What Keith's Watching: Fantastic Four (2015)

I knew going in that Fantastic Four was going to be a bad movie. It was universally panned and killed any hopes of a sequel. In it’s defense, it wasn’t as bad as the 1994 Fantastic Four. Anyone who has seen that one though, knows I’m not giving a compliment.

The story is the same as every other Fantastic Four. Four people do something for science, get powers, and then fight Doctor Doom. That kind of happens here, but with a whole lot less action.

That’s the biggest problem I have with this movie. Nothing happens. They get their powers by getting drunk and deciding to be the first people to go to this alternate dimension that they’ve somehow discovered. They don’t want NASA to get the glory. Something happens and they all get powers and leave Doctor Doom behind. I feel like we’re already halfway through the movie at this point.

The government starts experimenting with them. Reed runs away and the other three start doing missions for the CIA or some government agency.

For some reason, people decide to travel back to the other dimension and there they find Doctor Doom. A bunch of stuff happens, they realize they have to fight Doom together. Ten minutes later, they win and become the Fantastic Four.

What the hell? We spend only 30 minutes on Doctor Doom? It’s the main villain of the Fantastic Four and he has almost zero screen time.

There’s writing advice out there that suggests you start the story as close to the action as possible. The writers of this movie never read that advice because they start the action as far away from the inciting incident as possible. Literally, we see Reed Richards as a child.

I think the whole point was to show the bond between Reed and Ben Grimm has as kids, so that Reed feels even worse for what happens to Ben becomes a living sculpture. The problem is, Reed runs away and everyone is pissed, especially Ben. But through the magic of bad storytelling, Ben just forgives him and is very quickly okay with everything. So the device that’s supposed to strengthen Reed’s story, weakens Ben’s.

It’s been a while since I saw the Fantastic Four movies that had Chris Evans, Jessica Alba and that guy from that ABC show where he was immortal, but I’m pretty sure they were better than this. Not by much though. At this point, 20^th Century Fox should just give up, partner with Marvel Studios and make a good Fantastic Four movie.