Fantastic Four August o7, 2o15

See, the problem with us fan boys is that we tend to hold Marvel Comics in very high regard. Probably it’s because we got hooked on them at a very young, a very impressionable age. We take our comic books seriously because they have gotten us through those rough teenage years as

"the-kid-who-doesn't-fit-in." We were bullied by the bigger guys, invisible to girls, we looked funny, we were awkward, skinny (and fat), and Stan Lee and Marvel Comics wrote directly to us, for us, about us. Marvel Comics weren’t about superheroes; they were about very human beings that just happened to be superheroes. They lead tortured lives that mirrored the real life miseries that we the outcasts of teenage society faced on a daily bases. So, you’ll have to excuse us when we appear to get unreasonably angry when a movie studio (like 20^th century Fox) takes our beloved treasures of hope and turn them into celluloid sludge (I know, "celluloid" is an outdated word for film stock . . . but it sounds so cool!).

In a nutshell: Why The Fantastic Four Sucks

Lacks human interaction

When're you studio guys gonna get it? The ONLY reason people go to the movies is to see human beings interact with each other. Scripts need to be active and not passive. We want to see on the screen people struggling to overcome obstacles and reach (hopefully) whatever objective they are struggling to achieve. We don’t want you to tell us about the struggle, we want to SEE the struggle, hear it and feel it. For example, late in the movie when Reed is captured by the Evil Government Agent (a very Snidely Whiplash stereotype played by Tim Blake Nelson), he tells Ben, “Ben . . . you are my best friend.” Okay, that’s nice and everything, everybody NEEDS at least one friend, but there’s no exploration of that relationship. it doesn't seem to be more than a master/servant arrangement; Reed’s the boss and Ben is his unpaid employee. There's plenty you could have done in the beginning of the movie where Ben and Reed meet in grade school to show that “best friend relationship” without making the movie any longer than it is already. But the production team thought . . . well, there's the problem . . .  they didn't think the concept out. They don't think in terms of action when it comes to characters.

Another example: The Dimensional Traveling Machine is finely up and running and the “Evil Government Agent” comes in and announces that NASA is taking over the project “. . . and there’s nothing you eggheads can do about it! Woohahahaha!” 

 (Okay, the actor doesn’t really say that, but it comes off as something like that.) Anyway, the science boys are pissed. Victor Von Doom (Why is Dr. Doom in this movie?) pulls out this teeny tiny flask of whiskey(?) and everybody takes a sip and they’re drunk! And they decide to “Screw The Man! We’re gonna be the first to use the Dimensional Traveling Machine!” and . . . Well, and then it’s a breakneck run to get to the final scene where we “finally” see the BIG CGI action sequence that is so flat and cartoonish, so excruciatingly dull that I wished I had a Dimensional Traveling Machine so I could beam myself to another theatre in another dimension where I’m sure Fantastic Four would be a much better film.

If there’s a point to this “review” it’s that you can’t just sit down and write a script without exploring the specifics of human behavior in dire situations, and then figuring out a way to effectively express that human behavior in very clean, sensory images. I mean, you CAN be superficial if you want because that’s exactly what the producers of Fantastic Four (2015) have done. But there’s a price to pay for it. Ironically, the producers made this movie primarily to make a lot of money off the Fantastic Four franchise. And the rush to get the product out there to the public, to throw it together without truly exploring the world of the characters, hurt their bottom line.