Fant4stic Post your review here! (Fant4stic Four)

[Man in the Suit]

I really liked the first 2/3. Then "One Year Later" happens. Oof. I really loved what they were going for, but then the filmmakers don't follow through with anything they built. So frustrating.

 

[X-Maniac]

As I've just said to someone, I don't think it's as bad as the critics, fanboys or Tomatometer say, but it's by no means amazing, lol...

I think the first two FF movies had better structure, pacing, comedy and sense of family. But they also had that awful Thing foam suit, Ioan not being a very good Reed, etc etc.

This new one isn't utter crap, but it's something of a misfire that doesn't really capture the essence of the F4 very well (though Miles Teller is great as Reed). My local cinema chain Odeon has user reviews giving it 3 out of 5, and that's fair enough I think. Somewhere between 4/10 and 6/10 is probably a fair representation.

I may subject myself to it again during the week to see how i feel next time, and I'd be interested to see a special edition Blu-ray with an extended cut or even Trank's original cut.

 

[DCnightwing23]

I really liked the first 2/3. Then "One Year Later" happens. Oof. I really loved what they were going for, but then the filmmakers don't follow through with anything they built. So frustrating.

The third act was studio driven/created stuff. The filmmaker had no part of the final act and that was pretty obvious.

 

[Mace Dolex]

Even the theatrical posters are a disappointment since we never once saw the FF battling it out in New York city, the whole movie took place at the research facility and the Negative Zone.

 

[YJ1]

Thinking on it now for a few days, I officially HATE this Fant 4 Stink movie more than any other I've seen in my life. Hate everything about it.

I'm a film fan in general and have 2,074 films ranked on my Flickchart account. This FF is now ranked dead last. Even other movies that I hated like Open Water, Crystal Skull, Battlefield Earth, Skyline, Hudson Hawk are now ranked ahead of the disgrace they perpetrated on these FF characters. Maybe I love the characters too much and this made me hate this fiasco more but I don't care why. All I know is that this hate will never go away.

 

[Spider-Fan]

Ugh....where do I start with this movie?

Okay, let me first talk about my perspective as I approached watching this. Growning up, Fantastic Four was one of my favorite comics. They were easily among my most followed comics and in my top 5 for series I own the most issues of. I bought a VHS years ago of the bootlegged Corman version just to see a live action version of one of my favorite teams. Though the movie is awful I still enjoyed watching it on some level because it was the closest I felt I was going to get. Then came the Tim Story films. My tastes matured by this time, and both Story films were less well received by me. I outright hate those movies, and the thing I hated most in all of them was Doom. The Tim Story Doom was a horrible take on Marvel's best villain. I regard FF as a 2/5 movie, and FF: ROTSS as a 1.5/5 movie. They get some aspects of the comic right, and Johnny and Ben by and large were good. Reed and Susan were awful and woefully acted.

As news came out about this reboot, I was immediately taken out of it due to the direction. The Fantastic Four were always one of the most light hearted comics in the Marvel pantheon, but despite the light hearted tone, the FF also had more of an emotional punch than most comics given the nature of the team being a family and most of their adventures had high stakes not just for the Earth, but the cosmos. The FF embraced sci-fi and fanstistical elements, and crafted one of the finest titles Marvel had for many years. Josh Trank decided to take this wonderful fantastical team and groudn them. He sought to make it a gritty and more real take on the team, and from the start that felt like a betrayel to what made the comic book good.

Now, this being a poor FF adaptation was clear form the start. But, now the question became can this be a good movie in its own right? Well, having now seen the movie, the answer to that is a resounding NO! Not only does this film strip away the appeal of what made the Fantastic Four Marvel's launchign pad for the Silver Age, it also manages to strip away any appeal of what makes a movie good. The performances are lazy, the style uninspired, and the pacing is slower than a Stephen King TV film. This movie manages to do nothing right, and be boring on top of it.

Let's talk about the cast in more detail. The only character with any personality is Miles Teller as the guy named Reed Richards. He plays a cowardly version of the character, and a not particularl intelligent one either. This Reed Richards has so little regard for his experiment, he didn't even know creating a black hole was possible? Nor bothered to examine the samples he got after the teleportation? What kind of scientist does that! The Reed of the comics would never be this careless, nor would he ABANDON his friends when they need him. Suffice to say, I found him a terrible person. Next come Johnny and Sue. Neither character has any personality, and they have absolutely no chemistry. Say what we will about Alba, but she HAD moments with Chris Evans that made me buy they were family. I never once bought these two as family. Sue has one expression the whole film, and Johnny never really does anything relevent.

