Large Popcorn Review

MPAA: PG-13

Family Friendly?: Yes

“It’s clobberin’ time!” -Ben Grimm

In today’s world, audiences are given film adaptations of many comic book characters on the big screen. With successes like the Avengers (2012), Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), and countless other films, audiences believed that they wouldn’t be subjected to a bad comic book movie for a while. Unfortunately, 20th Century Fox’s attempt at rebooting the Fantastic Four franchise doesn’t live up to those expectations. I have actually wanted to see this movie for a while, but I never did because of people telling me that it wasn’t worth it to spend time watching this movie. With a cast of well-known actors such as Miles Teller and Michael B. Jordan, I thought to myself that with these actors they could make a decent movie…

PLOT:

The film follows brilliant inventor Reed Richards (Miles Teller), his friend Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), as they try to create a teleportation device. Reed gets noticed by the government, and him and Ben are sent to a facility to help create Reed’s invention. There, they are assisted by Sue (Kate Mara) and Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan). When testing the machine, they are exposed to material from a different dimension and gain superpowers. Will Reed be able to find the cure, or will they all become tools for the government to use and decide their future?

WHAT DOES IT DO?:

In the comics, the Fantastic Four are an extraordinary family of superheroes that go on many adventures. This is definitely not the case for this adaptation. In the film, the four characters are constantly subjected to be in dark rooms, and its hard to see them. Not only that but they are never shown to bond or even be the close family they are. The only time they are shown to be somewhat close is when its a montage and only 5 seconds of it do you see them having fun together. You can’t even call these people a family when they barely don’t know each other, and the audience isn’t shown any of those close connections from the comics. On top of that, the actors seem like they don’t even want to be there, and I don’t blame them. Miles Teller doesn’t have any emotion or tone in his voice, along with the rest of the cast. I believe the reason why is because they had to do reshoots when Fox took over production, and none of them wanted to come back to film.

“We have a responsibility to use our powers”- Johnny Storm

You think for the name of the movie, their powers would be fantastic right? Well, here’s the thing….. they hardly use their powers in the movie. I honestly think that we see them use their powers for about 15 minutes out of this 130-minute film. If they changed the largely focused science scenes into bonding with each other, or even fighting threats, there would be somewhat a redemption for this movie. Sadly, we were never given any of those scenes that could have made this film better.

MOVIE SNAX’S NOTES OVER THE FILM:

After seeing this movie, I actually see why people do not like this movie, and I will go into the reasons why I thought it wasn’t a good movie to begin with. I believe there was an original intention to make this film good, but due to Fox’s interruptions, this movie was doomed to suffer. Fox changed the original 3-hour film into only 130 minutes, which probably cut out crucial scenes that would have made this movie better. This happens a lot with movie studios trying to squeeze everything out of a franchise name. Just like the Amazing Spider-Man franchise, the final version of Fantastic Four was due to the studio getting in the way of production. For example, when The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was being developed, the creators had every soul intention to make the film just focus on itself. However, when Sony wanted to catch up with Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe with their own, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was filled with references to not only one or two, but SIX spin-off films, and it made the movie a complete mess with everything they tried to fit into it.

In Fantastic Four’s case, there is also another reason for the troubled production. With the contract established with Marvel Comics, Fox had only until the end of 2015 to make a Fantastic Four film, or they would lose the rights to the characters, and they would go back to Marvel Comics. Instead of losing the rights to the characters, they scrambled as quickly as they could to make a mess of a reboot. However, this reboot had huge potential in my opinion. With Josh Trank, the director of Chronicle (2013), and with well-known actors, I believed that Fox had a potential new successful franchise. However, it makes me sad to admit that these beloved comic characters still don’t have a good adaptation.

Conclusion:

Overall, I really wanted to like this movie. I am a fan of the Fantastic 4 comics and the four characters, but this isn’t the treatment that they deserve. With talks of Disney’s purchase of 20th Century Fox in December 2017, I have high hopes for the Fantastic 4 to be rebooted, and finally, have time in the spotlight that they so deserve. Until then, these characters’ name has been disgraced with this movie.

RATING: 1/5 Popcorn Kernels

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