"Look at me. I'm not your friend. You turned me into something else."
If the new Fantastic Four movie has anything going for it, it's that it doesn't share much of anything with its 2005 counterpart, despite both films being an origin story for characters with the same powers. While the former version is colorful, silly, and lacks a compelling story, the 2015 film is dark, gritty, and lacks a compelling story. On second thought, maybe the two do have something in common. Trailers for the film didn't impress me, but I'll tell you what did: the 8% score the movie received on Rotten Tomatoes. Ouch. That's not a bad reception, that's a gaping black hole of suck. With all the talent in front of and behind the camera, how could it turn out to be such a disaster? I had to see it for myself.
Truth be told, I was really wondering where all the damn hate was about for the most of the first act. Teenaged genius Reed Richards (Miles Teller) has been working on a matter transporter, essentially a teleporter, ever since he was in fifth grade. His best friend Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) has always played Igor to Reed's Dr. Frankenstein, helping him out with his experiments in all likelihood to get away from his trashy family. After Reed's invention is disqualified at a high school science fair, Professor Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) offers him a scholarship to the Baxter Foundation for a chance to work with a team of scientists who are on the verge of traveling to another dimension. The machine he's been working on all this time has actually been tapping into a place the scientists dub Planet Zero, and with Reed's help, they are able to complete a successful test. Aiding in the project are Storm's children Sue (Kate Mara) and Johnny (Michael B. Jordan) as well as the potentially dangerous Victor von Doom (Toby Kebbell), all geniuses in their own right. But when they attempt to travel to Planet Zero themselves (just to claim a little glory for the experience), things go horribly wrong. Like horribly wrong.
Aside from a strange feeling of coldness and some major plot contrivances, the first act of Fantastic Four is actually pretty good. I'm a fan of Josh Trank's breakout hit Chronicle, and I saw many of the same qualities that made that film work fully intact. The acting is natural and generally very good (allowing me to disregard the fact that all of the actors are a bit too old for the parts they're playing), and a few interesting themes were established (childhood friends growing apart, rebelling against a parent's wishes, dysfuntional families, lust for fame, etc.) And what a shame too, because as soon as the group heads to Planet Zero and gets their powers, everything goes to absolute shit.
The film cuts to on year later with a title card, and it's precisely then that the movie implodes on itself. The entirety of the story's meat, which is how they learn to control their powers, is 100% missing. That's the core of the story, the reason you tell the origin in the first place. Why oh why is that crucial part of the story missing? Can you imagine if during the first Spider-man movie, after Peter Parker is bitten by the mutant spider it cut to one year later and he was already Spider-man? That's what this is like... no Uncle Ben dies, no love story, character development, absolutely nothing. Everything after the opening dips in quality tenfold; the acting is for shit, the dialogue is for shit, the story is for shit, and not a single one of the themes established gets any kind of resolution. Nothing works about it in the slightest except for the visual effects, which are decent at best. Apparently Trank was not involved in extensive reshoots and editing which changed the entire second half of the film, and it shows. Badly.
Even if the second half of the movie hadn't been such a trainwreck, there's something about the bleakness of the whole affair that is a bit off-putting, not unlike Man of Steel. The colors in the trailers were rich and warm, which might have been pleasant to watch as opposed to the dull greys and blues the movie wallows in. It works for the Dark Knight trilogy because Christopher Nolan is a fantastic director that tone simply fits Batman. There's nothing memorable about the score by Marco Beltrami and Phillip Glass, which doesn't even attempt to give the Fantastic Four a memorable theme or generate excitement in the slightest. I would say that there's no shakey-cam during the action scenes, but truth be told, there really are hardly any action scenes to speak of. This is pretty much the anti-Age of Ultron.
I may not be a fan of the comics, nor was I a huge fan of the past film attempts, but the Fantastic Four is just too iconic and important to the world of superheroes to be treated like this. In 1961, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created Marvel's first team of superheroes and broke new ground in the comic book medium for how realistically the characters were developed. Where is any of that here? Where are the character dynamics, the plot developments, the general reactions to these crazy scenarios? We never even hear any of the characters being called their comic book names throughout the film, aside from jokes here and there. And I didn't even get into the villain, Doom, who is positively awful on all fronts. The cast here is uniformly excellent at first, and the friendship between Reed and Ben had a lot of charm before all potential was flushed down the toilet. What a waste.
2/10
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