Fantastic Four directed by Josh Trank, starring Miles Teller, Micheal B. Jordan, Kate Mara, and Jamie Bell. First things first, the movie sucks.

Oh? That wasn’t enough to sate your curiosity on this film? Well then here’s a relatively short review of the film: Imagine if ‘Iron Man’ spent a good 20 minutes on Tony Stark’s childhood, and then the majority of the movie is him stuck in the cave building the first suit. The climax is him breaking out of the cave and returning home, it finishes with a teaser of him making the second suit. That is what ‘Fantastic Four’ was like.

Oh you still want to know more about this film? You wanna know why it was such a disappointment? The Fantastic Four only become the Fantastic Four because they got drunk.

In fact the quality of the film can be summed up by realizing “It’s Clobbering Time!” is a phrase Ben Grimm’s brother said to him before he beat him.

Watching the new Fantastic Four just reminds me of writing an in-class essay in high school. It starts off great, everything is written neatly inside the boundaries, everything is structured well. Then you notice you don’t have much time left and your blue ink pen out of ink and the only thing you have left is a neon green highlighter.

You panic and you’re not paying attention to the boundaries anymore. Your neat handwriting has turned into a childish neon green scribble and by the time the final bell rings, you can barely consider your work a fully formed essay.

I just can’t even remember a film in recent memory that nose dives as badly as Fantastic Four does in its second half. The film starts off pretty good, with good acting from the four leads and good cinematography.

There are still a couple of oddities in the first part, like how despite how good of an actress Kate Mara is she isn’t given anything to work with script wise. The fact a movie set in 2007 pretends like you can power a science project with a number of old Nintendo 64’s, but overall I was enjoying the film’s curiously slow build.

All that build up is thrown out the window when our heroes are teleported to another dimension. This is the neon green highlighter.

Unfortunately it never recovers. When the film enters its third and absolutely horrendous final act, we’re finally introduced to Doctor Doom, who’s now inexplicably murderous and dressed like a Dragon Ball Evolution left over. This may just be the worst costumer design in a super hero film ever.

The main four barely interacted made their teaming up seem really unearned and I’m pretty sure Johnny and Ben had no lines together until the end when Johnny shows some of his classic love-hate with Ben but, being how they never even talked before that scene, it just makes Johnny look like an incredible jerk.

Despite how bad that scene was, despite how bad the movie was the most disappointing thing is how the movie handled Victor Von Doom. Doom isn’t just one of the best villains in comics, he’s one of the best characters, period. He’s complex, driven, he is equal parts sci-fi and mystical.

What film companies keeps getting wrong is that Doom isn’t evil for the sake of evil. He actually wants to save the world through his own means. He doesn’t even really hate the Fantastic Four outside of Reed Richards. The overarching conflict Doom represents is that there’s a possibility he might just be right.

In conclusion I will finish with a story. This summer I worked in a theme park. On a particular day it began to storm and I was trapped outside while the guests flee. I sat down on a bench and watched the scenery. Not much to look at, except some wet playground equipment, some rusty seats and a particular dry patch of grass covered by a roof. I didn’t have my phone so I literally had nothing to do. So I bought myself a pack of chips and quietly watched the pitter patter of the rain. Something caught my eye it was a squirrel just sitting around trying to burst open a particularly stubborn acorn. So stubborn that the acorn didn’t open for over an hour. For the next hour, I just watched a squirrel try to eat an acorn. I’d look away and look at the rain again at times but I just kept coming back to the squirrel. For the next hour, I literally watched a squirrel try to repeatedly bite an acorn. It was the most boring anticlimactic thing I’ve ever experienced.

Now while watching Fantastic Four, I had a flash back to that faithful day. Now, I’m dead serious when I say this, but the tale of a squirrel trying to eat an acorn in the rain has more plot twists and character building than Fantastic Four.

 

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