Ah tis good to be back! Admittedly I wanted to do another few reviews while I was away volunteering in China and you guys are probably a bit exasperated with me by now seeing as how lax I can be with updating this blog but the Internet connection was so bad where I was staying that I could only mostly access my E-mails and some flash game websites. On top of that, the Chinese government banned the use of IMDB.com years ago and I'm not even sure if Blogger is allowed in China either.
Either way, I apologise for the long period of wait that you guys have been put through since my top ten lists for best selling music albums. So I thought that the best way to make up would be to rip on a terrifically bad superhero movie with a great cast, very little passionate acting, formulaic writing, even more formulaic storyline and plot and utterly forgettable action. So without further ado ladies and gentlemen; the legendary 2005 flop Fantastic Four!
Now I've decided on a quick revision of reviewing old films so that now I can only review them if they are more than 5 years old just to make things a bit more balanced. Now admittedly, the last 30 years or so have been a rough period for comic book heroes in films excluding four particular series namely; the Superman series starring Christopher Reeve (barring Superman IV), the Spider Man series starring Tobey Maguire, the Batman series starring Christian Bale (maybe barring the overrated Dark Night Rises) and the mega-giant marvel ultimate cinematic universe that came together last year with The Avengers. Aside from these series's (and maybe the Punisher movies) the superhero movies of the last 30 or so years have sucked balls. Particularly in the early 1990s-mid 2000s, the quality of this genre was at a low point as many if not most superhero films at the time had their original back-stories drowned in plot devices and basic-formula storytelling. This was so that, particularly with more obscure comic book films such as Steel (1997) and The Phantom (1996), the original source material of the comic book character in question could be told more quickly and simply as is deserving of the silver screen. This however made it so that many superhero films at the time had warped back-stories that straight up pissed off fans of the source material and overly-formulaic plots and characters that basically dissuaded anyone else from watching these dreadful shitfests.
Nowhere is this more apparent after 2000 than with the 2005 crash Fantastic Four which unlike many other superhero films in the 1990s and early-2000s, worked with source material based off of one of the most recognisable and popular superhero team franchises of the last several decades. Despite the back-story of the FF comic book team being popularly simple and enjoyable, director Tim Story and basically anyone else who worked alongside him on this doomed endeavour made the back story of the Fantastic Four even more simple than it already was and then dropped a thousand tonnes of over-simplification of original comic book plot points in to boot. This meant that what was supposed to be the milestone of comic book films to duet alongside the success of the excellent Spider Man and Spider Man 2 (2002 and 2004 respectively) and mark the true end of the 'dark ages' of superhero films instead became yet another overly-formulaic action romp with forgettable characters based on some of the most iconic comic book heroes ever.
Now naturally I can't really get into ripping into this pile of vile crap without laying out the storyline of the film which thankfully is very simple to outline. As the technology of the modern world advances, failing but skilled scientist Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd) (accompanied by his good friend and former NASA pilot Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis)) approach technology and media mogul Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon) with plans for an experiment to capture the energy of an oncoming solar storm that could power earth's energy needs for centuries to come cleanly and efficiently. However, even as Doom, Grimm, smoking hot scientist Susan Storm (Jessica Alba) and her hot-headed brother (Chris Evans) are assured by Richard's calculations that they are in no danger whatsoever. The solar storm arrives earlier than expected and hits the space station that our heroes are on while the station's shields are down thus incapacitating the heroes but also giving them latent super powers. As Richards, the Storm siblings and Grimm come to terms with the changes made to their lives by their powers, the already maniacal Von Doom realises that he can finally gain the unlimited power that he has always craved with the powers bestowed upon him by the freak accident. Putting aside their differences and bickering, the 'Fantastic Four' then take on Doom as he attempts to become a god among men and, sing it with me now, 'take over the world'.
Now that sounds simple right? Well it is, but that doesn't mean that the way the story is told has to be overly-simple and formulaic. And that is Fantastic Four's problem, it was marketed as being a benchmark in the history of superhero films but ended up being just as any other blockbuster release in 2005 was in terms of deep plot and characters. In fact allot more went wrong with this film. To say that it over-simplified the back-story of the FF is just the tip of the metaphorical shit-coloured-iceberg that is this film. To start with, the best superhero films have tended to be the ones that most closely followed the source material (i.e. see Spider Man (2002) and Iron Man (2008)) and while Fantastic Four does that to an extent, it takes out a few key features of the FF's back-story and also takes a notably long time (about 20-30 minutes if my memory serves me) to get to the point in the film when the super-powers manifest.
