Fantastic Four (2015)

Plot: Reed Richards has spend his childhood working on building a teleporter with his best friend Ben Grimm. Eventually he gets noticed by Franklin Storm who recruits him to build a Quantum Gate at the Baxter Foundation with his children Sue and Johnny Storm and his protege, Victor Von Doom. They eventually get it to work, but when the facility's supervisor decides to send astronauts to go through the teleporter, Reed, Ben, Johnny and Victor decide to secretly us it to go to a parallel dimension. But during their venture, Victor accidentally causes the structure of the planet to erupt with green lava-like substance. Victor falls into the collapsing landscape while Ben, Reed and Johnny escape. But one the journey back, the machine explodes and alters Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben on a molecular-genetic level and gives them super powers.

Okay already I've seen videos of people giving this movie a ginormous amount of hate. And looking back at what I saw in this movie, I have to agree. But at the same time, I don't hate as much as everyone else, because as bad as it is - and it is bad, there are some little aspects that I appreciate. For example, I like how in the beginning, we see a little bit of Reed and Ben's childhood, even if some things were out of place in some areas like Ben's relationship with his brother. I also really like how part of this movie has to do with going to different dimensions. Granted, it's just one place that they go to and there isn't much out there. But I still can't really overlook the fact that we get any of the FF going to different places at all - like they do in the comics, as opposed to what they do with the other two films from Fox. And I'm glad that we get more of Doctor Doom's powers. True, it's really just telekinetic abilities, force field generation (arguably) and playing Earthbender from Avatar: The Last Airbender. But truth be told, I'm content with that. Yeah the Earthbending is ridiculous and he still isn't a sorcerer or flies or anything like that. But A) I never expected us to be that lucky when it comes to his powers in this film anyway, and B) I prefer this over practically being a prelude to Electro in Amazing Spider-Man 2 regardless. In fact, as little as it is to say, I honestly find that aspect to be my personal favorite part of the film. We may be no closer to getting the real Doctor Doom than before, but frankly, I'm okay with the minor improvements we have. Now with all the positive stuff is out of the way, let's talk about the bad. First off is the characters. I mentioned in my review for the first Fantastic Four movie, that they didn't do a half bad job in giving us a more or less accurate representation of the characters and their relationships with one another. And that's more than I can say for the FF team in this film. Other than making it obvious that Reed and Ben are BFFs (yes I know that's a term for girls, but you get the idea), you get none of the real personalities of the characters and their relationships. There's little to no interactions with Ben and Johnny, the 'friendship' between Victor Von Doom and the team is not believable, and *Spoiler alert in case you actually care* There is straight out no romance between Reed and Sue. In fact most of the development of their relationships between any of them are done through a montage while they are building the machine. Also there's no humor in this movie. There's a light charm in this team in the comics and the other films, and yet this film makes them all dark and moody. It's like they're taking from Man of Steel, except in that movie, it had (in my opinion) at least one little joke in the end that made me chuckle. Here, aside from one moment with Johnny that's seen in the trailers, I don't think there was any real attempt for any humor at all. And amazingly, as a character, Doctor Doom (or just Doom in this case) is worse than the Doctor Doom in the other films. There is little to no real motivation for him to be the villain. Thinking back about the movie, I have to agree with other reviewers who say that his desire to be evil is forced. They had so little to do with him in this movie that they actually made the Doom in the first FF film look really good. I actually thought I was going to get at least a slightly deeper version of this super-villain in this film, and they actually made the Doom from the '05 film look good. Wow. Fail. Also, Reed Richard was rather out of place during the middle of the movie. I won't give anything away (not that most of you would care if I did), but he does something that is almost completely out of character. And this matter goes on for quite a while, which makes it worse. In fact that's one of the biggest problems with this film; it's a drag worse than - you guessed it, the first FF film. There is genuinely no action until the final act, and even then, the fight is really rushed and unimaginative. Also, the editing is really bad. I remember that there's some parts in the film where - being someone who is hoping for a career in film editing, I kept thinking that there had to be more specific cuts inserted to these sequences instead of dragging on some shots. The worst of it is when the team looks at a crater and there's this happy music playing. Uh...sure, like that make sense sarcastically speaking.   


And that's my review for Fantastic Four. I'll give it credit with some of the little thing about the movie, but in the end, we have a film with no real chemistry between the characters, a worse adaption of Doctor Doom, almost no action until the very end - which even when there is, it's really boring, and some really bad editing. This is a definite skip. And let's hope this leads to Fox giving back to Marvel at least one of the movie rights to one of their superhero teams back.

Rating: 15%