth is a nice turn-off-your-brain-and-munch-popcorn plot, but Doom doesn't even make a lick of sense. He wants to destroy humanity... because? Again, it's something that the 2005 movie did better, as is the titular Four banding together to beat Doom, and the 2005 movie isn't even strictly a good movie! The CGI in this movie is especially bad mostly because so much of it just looks unfinished... but considering the monstrosities they turned out that is Dr. Doom, I'm not sure if the movie would look more impressive or better if they actually wasted even more money finishing the CGI.

Also why in the fuck did Doom forget he had "make your head explode by waving my hands" powers? Maybe it doesn't work on the stretchy Reed, but he did such impractical shit like throwing rocks at the Thing and just randomly force-punching Human Torch and Invisible Woman. 

And it's hard to fault the movie's poor production history for its many faults, but it's clear that these actors are capable of doing stuff... yet are just prevented from doing so by shitty directing or shitty scripting or both, but between whatever is going on, and the blatantly obvious reshoots... I mean, Sue's hair changes shades of blonde from scene to scene, Reed magically grows facial hair and causes it to disappear from scene to scene... at least when you do a reshoot make it proper! Jeez.

Also, this movie could've done without the obvious racial profiling of having the white Sue Storm be the studious, obedient child while the black Johnny is the rebel doing illegal car races and crashing cars. No, I don't care that Johnny Storm is black now... but this just seems two steps forward, one step back as far as progressivity goes. And Sue Storm being left behind as mission control? It felt kinda sexist for me too, especially literally every single version of the Fantastic Four origin always had the five of them go on the trip to the Negative Zone. 

Honestly, this movie is just... exhausting. It's only an hour and a half long, but I just feel devoid of energy watching it. There's no sense of fun or wonder to be had from it, in no small part due to poor dialogue and simply the movie being... unattractive. Doom and the Thing just look grotesque, the whole movie is dark and almost entirely happens in the dark science facility or the doomsday world of planet zero or whatever the stupider name they replaced 'Negative Zone' for. Hell, even Batman had scenes set in daylight! Fantastic Four really could've been a decent origin movie... yet it just ends up being a soulless wreck doles out way too fast to make sure movie rights stayed with Fox and didn't return to Marvel like Daredevil and Punisher did. But I have to echo what everyone is thinking... I mean, Fox has a sweet thing going on with X-Men, but this trainwreck of a movie (plus the sub-par performance of Spider-Man) makes everyone think if Fantastic Four would be better off just returning to Marvel, since Marvel Studios, well, people trust them to make good movies, and even the worst among their movies are at least fun to watch. Hell, even the old bad Fantastic Four movies had a sense of fun to them even if they're bad movies.

This? This isn't honestly bad bad to deserve all those bad reviews, it's just boring, disappointing and exhausting to watch, the antithesis of what a superhero movie should be. It tried its best at adapting the source material... it just did a shitty job out of it.