Fantastic Four

I guess Marvel’s “First Family” just isn’t meant to make it big in Hollywood. What a mess.

Most should be familiar with the Fantastic Four at this point. Not only are they one of the first and most successful creations Marvel put out in the company’s early years but the quartet have already starred in two previous film efforts, the campy and relatively forgettable 2005 film and its 2007 sequel, Rise of the Silver Surfer. While those films left much to be desired, they more or less hit the core of what it means to be part of the Fantastic Four and how their powers came to be.

This time around, the origin of Reed Richards (Miles Teller), Sue Storm (Kate Mara), Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan), and Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), has changed up quite a bit. As opposed to getting sent into space and coming back with extraordinary powers to stick it to the super-villain community, this reboot takes a dark step forward with the “family’s” new origin revolving around transporting themselves into another dimension called Planet Zero aka The Negative Zone, being brutally bombarded by glowy green energy and eventually coming out on the other side with horrifying consequences. The arrogant and brilliant Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebell) tags along during the first expedition into said new dimension and is left behind in the barren wasteland that is Planet Zero, while Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) does his best to keep the government from trying to abuse the powers the quartet have developed through various (you guessed it) militaristic ways. Oh, and Sue is adopted and Ben and Reed have been close buddies since grade school. Not the worst way to reboot a franchise for the modern day audience so kudos to the filmmakers for trying to change things up and take a few risks, but still a bit too little too late for these characters.

Director Josh Trank (Chronicle) tries his best to get this reboot off the ground but does little more than introduce some interesting ideas only to have the film collapse under its own weight in the final act when our heroes start to do some actual heroing. I mentioned taking a risk with this film and while I appreciate the effort, there’s nothing here that seems fully realized or fleshed out to a point where I eventually didn’t really care about anything happening on screen or even where the film was headed.

To be honest, this film would have benefitted greatly if it weren’t actually about the Fantastic Four at all. There were so many cool ideas and outside of the box thinking that it actually brought the film down when I realized that this was a comic book movie. It seems like the filmmakers were pretty much obligated to shove in some stuff from the source material to legally be allowed to call it a Fantastic Four movie and shove they did. Strike the silly last act, the uneven and sometimes stilted dialogue, and the odd and completely unbelievable “family” dynamic and you’d be left with a perfectly acceptable sci-fi tale about a few co-workers who are forever and grotesquely altered by their own experiments.

Speaking of grotesque, I really dug the way they introduced each power and how every member of the team dealt with the knowledge that they were no longer just normal human beings. It was actually quite unsettling to watch these transformations and the entire sequence really gave me a creepy, horror-ish vibe that, as with the rest of the movie, went absolutely nowhere after showing some big promise. Why not deal with the emotional fallout of what happens to a person going through these kinds of changes as opposed to sweeping it under the rug? Why cut to a year later in the story thus skipping over all of the juicy character moments we could have had? Why rush to the typical superhero finale when the heart of every Fantastic Four tale is first and foremost about family and the way they always have each other’s back no matter what?

So much potential was lost here so that when the final act comes around and Doom finally makes his debut, everything begins to fall apart faster than the first half of the movie. It almost feels like there must have been a good 20 or 30 minutes cut from Doom’s retrieval scene up to his return to the Negative Zone because literally nothing from the last third of the movie felt earned. There was no family dynamic, no sense of anything really being at stake even with Doom pulling the typical “let’s destroy the world just because” shtick out of nowhere, and most of all, no excitement to see how it all ended. This film almost felt like it belonged to the beginning of the superhero movie boom where the filmmakers didn’t really know what to do with a movie or property like this so they just kind of slapped some stuff together and hoped that the fans would forgive what they’ve done.

Lastly, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the CGI. It’s not terrible by any means, but it’s certainly not very good. Maybe it’s me but seeing Reed in action, stretching and punching and bending from afar, just looks…silly, especially with the darker tone the filmmakers were going for. Not to mention the fact that The Thing shifts from looking pretty damn good to absolutely terrible in the span of a scene or two seems pretty weird. As for the other team members, Sue fairs much better since she has the least CGI heavy powers and Johnny was actually pretty impressive to watch in action.

It’s not that the movie is terrible, and regardless of what the vast majority of reviews might say, there was a lot that the filmmakers attempted to do right but in the end, this movie pretty much ensures that the Fantastic Four will probably never get the big screen treatment again. Maybe Marvel will somehow steal back the rights to make their own version and do something truly fantastic with it. Here’s hoping.