Then comes poor Ben Grimm. Ben, who had NO reason to be on this mission other than he got a drunken call from Reed. The Thing was probably the most rightly done in that we felt bad for him, but there is NO justification within the story for him being in the mission. Also, it is great how no one cares that the government sends Ben on dangerous missions for 1 year, but suddenly when Johnny is about to go on them, we must act quickly and cure them! Everything that happens to poor Ben makes me think the other people in the film are horrendous human beings. Then there is Doom. Poor Doom. What did they do to you. They took one of the most brilliant minds in all of comics. Someone who rules his own people and stands up to gods themselves, and they made him basically my sister's loser ex-boyfriend. Are you kidding me? Then when he comes back in the story with his powers, there is NO explanation for why he is suddenly evil and wants to destroy the Earth. None. Crappy writing at its finest.

I wish I had more to say about the stylistic elements of the film and such, but to be frank, there is nothing to say about them. Say what we will about movies like Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, or even the Tim Story Fantastic four films, but at least those have moments of hilarity we can laugh at. This movie has no action, no personality, and no entertainment. Simply put, this is easily one of the biggest misses in the history of comic book films. It has earned the spot at being one of the worst of all-time. Movies like this deserve to fail, and the people who make them also deserve to be fired. They probably trashed the Fantastic Four brand for years, and that is terrible for a long time fan of the material. Hopefully someone who actually gives a crap about the property and sees the appeal and why we loved it in the first place takes care of it next time. The Fantastic Four have been mishandled on films since the 90s. Please have mercy and bring them back to prominance. Show the world why they basically created the Silver Age of comics for Marvel and as the First Family of comics. Don't continue to give it to people who make garbage like THIS movie.

Overall Rating: 1 out of 5

I award this no points, and may god NOT have mercy on Trank's soul.

 

[NewYorkSpider]

This movie was a disaster. I gave it a chance in hopes that everything being said about it wasn't true. The first 40-50 minutes of the film wasn't that bad. It explained the plot well and introduced all the characters at the right pace. Then after "One Year Later", the film goes on a downward spiral. The cast had no chemistry, there was no build up of the villain, Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben had like 5-10 minutes of screen time together and the last act is extremely rushed.

5/10

 

[cph9fa]

I really liked the first 2/3. Then "One Year Later" happens. Oof. I really loved what they were going for, but then the filmmakers don't follow through with anything they built. So frustrating.

^^^ Pretty much this exactly...

I was down with the younger biracial cast. I was invested in Reed and Grimm as friends. I bought into Franklin's project for young geniuses at the Baxter building. I was on board with the idea of a "body horror" interpretation of the Fantastic Four. I was even willing to give hackerDoom a chance to see where they took him; I liked some of early interactions between him and Reed. There was a lot of potential and promise in the first part of this film.

Then, just as it was getting good; just as your wondering how Reed will help his friends escape -- they flash the words "One Year Later" up on screen, and it's like we're suddenly watching a different film. Different characters, different motivations. Completely different tone (talk about tonal whiplash). The film takes you right up to the point of delivering on all the promises from the first half, then skips over any kind of payoff on those, in order to completely reinvent itself. It then rushes confusingly through a plethora of plot points, helter-skelter, just to get to a big showdown with Doom, which doesn't feel at all earned or menacing.

 

[psylockolussus]

So do you have a revised score?

Third viewing: 6/10

 

[nightwing06]

Watching Fantastic Four or FANT4STIC play out on the big screen it wasnt hard for me to believe at least half of the
rumors about the major malfunctions on the set of this film were true.

Its not the horrific nightmare some critics have made it out to be.I actually liked the first half and development of the characters.
The actors Miles Teller , Michael B. Jordan, along with Kate Mara, Jamie Bell and Toby Kebbell whom i admire and have enjoyed their
work elsewhere do a great job in the first half.
Then everything goes flatter than a 3 day mug of beer The script,the SFX ( i swear i laughed out loud at how cheap and cheesie
some of it looked like) everything!!
Whats so frustrating is that i could see if they had made only a few alterations to the script it would have been a much better film.
This film has one of the most anti climatic and grating conclusions i have ever seen
I really dont get how a studio has the rights to such a wealth of stories and doesnt use them.Dr.Doom is one of the most interesting
villains in comics,here he is reduced to an odd looking Terminator,mixed with the robot from Millenium (yeah look that movie up and
watch the whole thing ,i dare you!!)
All i can say is watch the first half of this film,when it hits DVD,then go online or buy some old FF comics and read them

Scale of 1-10 a 4

 

[CTFFFan]

That was not Dr.Doom. I don't know what that was. He was like a cheap boss from a crappy video game.

