Fantastic Four

If you have ever wanted to see a superhero movie where everybody seems to be on downers or depressants, here is Fantastic Four.  This is a drab-looking movie, shot mostly in dull grays and blues, and set almost entirely in the colorless walls of a military base.  This is a dour movie, where the superheroes, villains and side characters can hardly seem to muster any enthusiasm for themselves.  But most of all, the movie's just not fun at all.

Those of you with good memories will know that this is not the first time these characters have been brought to the screen, as there were two previous movies in 2005 and 2007.  Those of you with extremely good memories will know that even before that, there was a failed attempt in the early 90s to make a movie about the Fantastic Four that never even got released, except on bootleg videos passed around at comic conventions.  What we have here is essentially a reboot with the same characters played by different actors.  Here again is the team of superheros comprised of Reed Richards (Miles Teller), who can stretch his body and limbs to the point that he looks like a living Stretch Armstrong toy, Sue Storm (Kate Mara), who can make herself invisible and create force fields around people or objects, her brother Johnny (Michael B. Jordan), who can turn into a living form of molten hot energy and calls himself the Human Torch, and Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) whose body is entirely made out of rocks and goes by the name of The Thing.  They're once again going up against their arch rival, Dr. Doom (Toby Kebbell), who shows up abruptly in the last 15 minutes of the film wanting to destroy the world, and the Four have to fight him, because that's what the fans of the comic want to see.

What's that?  You say you've never read the comics or seen the earlier movies, and you have no idea who these characters are, or even their relationship to each other?  Tough luck, says director Josh Trank (who did a much better movie about people with powers a few years ago called Chronicle) and his team of writers.  They assume you hold advance knowledge, and don't need to know such things.  The most character development we do get is in the early scenes depicting Reed and Ben as children trying to build a teleportation device in their garage.  Those crazy kids actually succeed, and take their invention to a Science Fair, where their snooty teacher brushes off a demonstration of actual teleportation as "a magic show".  I repeat: These kids have discovered the secret to teleportation, and the teacher brushes it off.  I know some people are hard to impress, but criminy!  Fortunately, there just happens to be someone working for the government named Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) hanging out at the Science Fair.  Why is he there?  Well, you never know when a couple of high school kids will crack teleportation.  Turns out he's working on a similar project, and he hires Reed Richards on the spot to be part of his top secret project.

At the secret lab where the experiment is going on, Reed meets up with the rest of the main characters, including Dr. Doom, who at this point of the film is a stuck up young science genius who simply go by Victor.  Through exhaustive scientific research (which takes about three minutes of screen time), they find out that the objects teleported in Reed's device are actually going to another dimension and a distant planet that the scientists call "Planet Zero".  The hope is that Reed and his fellow young scientists will be able to teleport themselves to this distant planet and explore its secrets.  But the big, mean military head who is always looking over their shoulders (Tim Blake Nelson) wants to choose a different team to be the first to try out the device.  Reed and Victor won't have this, so they gather their friends and teleport themselves to the other dimension, landing on a planet that looks suspiciously like a CG layout for a video game level.  The mission is a disaster, and Victor winds up falling into a pool of glowing energy, presumably to his death.  When he returns during the last few minutes, he's suddenly made of metal and has the ability to kill people when his eyes glow green.  He also now calls himself Dr. Doom, because Sue sarcastically called him that once in an earlier scene.

The visit to this distant planet is what also gives Reed and his friends their powers as well.  So, they're superheroes now, right?  Do we get to see them in action?  Of course not.  We get to see them mostly sitting in containment cells in a military prison, moping about how they're not normal anymore.  Well, to be fair, Johnny's kind of okay with his ability to turn into flaming energy.  The rest of them, not so much.  The military wants to use them as tools of war, the scientists want to study them, and it's all very boring.  Fantastic Four is quite odd for a superhero movie, as it seems tailor made to have its central characters not use their powers whenever possible.  There are no thrilling adventures, no daring escapes, no witty banter between the heroes...Heck, the Fantastic Four barely get to interact with each other in this movie, even when they're sharing the screen together.  All the heroes do for a majority of the movie is sit confined in their cells, or stare at computer monitors.  This is the cinematic equivalent of buying an adventure book, and having the pages be blank.

The film's director, Josh Trank, has more or less disowned the film as bad buzz and widespread critical pans began to swarm around the film leading up to its release.  He claims that he is not at fault for the film's failure, and that the studio refused to let him make the movie he wanted to make.  There are even reports that he had no control over the final product, and was more or less replaced.  According to other sources, Mr. Trank was difficult to work with, and didn't seem to know what he was doing while he was making it.  Whatever you choose to believe, it can't be denied that something has gone horribly wrong here.  While the previous attempts to bring the Fantastic Four to the screen were not exactly what you would call a success, they at least had a sense of life to them.  This is a dull, gray and murky story that plods along to nowhere in particular.

In this day and age of The Avengers, Iron Man, the Dark Knight movies and Guardians of the Galaxy, do we really need a superhero movie that seems to have the very essence of joy drained out of it?  If the movies I listed above represent some of the top of the genre, then this exists somewhere in that strange lower region where nobody involved seems to have cared much.

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