Plot: Reed Richards is a bankrupt scientist who goes on a space station to investigate on space clouds with his best friend, Ben Grimm, his ex-girlfriend, Sue Storm, her brother, Johnny Storm, and his investor, Victor Von Doom. But during their trip the cloud materialize ahead of schedule and hits the space station, thus alternating their DNA. Reed is able to stretch every part of his body, Sue can become invisible and create force fields, Ben gained orange rocky skin and superhuman strength, Johnny can engulf himself in fire and fly, and Victor gains the ability to manipulate electricity. Reed tries everything in his power to try to understand their abilities and try to cure them, but he faces the problem of the group fighting each other while they are unaware of Victor becoming Doctor Doom.
Watching this movie before I wrote this review, I had mixed feeling for it. On the one hand, it captures certain areas about the team rather well, but on the other hand, it has a bland story and it drags a lot with the disputes of the team and discovering their powers and all around doing mostly nothing in terms of acting like superheroes. Well let's talk about the good first. First and foremost, I think in the long run, they captured most of the characters and their relationships between each other okay. Reed is so devoted to science, sometimes he gets so focused that it gets in the way of his relationship with Sue, Ben and Reed are best buddies, Ben and Johnny argue a lot, Johnny is brash and impetuous, it's all there. (Though I have to say; thank God, Chris Evans proved me wrong about being worthy to be Captain America. Cause this film and its sequel gave me a good reason to doubt him back when the first Captain America movie was coming out.) And for the most part, that's kind of what they do most of the film; establish their characters and their relationships with one another. But where that's a problem is how they go a little too far with focusing on addressing what their powers are, trying to find a way to get rid of them, and they argue at each other more times than I can keep track of. Ultimately, this leads to the same problem as movies like the first Transformers movie and the first Hulk film have: we rarely see the characters in action. They save some people at a bridge from a catastrophe that they accidentally caused, and they fight Doctor Doom, but other than that, it's mostly just the characters discovering their powers and arguing. And if there's one representation of a character that I disapprove of, it was Victor Von Doom. He came out as a very cheesy villain - he acted more like Norman Osborn a.k.a. the Green Goblin in the first Spider-Man movie when it came to his part in the story. And they only showed his power to manipulate electricity, which is only one of his powers. I mean Doctor Doom in the comics is also a sorcerer, he's telepathic, has force field generation, really they could've done a lot more with him. In fact I really hope they at least give us some of those powers at the reboot. I mean the whole time I was watching him manipulate electricity, I couldn't help but think of Electro from Spider-Man.
And that's my review for Fantastic Four. I give the movie credit for giving us the basics with most of the characters and their relationships. But it has a bland story that keeps on dragging with the characters either just exploring their powers or arguing with each other and making Doctor Doom just Green Goblin from the first Spider-Man movie with the powers of Electro. You could do worse when it comes to bad comic book films for sure, but for me, this film gives me good reasons to hope that they do so much better with the reboot. Btw, I should note that I am not going to review Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. I've seen it before years ago and I don't really want to see it again just to prepare for the new movie. To be blunt, it's a horrible film with an even cheesier story, not much going on, and their representation of Galactus is insulting at best. Meanwhile, I'm going to see the reboot tonight, so stick around to see how I think it turned out.
Rating: 40%
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