Reminded me of C3PO.

 

[CTFFFan]

I can't add anything that hasn't already been said. A piece of trash and looking at my screen name, should be a sign I am a FF die hard. Please let Marvel get the rights back so we can get the comic and a real FF movie at some point!

 

[X-Maniac]

The third act was studio driven/created stuff. The filmmaker had no part of the final act and that was pretty obvious.

However, we don't know what Trank's Act 3 would have been like. It might have been worse...

 

[Loki882]

Well Trank's big idea for Doctor freaking Doom was apparently "blogger who's screen name is Doom." So yeeaahhh.

 

[Tony Stark]

Well Trank's big idea for Doctor freaking Doom was apparently "blogger who's screen name is Doom." So yeeaahhh.

And apparently the studio hated it so much they changed it. Although the essence of the internet anti-social blogger/hacker is there.

The fact that there's no personal connection between Victor and the team, so they have to resort to [blackout] having him kill Dr. Storm[/blackout] in a cheap out of nowhere fashion to build up a fake rivalry.

 

[Kelly]

I like keeping things as positive as i possibly can, so because of that, a full on review just cannot be given. I can't say that I was disappointed when I watched the film this weekend with my family, mainly because once SDCC 2015 came and went....I knew there was nothing in this movie for me to be excited about. It was pretty much everything I thought it would be. EXCEPT, I thought MAYBE it would be an ok sci-fi movie....it wasn't. I already knew I was not going to an F4 movie.

That is pretty much all I can say.

 

[Joe Rockhead]

Hard for me to add anything that already hasn't been stated.

On Saturday, I took my nephew out to the movies for his birthday, with a couple of his friends, and we saw Dragonball Z. After the movie and lunch, we decided to make it a double feature with Fantastic Four.

For Dragonball Z -- the review is simple. Everything you could want in a movie was there. Character designs and story, with action and humor that reflect the original animated series were all present. The kids enjoyed the movie even though it had quite the predictable resolution.

But Fantastic Four? This movie was everything you never wanted in a Fantastic Four movie was there. It was dull, slow, disjointed and joyless.

The story suffers from several things. First it was based strictly on the Ultimate FF, which consensus public opinion is the inferior version of the Fantastic Four when compared with the Kirby/Lee originals.

Second, Trank did a really piss-poor job of establishing any sort of relationship between any of the main characters before the accident, so that it seems really forced and rushed to have them band together to fight Doom in the end.

Third, it spends way too long for them to get to any action with 4 and Doom and it's over way too quickly. I did find the directions they wanted to go in for the characters in the first act interesting, but what was there felt incomplete and hollow.

Fourth, why in the world would Sue NOT be included in the trip to planet zero (seriously, THAT's the name they came up with?) while Victor is there?

Lastly, Victor is just another wasted character that becomes a one note villain when on the written page he's such a complex character. None of that complexity is delivered and his motivation for being at the Baxter Institute is to see Sue (oh, and see this upstart Reed who 'stole' his dimensional travel theories and did him one better).

I do feel bad for the actors. I think each one did a credible job with the characters that were written for them. I just don't believe there was anything to work with... AND they were instructed NOT to reference the comics.

One thing I can say is that the film did put major focus on Reed Richards, it's just sad that it's not a Reed Richards that anyone cares to see on film.

Now don't get me wrong, I didn't outright despise the film. There were some instances where the direction and story were good. For instance Reed and Ben as kids was mostly well done (if you could ignore the abuse of Ben at the hands of his older brother). Also, the post accident scenes up until Reed makes his escape are all pretty well done, especially Reed's predicament.
And I didn't have a real problem with how their powers were displayed, nor with the CGI designs for the Thing were ok (still could have used pants).

But isn't the problem that a total of maybe 10 minutes of good with the remaining 80-90 minutes drifting between mediocre and downright horrible a complete failure on the part of Fox, Trank, Kinberg and whomever else assisted in producing this travesty?

In the end though, it wasn't a total waste. I got the joy of explaining everything that was wrong about the movie to 3 teenagers who seemed interested in learning what could have been. They were mostly let down by the fact that there was no real fight in the movie.

