So a new movie came out this weekend.  It’s called Fant4stic.  Or Fant-Four-Stic.  Or it might be a movie in Klingon called Fan T’Four Stic, which probably translates to “career suicide by way of a jagged dagger” or something just as violent sounding.  Oh, wait, that guy on the far right looks like Marvel’s ever-lovin’ Thing!  This is the Fantastic Four!  That’s what this is!

Oh jeez…  Checking the internet to see more about this Fantastic Four flick, I’ve found that a lot of people are talking about – and not favorably.  [Insert frowny face here.]

Well, I guess it’s time to throw my two cents into the shit-Storm (see what I did there? Admittedly, I’m stretching).  Continue on to read my SPOILER-filled review!

Before I begin my review, I want to point out a few things.  The first bits of this review was written the NIGHT BEFORE I saw the movie.  So, let it be known that I won’t actually get into my actual feelings about the film itself until the second half of this article.  I just want to make some things very, very clear.

First, and foremost, I want to like this movie.  When trailers first came out, I thought, “Hey, this doesn’t seem too bad!”  I thought the design was decent from what we were shown.  I understood this Josh Trank fella seemed to have a bright future.  I thought what we saw of Doctor Doom in early looks was far more promising than the previous film versions of the ol’ FF.  Things were lining up to be, at the very least, an honest attempt to make a decent Fantastic Four movie.

Two words come to mind: tee and hee.

Second, if the first point I made above failed, I do love bad movies.  There’s nothing like cinematic abominations.  They can be fun.  They can be perplexing.  They can be more entertaining to watch than the best of films.  If it did turn out to be a massive lump of turds, maybe it will be saved by being entertaining in its embarrassment.  You know, like the 1994 Roger Corman-produced Fantastic Four.  Do not dare lie to yourselves and the rest of the world and say you don’t get a good, hearty giggle out of the original – despite how truly bad it is.

Finally, I want to thank other comic sites out there, and pretty much the rest of all of society with internet service, for making this movie impossible to succeed.  Look, I understand people want these rights to go back to Marvel Studios.  But I need others to understand that these rights were sold long before Marvel Studios was a glimmer in Kevin Feige’s eye.  Deal with it.

No matter what you say or think, you only kinda like these people.

Let’s also not forget that if you ask ten comic book people, at least nine-and-a-half of them really don’t give two craps about the Fantastic Four.  Why?  Let’s just say no one gets addicted to them because the Fantastic Four is so passe.  While the series itself has had some very, very good moments and runs in their 54 year history, for the most part, they are a product of the Age of the Atom, and the early days of nuclear-driven sci-fi.  This is part of the reason why people grow tired of them after about a year or two of stories in print, and their movies don’t draw a great deal of interest.  So no matter what your feelings are on the subject, you actually do NOT want Marvel Studios to retain these rights.  You just don’t.  You don’t care about the FF that much.  The Fantastic Four is basically the Superman of Marvel.  You recognize the importance and what that concept birthed, but you don’t really like them quite like you think you do.

I’m not even going to get into the things said about the Human Torch being black and not actually related to Sue, or that there is a different origin or any of that crap.  Nick Fury is a black dude (and a real baaaaadass one too) and there are other Marvel movies that have messed with a character’s origins to make it fit the narrative they decided to tell.  These complaints are either poor excuses to be prejudice against the movie itself, or simply just the other prejudice.

I will speak more about the over-zealous hate of this movie that presented a near impossible thing to look past going into the screening later in this article.  Additionally, I will make a suggestion for how the Fantastic Four could make for a wonderful live action property if anyone wants to make an attempt at it.  For now, I suppose I should actually talk about the movie…

In this new Fantastic Four, nerdy teenage Reed Richards (Miles Teller) and his friend Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) spent their childhood building what turns out to be an incredible transportation device.  After putting it on display at their high school science fair, they are immediately disqualified for putting on what their teacher (Dan Castellaneta) decrees is a mere magic trick.  However, it just so happens that Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) and his adopted daughter, Susan (Kate Mara), are attending the science fair.  Upon realizing Reed has unlocked the mystery of how to bring matter back from wherever it is teleported to, Dr. Storm gives Reed a full tuition to the Baxter Foundation – a special school full of the top scientific minds.

Reed Richards surveying the Baxter Foundation lab.

Here, he works with Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell), who also designed a teleportation machine, and Sue to put the finishing touches on this machine.  They find that wherever it is the matter is sent to, it’s not on Earth.  Instead, it is another dimension, and a planet that is in the primordial stages of existence.  Once Dr. Storm’s biological son, Johnny (Michael B. Jordan), is added to the team, the machine is built and tested successfully using a monkey.  Enter Tim Blake Nelson, a doctor with suspicious ties to the government, who decides that instead of sending the actual scientists who built the machine to this new planet, he’s calling in NASA to send their own astronauts.

Johnny (Jordan) and Victor (Kebbell) preparing to teleport.

