FANTASTIC FOUR: FANTASTIC FLOP

I’ll admit it up front, I’m a comic book fan. No, I don’t still buy them but I grew up with them and have an appreciation for the work that goes into making a comic book. Because of that I’m in geek heaven lately with all of the comic book movies and shows on TV. And for the most part they’re doing a great job of these. But when they get it wrong they REALLY get it wrong. Like the new FANTASTIC FOUR movie.

The movie opens with grade school age Reed Richards and Ben Grimm becoming friends in a school where the other kids don’t appreciate Reed’s genius and Ben us picked on by his older brother. Years later at the science fair Reed (Miles Teller) and Ben (Jamie Bell) have a project on display that the teacher’s don’t understand but one that Dr. Franklin Storm notices. He offers Reed a full scholarship to come study and work with him.

Reed takes him up on the offer and helps work on a secret project that will transport people to and from another dimension. Already working on the project are Dr. Storm’s daughter Sue (Kate Mara), Dr. Storm’s trouble making son Johnny (Michael B. Jordan) and another prodigy who is difficult to work with and has a thing for Sue, Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell). The team gets the machine to work and the government moves in to take it over before they have a chance to go to the other side themselves.

A night of disappointment and drinking finds Johnny, Doom, Reed and Ben (who Reed wants to share the adventure with) sneaking into the lab to take a trip to the other dimension on their own without approval. They get there and are amazed by the landscape that they find there. But one thing leads to another and they end up having to escape before the land crumbles beneath their feet. In their haste Victor is accidentally left behind and falls into the green lava looking substance that covers everything. Glitches prevent the doors of the pod from closing on all sides but the pod makes it back as the lab explodes.

Reed wakes to find that he’s changed. As a matter of fact all of them have changed, including Sue who had run to the lab as they were returning. Ben now looks like he’s made of giant rocks, Sue can control force fields and turn invisible, Johnny can becoming a flaming human being and Reed can stretch his body. When he sees what they are doing with this, turning them into weapons, Reed escapes the lab and searches on his own for a way to turn them back.

He is eventually caught by the government and taken to a top secret base where they’ve recreated the pod and lab. The plan is to return to the other dimension again and try and see if they can recreate what happened before. Things go awry when they discover that Victor survived the lava and has changed himself into a near omnipotent being determined to save this new dimension while obliterating his home world. Only the four can stop this from happening.

So where does this go wrong? Nearly everywhere, for film fans as well as anyone who’s ever read the comic. Storylines are changed from the start beginning with the grade school set up. Ben is no longer a football star but a fairly smaller than average teen. Doom is a troubled teen rather than a scientist who works willingly side by side with Reed. The romantic angle between Sue and Reed is tossed aside. To show that comic movies can handle diversity, Johnny is now black rather than the blonde haired teen of the comics. And Doom…well he no longer sports the iconic armor that he does in the comic, instead having a hardened lava body instead. Comic fans hated this film and it’s easy to see why.

As for the movie side of things well that doesn’t work either. The film moves at a snail’s pace, taking over an hour to get the group changed into what they will become known for. And during that time it doesn’t do much to get the viewer emotionally involved with the characters. We should be concerned about the welfare of these characters when bad things happen to them but there is so little emotion emitting from any of them that they just seem like sideline character suddenly thrust to the forefront. We have no reason to want to feel anything for them when it finally does.

And those super powers? They don’t show until the last 30 minutes of the film and aren’t fully put to use until the last 10 minutes. Why make a movie based on a comic book if you want it to have so little association with that comic? This has been one of the biggest reasons for movies based on comics failing. It’s also why movies that Marvel actually has a hand in making have succeeded (this one was made by 20^th Century Fox who still owns the rights to the Fantastic Four).

While some weren’t happy with the two previous Fantastic Four films they were leaps and bounds better than this hunk of scrap. It’s a movie that’s not worth a free rental should you have the opportunity. It might not even be worth watching for free on TV. My suggestion is to ignore it and maybe it will die a quick and painless death.

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