 

[BlackFox]

This started out ok and was interesting up to the accident and then it all sort of fell apart in one of the worst paced films I've seen in a while. The premise started out slow and with gradual build up before rush, rush, rush to that end it was all over so fast!!! This film clearly had problems and behind the scenes meddling similar to ASM2 but it just ends up being a waste of potential.

Sure its not the worst ever CBM made and is marginally better than the first two FF films but its not anything I would want to see again in a hurry either, when people complain about bad third acts this film takes the winners medal, there is no build up to things, dialogue is reduced to a couple of lines in each scene, things happen so fast you dont know why or even worse care, characters come and go with little emotional impact. Just a feeling of waste of potential in the first 45-60 minutes that might have been.

Doesnt look likely we will see a follow up anyway judging by the way things are going, maybe it is time for a change of hands for FF too like Spidey, maybe they are better suited to that world we shall see I guess.

This is a sad ending to what has been a pretty average CBM year, not going to go down as a vintage year I doubt, hopefully 2016 can bring the noise again, in fact I'm pretty confident it will, Deadpool, Cap, Batman, Supe's etc etc will hopefully all bring their A game.

5.8/10

 

[MadVillainy]

This started out ok and was interesting up to the accident and then it all sort of fell apart in one of the worst paced films I've seen in a while. The premise started out slow and with gradual build up before rush, rush, rush to that end it was all over so fast!!! This film clearly had problems and behind the scenes meddling similar to ASM2 but it just ends up being a waste of potential.

Sure its not the worst ever CBM made and is marginally better than the first two FF films but its not anything I would want to see again in a hurry either, when people complain about bad third acts this film takes the winners medal, there is no build up to things, dialogue is reduced to a couple of lines in each scene, things happen so fast you dont know why or even worse care, characters come and go with little emotional impact. Just a feeling of waste of potential in the first 45-60 minutes that might have been.

Doesnt look likely we will see a follow up anyway judging by the way things are going, maybe it is time for a change of hands for FF too like Spidey, maybe they are better suited to that world we shall see I guess.

5.8/10

This is kinda random but Ive always been curious...how do people give movies ratings like 5.8/10. I understand 5.5 or maybe even 5.25, but 5.8? What warrants the .8?

 

[BlackFox]

This is kinda random but Ive always been curious...how do people give movies ratings like 5.8/10. I understand 5.5 or maybe even 5.25, but 5.8? What warrants the .8?

I've always used this method so its simpler to rank things for those all important lists we all love and also to give a bit of leeway for when comparing one thing to another. I guess some prefer to just give round numbers but I just like the little bit of flexibility it gives.

 

[pr0xyt0xin]

My guess is its something like 58% positive.

Makes a decent amount of sense to me. Plus everything is comparative right? like... if F4 was the only movie ever it would be a 10/10 because there would be nothing to compare it to.

so its better than a movie ranked 5.75 but worse than a movie ranked 6.0

 

[Primal Slayer]

Just saw it. The first half of the movie was more or less useless and the review that I saw that said the the film didnt start until the end, did not lie. The F4 against Doom seemed really quick and if anything that whole bit could've been fleshed out better.

The reshoots were TOTALLY noticeable because Sue's hair had a superpower of it's own where it could change shades, get rid of those dark roots, look stale as hell, look real.

For me, I enjoyed the Alba F4 movie better.

 

[DlAMONDZ]

This had no 2nd act huh? They get their powers, "Doom" shows up killing people for no reason then gets defeated lmao

I'll give it a 4 I guess

 

[Primal Slayer]

I was wondering if he just held back on the F4 because he was "friends" with them? Or if his powers didn't affect them as easily as it did everyone else. Because it took him a second to kill a person but he just flings them around.

 

[PROLIFIK1]

So I just finished watching this.

I'll keep it short, the first half wasn't that bad until they got their powers. Along with the majority, it kind of just fell apart from there. That whole third act just didn't flow and it was obvious it was just thrown together in a panic. The whole confrontation with Doom was so bad and quick, that I was surprised when the movie had ended. This movie was bad, but it had some potential. It just wasn't executed correctly. With a better script, it obviously could of done better. It's a waste of many of the actors' talent.

After seeing this, I can easily say that the Tim Story versions are my favorite out of the 4. It isn't saying much, but it was still well balanced compared to this dreary monotone Trank disaster.