All the while we are waiting for said powers to manifest, we are bombarded with formulaic back-story to the individual characters that in truth had nothing to do with the original ones from the popular comic book series such as Susan and Reed already having been in a relationship before the film's plot-line begins. This is actually pretty common with films such as Fantastic Four which have classical source material to base the film off of but go over the top with the well-meaning modern spin that aims to give the film itself punch and grip with a modern audience. Unfortunately, with Fantastic Four and other films that go far too down the same road (i.e. see the live-action The Smurfs (2011)) end up just fluffing the storyline and plot so much so by doing this that by the time that we get to the iconic moments and the gripping action, we may have already lost interest in the deep meaning behind the plot and the individual characters
Unfortunately, once the action arrives, it is pretty freaking tame in terms of the level of action a super hero film should be aspiring to. Films such as Iron Man (2008), The Punisher (2004) and X-Men: First Class (2011) had pretty gripping action scenes with iconic moments such as a guy getting boiling soup thrown in his face in The Punisher and a man getting a coin pushed through his skull by the force of super-powered magnetism in X-Men: First Class. By this I mean that if you watch Fantastic Four solely on the basis of its action scenes, you'd likely think it was any old blockbuster based off of any old last-minute plot (see Lockout (2012)). On top of that, the main villain in the film, Dr Victor Von Doom, is very easily beaten in the film's climax by what is, admittedly, a notably interesting display of knowledge of physics for a common summer blockbuster movie. Furthermore, after the battle is won, there is this scene that straight out rips off the last scene from Raiders of The Lost Ark (1981) by showing that Doom is being shipped off to prison thus setting up the basis for the sequel (which later turned out to be worse than this festering pile of human torch poo).
As for the characters, I mentioned earlier that much of the film is smothered by generic plot-stuffing and modernising of the FF's original back-story and the characters themselves are no exception. Despite the fact that all the four main characters have clearly individual flaws, they all seem to be reading from the same acting sheet on how to show emotion because THEY ALL ACT THE BLOODY SAME. I wouldn't mind this so much if we were only working with a duet for our main characters (i.e. The Road (2009)) but I mean come on people! That shit just won't fly with a quartet of characters who are vastly different in the film's source material, will it?
Mind you though, I didn't really mind the main characters, despite all their blandness and occasional monotony. Chris Evans as Johnny Storm (aka The Human Torch) tries to show how much of a douchy, party-boy his character originally was, Jessica Alba is the most bland out of the main four but is still hot as hell, Michael Chiklis manages to show how tragic a situation his character (Ben Grimm aka The Thing) finds himself in socially after his transformation and Ioan Gruffudd manages to do at least a satisfactory job in the acting department with the less-than-noteworthy script he clearly had to deal with.
Yet while these guys are simply bland, the main bad guy Von Doom, played brilliantly over-the-top by Julian McMahon, is probably the sole factor with the most problems relating to it throughout the whole film. Firstly, McMahon plays his part so overly dramatically that I kept thinking he was going to magically turn into Ming the Merciless during one of his many scenes where he's sitting in a leather chair in a half-darkened room, stroking his chiselled chin with a bejewelled finger while you look at his smug face contemplating whether to kill or torture his enemies, to exploit or crush his rivals and whether to have orange juice just before or just after brushing his teeth. Furthermore, while the back-stories of the other characters were only changed a little bit, Von Doom's is almost wholly changed for a rather unnecessary reason.
In the original comics, Von Doom is portrayed as a tyrant in the fictional nation of Latveria who makes use of powerful technology mixed with even more powerful intellect and magic to make himself the FF's most dangerous adversary. In the film however, he's your stereotypical poster boy for the evils of corporate capitalism in the western world by being even more smug, sardonically evil and leering than he is in the original comics. On top of this, the powers that Doom has in the film pretty much just seem to extend to the absorption of energy and the firing of laser bolts which is about a hundredth of what the Doom from the comics can do in all his over-powered glory. On top of this, Doom is shown to be powerful in the film, but (SPOILER WARNING) why does he manage to survive a force-field-contained supernova that he's at the centre of when there are clear gaps in his armour and when there's no clear explanation of his durability.
Now I would usually recommend that you'd watch a bad film just to see one or two iconically or obscure great bits in a bad film but I'm not playing that magic card here. In all honesty, this film is all bad with an overly generic-modern take on the storyline of the original source material, good actors being wasted on a terrible script, tame action and a villain that might as well have been half of the blockbuster villains from action films in the 80s mixed together then mixed with crack cocaine. Hell not even Alba's hotness can save this disaster from ever being remembered as one of the worst superhero films...still...at least its not as bad as the sequel.
Plot: 5 /10
Characters: 4/10
Camerawork: 5/10
Action: 3 /10
Overall: 17/40
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