The Comic reviews Fantastic Four 2015 (spoilers)

The comic book movie rot starts here, Fantastic Four, the latest Marvel property to be re-brought to the screen is a tired mess. I went in optimistic, Trank’s brilliant debut Chronicle, a great cast and promising trailers all good signs, ultimately I was proven wrong and should have believed the prophetic messages on the bottom half of the internet. The film, if you can call it that, feels very much like 90 minutes of deleted scenes shown in chronological order with my own internal blu ray commentary casually saying “I am not sure what they went for in this scene, I can see why they took it out”.

The simplest way I can find to describe what is wrong with this film is to say it is effectively like filming Back to the Future from Doc Brown’s point of view, his years as a scientist, his failed inventions, his fall on the toilet, his hours making the DeLorean and then the last ten minutes being him meeting Marty followed by the events at twin pines/lone pine mall. Same story, same character, same cast but none of the peril, wit or excitement of the original. We get scenes of Ben Grimm being bullied by his brother, but none of him doing any real clobbering, for example the sequence with him dropping from a helicopter in the trailer? Its absent from the final cut. We get scenes of Johnny Storm in a Grease like drag race, we don’t see him experience his powers for the first time, or learn to harness them, we see Reed at a science fair and falling asleep at his desk, we don’t see him really trying to help his friends and undo his mistakes. Sue Storm? Shes mostly invisible, except for her newest power, pattern recognition. Im not joking. 

There are two villains in the movie, Firstly, Doom, Reed’s colleague & Dr Storm’s protégé and secondly we have Science Teacher-man who cruelly scoffs at young Reed’s inventions. I afford them equal footing because they are pretty much given equal screen time, and their motivations are explained with the same depth. Doom’s powers are aldo inexplicable, one line from the trailer is “he is stronger than each of us but not stronger than all of us.” With Doom casually popping heads with psychic powers, I beg to differ, funny that he doesnt use his Scanners power against the Four, choosing instead to throw rocks at them.

The interdimensional craft that is the driver of events, I deliberately refrain from using the word story, is centre stage for most of the movie. Compared with the globetrotting Rogue Nation this gives the film a very local feel. The film takes place across two labs and a few square feet of Planet Zero. The scale and scope feels tiny, almost claustraphobic. The population at large are ignorant of the ‘heroes’. Even the inevitable formation of the team via cliché’d 'fight one at a time, then combine and fight as a team' sequence takes place over a handful of minutes in a finale that makes little sense. The craft is built in three iterations, the film’s climax sees the team relocated to a newer bigger lab in the middle of nowhere presumeably to build a fourth… great.

At just over an hour and a half the film feels bloated, if the film had started with Reed recovering from his trip to Planet Zero, watching over his friends, then the bulk of the previous hour of film could have been told in 3 second flashbacks. Given the origin of the character’s powers in Chronicle was a handful of seconds its difficult to see why Trank would break with such a great formula. In the end what we have is an unfunny episode of the Big Bang Theory with a short fight at the end. With Doom as Sheldon Cooper, Leonard as Reed, Bernadette as Sue and Howard and Stuart as Johnny and Ben.

Those keen on a shared universe will be disappointed to know that there is no mention of Fox’s other properties. 

This isn’t the film the trailers sold, there is little sense of fun or heroics and certainly none of the playfulness or wonder we saw in chronicle. Chronicle’s baseball game among the clouds is an unmatched and standout scene amongst superhero films, Fantastic Four represents a low point in the genre and probably a breach of the trades descriptions act. Trust me, avoid.