redfiona99

I don't think people's dislike of Fantastic Four is part of a backlash against superhero films. There may be a backlash against superhero films, but this is a bad film on its own merits.

A few people are going to be reasonably exempt from the criticism that follows later. Toby Kebbell, Reg E. Cathey and Tim Blake Nelson are in a much better film about the tragic fall of Victor von Doom which we see bits of in Fantastic Four. I'd much rather have actually watched that film.

Jamie Bell. You know how Thor 2 has about half an hour of Malkeith stuff they couldn't fit in and Days of Future Past had a Rogue sub-plot that they cut because they couldn't get it to mesh with the rest of them film, I have to assume that there's been a lot of Ben Grimm stuff cut. Because he appears as a child, is interesting, appears as an adult, is interesting, vanishes, only to be recalled for one scene and then gets turned into the Thing, after which he appears for three scenes.

Michael B. Jordan, who is a lot closer to my darling Johnny Storm than Chris Evans ever was. When he's given anything to do, he does it well.

On to the film itself:

The promotional material makes a big thing of having the same producers as the X-Men. Well they brought the wrong people over and should have gone for the writers. When First Class first came out there was a promo where someone, who I think was Matthew Vaughan, said that because they'd been given (relatively) little money, they'd had to focus on the characters more and he thought that resulted in a film people liked more. And I think he was right, and that was what Fantastic Four was missing.

That, and it had some of the worst dialogue you have ever heard. George Lucas would have said that that's not how people actually talk.

You know there's a problem when Victor von Doom is your most sympathetic character.

I am not kidding about Victor von Doom being the sympathetic one. Instead of being our usual monomaniacal rich boy with a vendetta against Reed Richards, he's an angry young scientist, admittedly with anger management issues, an excessive paranoia about his work being stolen and no concept of reasonable behaviour when it comes to Sue Storm. But, and this is part of the problem, he's shown to be right when he says that *they* will steal the Baxter teams work, and isn't entirely wrong in his bitter nihilism. Also, and I admit this is me over-identifying, being Austrian I have heard every single Adolf joke and I don't think the Borat jokes are much better, so I start to feel very warmly towards this guy.

They don't seem to get the 'show, don't tell' thing when it comes to Reed and Sue. Everyone else gets given something that the audience can hold on to (Ben's sucky family, Johnny Storm is lumbered with a control freak Dad (in the most loving way) who doesn't seem to get that forcing Johnny into sci/engineering is the quickest way of making him want out) but they don't.

All that being said the film isn't too bad before they go through the portal the first time there is no way their first test would have been on a chimp, not even a bad CGI chimp. Does no one involved in this film have any scientists they could ask about this sort of thing!

Even the first scene through the portal is good and I love that they focus on the body horror of the transformations.

Particularly Ben Grimm. There was a reason why Micheal Chiklis's Ben Grimm was the best thing about the original FF movies. Because he got him. Because Ben's not just the big guy, he's the heart of the team, he's loyal till death. Now, would being mutated into a monstrosity and then being deserted by my best friend send me into the arms of the army? Yes, or at least into the arms of any passing supervillain. But not Ben Grimm, because he's a better person than I am.

And I dig that it was probably an attempt to make Ben more relatable to the audience (although, it's interesting that family and Air Force man Ben Grimm is no longer seen as relatable. There's whole PhD thesises in that.) but it loses some of who Ben actually is.

I also feel it was thrown in to give some interpersonal conflict for no reason.

Furthermore, I refuse to believe one of the cleverest men on the planet couldn't have gotten a message to the rest of them somehow. 'Sorry for running, working on a plan to fix this and get you out' is not a long message.

Miles Teller is actually alright when he's given something to do but everything about Reed Richards is all tell and not show, we're told his parents don't understand him, but because of how technobabbly what he does is, and because we only ever see his parents in the scene where he blasts the lights out in the entire neighbourhood, it seems less like they don't understand him and more like he's an unspeakable brat who wants to know why the world doesn't worship his genius. And that's Victor's thing.

Miles Teller is at least given things to do. Kate Mara really isn't. I'm not sure if part of the problem is that they decided that Sue Storm had to be a scientist (despite the fact that most science institutes are kept going by their non-science staff. Sue Storm super-administrator is something I am down with.). So they make her a mathematician. But then give her a job no mathematician would get. But again, we shall skip over the science.

Anyway, the character is given almost nothing to do, and matters aren't helped by her having two expressions, one of which is blank and the other is blankly worried, so even when Sue is given something to do (like when her father guilt-trips her into catching Reed) it falls flat.

(For a clever guy, Reed is truly stupid with his choice of online names, and it does come over as Reed is dumb rather than Sue is clever.)

Here we come to an area of disagreement between D that I saw the film with and I. He felt that the film was horribly drawn out, while I thought that the ending was rushed.

Because after three sentences, only one of which is directly spoken between the two, Ben Grimm completely forgives Reed for everything. Which I can live with, just, because Ben is love, but I could have done with actual dialogue, not just Jamie Bell giving it big eyes through some CGI.

Then again, the lack of dialogue is probably a good thing because after the second trip through the wormhole the dialogue moves from passable/bad to godawful terrible. Partly it's killing of Franklin Storm, losing the one actor with gravitas enough to pull off the crummy dialogue, and partly it's that the writers seemed to be determined to shoehorn-in every single superhero cliché, not caring if it worked for these characters in this situation or not.

We have the grand reunification speech, we have the grand victory speech, we have the 'what shall we call ourselves' speech. All done straight-facedly with no play in it.

Matters are not helped by reducing Doom to generic supervillain status (and giving him the world's stupidest mask).

The "fight" scene at the end doesn't work either, because there's no struggle for Reed to overcome, he just easily slips out of his bonds and suddenly everything is fine, and then Doom is defeated way too easily (a problem the first of the old FF movies had as well).

Then we have the actual ending, where the Fantastic Four threaten the government with superpowered terrorism to get their way. And these are the good guys? It's not just me, D said the same thing as we came out of the cinema.

TL;DR version

Film is bad. Cohesive but bad.
It relies too much on bad CGI.
Main problem is that they don't seem to know who the characters are.
Also the terrible dialogue.
Needs more Ben Grimm.