After drinking away their sorrows, Victor, Reed, and Johnny decide they are going to beat NASA to the punch.  Reed calls his buddy Ben to join them on their adventure because, as Reed feels, without Ben, Reed would not be where he is today.  The four travel to the other planet, and after a horrible accident that appears to kill Victor, the other three return to Earth with the help of Sue (who finds out they are using the machine without permission), but an explosion of energy from the other planet changes Reed, Ben, and the Storms.

Later, Reed find himself captive at a secret government base.  His limbs are stretched out for feet.  Ben is some sort of rock monster, and we learn that Johnny is literally a man on fire.  Sue’s powers have left her basically invisible until she can learn to control her abilities to hide herself from the visible spectrum.  Reed, not liking the captive part, escapes, leaving his friends behind.  A year later, we learn the government, thanks to Tim Blake Nelson, is using Grimm as a soldier to destroy threats and wants to use Johnny as an aerial weapon.  Sue doesn’t want any part of the military aspect and Dr. Storm just wants to help rebuild the teleportation device to help find cures for the four (basically) kids.  Sue does get involved to find Reed who is globetrotting to try to build his own teleportation machine.  He’s eventually captured by Grimm and helps fix the government’s machine.

The Thing (Bell)

When the U.S. sends people to study the other planet, they are shocked to find Victor still alive.  They bring him back to Earth. They learn his suit was fused to his body and the planet’s energies gave him immense power.  After talking to Tim Blake Nelson, Doom learns the government wants to control the other planet he is now connected to.  He goes on a killing rampage, and returns to the other planet and creates a black hole to suck the Earth up and convert it into energy for the other planet so he can build the planet he wants to rule in peace.  It’s up to Reed, Johnny, Sue, and Ben to band together (despite some issues they have with Reed putting them into this predicament), and stop Doom before he destroys everything.

Spoiler alert: They do.

Okay, so that’s what the movie is about.  Seems like a decent story, but does it work?  Is the movie good?  Or, more accurately, is it as bad as the internet says?  The answer is no, it’s not that bad.   Let’s start with what I did like.  I’ll start to say that I actually very much liked the characters.  Reed is portrayed as the dork you’d expect him to be, but there’s a likable element to him.  He’s extremely smart, will kinda let you know that, but isn’t an ass about it.  On the other side, you have Victor who is the exact same, but a butthole.  Sue is portrayed as a dangerous mix of smart and rather lovely.  Johnny and Ben are not played as idiots.  They are trying to find where they fit into everything.  Ben, in particular, really shows a lot of sadness once he changes into the Thing.

The entire first act, we see Reed, Victor, Johnny, and Sue organically grow as friends.  There is a budding rivalry for Sue’s attentions between Reed and Victor, and, unfortunately, I believe a lot of that was left on the cutting room floor, but it’s not terribly presented.  I liked how Reed, Victor, and Johnny come to the conclusion to pull a Star Trek III and “steal” the machine they built for their own personal glory.  It, again, organically fit what we saw about them.  Reed is seeking some fame for being as smart as he is.  Victor just wants to claim something of his own.  Johnny just does what he wants.  It all made sense there.  Pretty much from the very beginning where we see Ben and Reed as children to the moment Reed wakes up in the government facility Fantastic Four is a much better than you might expect movie. I’d watch that first, oh, 45 to 60 minutes over and over.

Four to Doomsday

The final act, in which Reed, Johnny, Sue, and Ben band together to fight the incredibly powerful Doom is fairly good too.  There are decent effects used in the landscape and the five characters to show off their powers.  The way the team works together to stop Doom “feels” kinda right.  Additionally, I liked the design of this movie.  That includes Doom.  Some may not like his look (the fused bio-suit onto his body), but he seems about ten times more threatening than his previous big screen incarnations.  Gebbell gave Doom a menacing tone even before the accident that turned him into a monster.  When he escaped the government base, there is no holding back.  It gets real dark as he explodes heads of both soldiers and scientists who just happened to be unlucky enough to be in the same hallway he is.

There is about 30 minutes that is very unfortunate though, and really drug down this movie in my opinion.  I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m growing real tired of immediately putting a military presence in superhero movies.  Yes, I understand it is much more realistic to think that governments and military involvement would instantly occur as soon as someone with a bunch of superpowers shows up.  At this point, though, it’s becoming low hanging fruit to make them the bad guys.  It doesn’t fit the Fantastic Four either.  Seeing these characters become not much more than pawns of the military was pretty bad and nearly destroyed the tone of that first act that I loved so much.  It also was a section of the movie that was boring.  The movie is only 100 minutes, but when we were seeing military film footage of the Thing blowing up tanks and killing enemy soldiers, it felt like 200 minutes.  It completely slammed the brakes on the movie’s narrative.

