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My thoughts on the Fantastic Four


Toa Smoke Monster

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The following is my thoughts on the 2015 Fantastic Four movie, which do have spoilers from the movie. So if you plan to see it for some reason, don't read this until you do. (Unless you don't care, then by all means read it. :P)

 

 

I didn't know what to expect when I went to see the new Fantastic Four movie. Just based from its trailers, it did not look like it was going to be good. But I thought the same of the trailers for the latest Terminator trailers and I ended up enjoying that movie a lot. And not to mention the director of Chronicle, another movie I like, directed F4. So I had a open mind when I went to see it. Sadly, the trailers were indeed accurate about F4, in that it was not a good movie at all.

 

I'm going to use bullet points to tell some of the issues I had with it.

 

1. We never see Reed (Mister Fantastic), Sue (Invisible Woman), Johnny (Human Torch), or Ben (The Thing) all together on-screen until the last third of the movie. In fact, Sue and Ben don't even share a line of dialogue together until the last few minutes of the movie. We do see them on screen a few times, but they don't talk to each other at all until the end of it!

 

2. As a matter of fact, none of the characters really spend enough time together. Not even Johnny and Sue, who are brother and sister. They share a couple scenes together, but nothing that makes one care for either of them. You never really feel like you know these characters, even though its spends the first thirty minutes or so of the movie just focused on them. Say what you want about the first two Fantastic Four movies, but at least the four felt like they were a 'family' of sort. Especially since they all interacted a lot in those movies. That same feeling is not present here, and the movie feels flawed because of it.

 

3. When everyone gets their powers, the movie skips over how they learned to control them. Once they have them, the film skips ahead one year, where everyone basically knows how to use their powers. The only real exception to this is Sue, who is shown to be trying to use her force fields powers to fly. But aside from that, everyone else knowing how to use powers just feels rushed in the movie.

 

4. Right after the four get their powers, they are sent to a Military Base to be examined. That alone isn't a problem. The problem is that Reed escapes the place, basically leaving his friends, and goes on the run for that said one year span the movie skipped over. It can be argued that Reed didn't know enough about the place to stay, and was escaping to help find a way to help his friends. But the place really doesn't mistreat Ben, Sue, or Johnny. The only one who is really 'used' in a sense is Ben, who agrees to help the Military with missions in exchange to help find a way to reverse what happened to him. Johnny enjoys doing stuff for them, and while Sue insists that she not going to be used as a weapon, she still trains there and isn't in any real danger. So in a sense, he basically abandons his friends there. And for a whole year too. It was something that might have worked, but was just poorly executed.

 

5. The 'Reed will find a cure for our powers' plot rears its head in this one, just like in the 2005 Fantastic Four movie. But in that movie, it was one of the bigger plot points that drove the movie, with the four coming to terms with their powers and eventually wanting to keep them. In the new movie, it is brought up. But really nothing is done to try to find a cure for them. And the whole concept is completely dropped at the end of the movie. I'm not saying it's something that shouldn't have been brought up in this movie, but it too was just poorly executed.

 

6. Victor Von Doom. Poor Doom. In the Marvel comics, he is one of the most powerful villains ever. He is the ruler of his own country, and he has powers that make him an 'Avenger level' threat. Here, he is simply a Scientist that thinks the world is going downhill, and decides to destroy it in the third act of the movie. It's an action by him that has no real development behind it. It doesn't help that he disappears for half of the movie, and just returns as a man gone mad. And to top it off, they don't really define what powers he has. If you were to use this movie to solely based what his powers were, it would be to make rocks float and heads explode. That's basically all he does in the final act. The Doctor Doom in the few two movies was more threatening than this guy.

 

There are other issues I had with this movie, but I think I've gotten my point across. This is just a bad movie. The characters, along with the story itself, just feel too bland. The action scenes aren't the best. The only good thing about the movie IMO is that they gave Sue stronger powers than she had in the previous movies, but that alone isn't enough to save the film.

 

You know what this film did to me? It made me appreciate the first two Fantastic Four movies more. Especially Rise of the Silver Surfer. No, they are not best superhero movies ever, but they still had their moments and the four felt like an actual family. None of that is in this movie, and it is first movie I've seen this summer where I actually recommend not seeing in theaters. Wait for it to come out on Netflix or DVD if you really want to see it.

 

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