Fantastic For Insomnia
BACKGROUND
The history of the Fantastic Four movies is a long and complicated thing. But I'll try to be brief...
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| The Cowlick hairdo was all the rage back then... |
However with nothing happening in the eight years after, Roger Corman was hired in 1994 to produce a low-budget film so that the company could retain the rights and not have them revert back to Marvel.
The Fantastic Four had a trailer and a promotional tour, and even the cast were excited for it's upcoming release, but nothing ever happened... With the film inexplicably shelved, the movie rights were bought by 20th Century Fox.
2005 comes around and the Jessica Alba/Chris Evans-version of Fantastic 4 is released to mediocre reviews but box-office success, resulting in the sequel Fantastic 4: Rise Of The Silver Surfer two years later.
But since audiences weren't clamouring for a three-quel to this underwhelming super-hero franchise, things then went dark for a few years.
Slowly but surely, the rapidly-expiring movie rights came into contention again.
I can only imagine a shareholder meeting went something like this...
"If another Fantastic Four movie doesn't get made soon, the rights will revert back to Marvel! You know, those guys who are killing the box-office with their massively impressive and coherent Cinematic Universe!
We can't let them get their hands on some superheroes who could be included in the next Avengers film! That'd be terrible for us! Let's do what we did with those god-awful Amazing Spider-Man films and just throw one together!"And here we find 2015's Fantastic Four, or FantFourStic as the poster would have you believe...
"PLOT"
When they're freaking ten years old, Reed Richards (Miles Teller) and Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) manage to crack teleportation. Seriously. But no one believes them... despite the overwhelming evidence they can produce.
Cut to a few years later, and Dr Franklin Storm recruits Reed to work in his laboratory trying to crack inter-dimensional teleportation. There he meet the reckless technician Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan), his adopted scientist sister Sue Storm (Kate Mara) and the loner genius Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell) who has a crush on Sue.
After figuring out how they can cross into another dimension within days of Reed's arrival, they are told they can't travel though (rightfully, since they're nerds, not astronauts). So Reed and his team get drunk, behave like idiots and go through anyway!
Whilst there, they get touched by mysterious goop, blah blah blah, Victor gets covered in the stuff, blah blah blah, they come back and they have super-powers! What a shocker, you get the idea...
OPINIONS
Oh my God, this film. Where to begin...?
This film made me legitimately angry. Seriously. At one point I got so frustrated with the confusing mess on screen, I shouted out "DOES ANYONE KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON?!" quite late on into the film.
Thankfully I was sat with friends in an empty screening so it was answered with equally confused shakes of the head, and not in my removal from the screen.
The entire film feels like a 100 minute long trailer for another film that never happens. There are hints at potential tension that never occurs, ruined friendships that just get fixed in an instant and romance triangles that spectacularly never get touched upon.
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| Remember when things were fun and light-hearted? *sigh* |
Admittedly, that is an interesting approach to the subject of super-powers, especially in the scene where Reed is just getting used to his stretching ability and you can hear bones crack as they grow and shrink in size.
However, the Fantastic Four as a group have always been a light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek style of superhero. The problem with FantFourStic is by taking out all the fun of the powers and portraying them as freaks or social outcasts, you drape a black cloud over all the action and drama.
You feel like it's a chore to be in their company, something that is the complete opposite with any film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, especially Ant-Man, released only a few weeks prior to FantFourStic.
Another issue the film suffers from is that none of the main four characters are interesting, or even likeable.
Reed is a power-hungry narcissist who abandons his friends at the first sign of trouble.
Ben is hardly in the damn film, and yet when he turns into The Thing, he just becomes a Hulk-For-Hire, sitting miserably in his room, unhappy with his mere existence.
Sue is just boring and has no personality, other than Daddy's Girl.
And I know the character of Johnny Storm is a 'hot-head' with a heart of gold, but damn I never realised how perfect Chris Evans was in the role before I saw someone else try to portray him. Nothing against Michael B. Jordan, but his cocky and arrogant Human Torch has no endearing qualities at all.
All of that is before we even touch on Victor Von Doom.
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| This is Doom by the way. You'll see him for all of ten minutes, |
He starts off as a wayward protégé of Dr Storm's, hating the world and playing video games (which was a persona I was willing to go along with).
When he is brought onto the team, he becomes a standard boring scientist, jealous of Reed and Sue's growing 'relationship'.
A year after his abandonment on Planet Zero (or wherever they got sent to), he ultimately becomes a crazed and maniacal psychopath fused with a mysterious and unexplained green goo.
Dr. Doom is considered to be one of the greatest supervillains of all time, and he is given around 10-15 minutes of screen time! And in those short few minutes, he manages to rack up an impressive and unnecessary kill-count for a 12A-rated film. All killed by squeezing people's heads until they break using his, again unexplained, telekinetic abilities. Yay! Happy! Fun! Superheros for kids!
LET'S WRAP IT UP
God, I could carry on for a whole other article about what is wrong with FantFourStic, but you get the picture. It's just such a mess. All soulless and empty, with the main goal to just keep the movie rights in the greedy hands of 20th Century Fox.
The film disappoints on nearly every level, but coming from such a promising director and with the initial scenes having some degree of potential, it's just even more of a let-down.
Hopefully Marvel/Disney will see the damage that their child's guardian is doing to it and step in before another reboot is shoved down our throats in ten years time. They've managed to successfully negotiate a deal for joint custody of Spider-Man, hopefully they can do the same with the Fantastic Four.
I would call this film the worst of the year so far, but I know a film that is worse... and that's getting reviewed next...
Rating - 2/10
Until next time folks, thanks for reading!
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