That brings me to something I’m sure you’ve seen on other sites.  There were really cool shots/scenes that were probably part of this whole military section in the trailer that isn’t in the movie.  Remember that shot of the Thing being dropped from a plane?  Not there.  While this was my least favorite part of the movie, knowing there were things missing like that just shows how incredibly edited this movie was.  It might even lend some credibility to some tweets director Josh Trank posted about how his version of the film was, at the very least, different than what we are seeing now.

I’ll admit… I like this Doom!

My last issue with the film was Doom’s motives for destroying the Earth.  There isn’t one really.  He does mention a few times where he didn’t like how Dr. Storm was following the orders of the people who fund the teleporting project, and how the governments of the world are destroying this one and could spread that to the world he adopts later in the film.  Those are nearly forgotten throughout the course of the movie, though.  Yeah, Doom’s a dick, and perhaps his psyche is altered by the powers he obtained in the other dimension, but we go from him just being a jerk to being thought as dead to head-exploding world killer.  Here are some other pieces of connective tissue to the film left on the editor’s floor.  While the fight against Doom is a well constructed sequence, the deeper motives behind what Doom is doing is sorely missing from the narrative.

So why so much hate for this movie?  I can’t speak to the critics.  I’m not a film critic.  I don’t know as much as they do about shot construction or direction or what have you.  I know what I like and what I don’t like.  I know I like this Fantastic Four more than the last two attempts (I just can’t include the 1994 version mentioned earlier).  That’s not really saying much, though, because I do know I don’t like this movie or the FF like I do the Avengers or Captain America or Thor and their movies made by Marvel Studios.

Maybe that’s what has the comic fans in an uproar.  It’s NOT Marvel Studios and the Fantastic Four flicks from last decade were so dreadful.  However, I have another thought.  We’ve become a group of fans and a society that likes to knock people and things off pedestals.  There were a lot of complaints about Avengers: Age of Ultron and I don’t think most of it was warranted.  Me, personally, I loved that movie.  Maybe not as much as the first or a few of the other Marvel movies, but I thought it moved in the right direction the entire time.  However, because it was EXPECTED to be better than the first, people railed against it when it didn’t live up to that expectation.  When Ant-Man didn’t score a hundred billion dollar opening, articles flew about how the movie wasn’t living up to Marvel’s standards.  We live in a jaded culture.  Perhaps we’ve grown tired of the superhero genre.  I’m sure people grew tired of the Universal monster movies back in the 40s once they took off in the 30s.  When new genres or styles come along, there will be backlash from a loud portion of society no matter how big or small it is.  That’s not to say any and all bad reviews of movies I liked (Avengers, Ant-Man, etc) can’t have their own warrants, but there are a lot of feelings out there that are just contrary for contrarian’s sake.

Sue, hun, you probably don’t want to check Rotten Tomatoes right now. Or any comic book website. Just go back to playing Candy Crush for a few months.

Anyway, this movie has garnered hate long before the masses could see it for themselves.  Boycotts were formed.  Accusations that Fox purposely tanked this movie in response to some behavioral problems from Trank.  First, the boycott is dumb.  Just don’t see if it you don’t think it looks like something you want to see.  No one is forcing you to see every comic book movie.  I won’t be in the theaters when Batman V. Superman comes out because I choose to not see it because it isn’t appealing to me.  I’m not going to protest against it and form boycotts so DC will stop making movies I don’t like.  That’s childish.  Just don’t go.  Also, Fox is not going to pour all this money into a movie and then derail it purposely on its own to destroy a director.  At least I can’t believe they’d spend, what I’m sure is, about $150 million to just throw it in the toilet.  I’m sure it’s not too far to imagine that maybe they had a different vision than Trank and maybe that is more of the product we see now, but that happens all over the place.  That doesn’t stop people from making their opinions known to the world through the internet.

Like me.

Before I wrap this up, I want to offer Fox and/or Marvel an idea I’ll let them have for real cheap.  You want to do something awesome with the Fantastic Four?  Let’s try a television series set in the early 60s.  Try to capture a Jack Kirby or Mike Allred look with bright colors and real sci-fi looking sets and ideas.  Make it fun again.  The Fantastic Four doesn’t really fit in the present day.  It doesn’t have to be part of your cinematic universe.  It can just be a fun series about four adventurers who got bombarded with cosmic rays and gained these awesome powers and decided to become superheroes.

I’ll let you have that idea for a cheap, say, $50,000.  You can reach me through this very site.  Let’s talk and work out this idea!

This is the look I want to see from the Fantastic Four.

Finally, I wanted to like Fantastic Four.  The online backlash seemed to make it near impossible, but I actually, kinda, marginally did like it!  I sincerely loved the first act.  I loved how organic and likable the characters were.  While that second act nearly destroyed all that, at least the final act helped the movie cross the finish line.  See if it you want. I’m not going to demand you go or not.  If you don’t have a real connection to the Fantastic Four, or comics in general, it might not capture your imagination like Iron Man, or Avengers did.  Don’t just hate it because the critics or nerds say you should.

Final rating: 3 out of 5 stars