Story by Adam Winn, Contributing writer.
The newest Marvel reboot opened up to fans across the world Aug. 7 in the form of “Fantastic Four.” Unfortunately for Marvel Studios, it was met with mostly jeers.
Have you gone into a new movie with high hopes and ended up extremely disappointed after leaving? The new “Fantastic Four” movie is one of those movies for me. Before having seen the movie, I had read several other reviews and opinions on the film online and all of them weren’t that great or highly rated.
Even though I knew this, I tried going in with a clean, unbiased opinion on the film or how I thought it would turn out. Unfortunately, the film did live up to its previous poor reviews and was an overall failure for the superhero genre.
Without giving any serious spoilers away, the entire movie is basically just one big origin story.
The plot of the film is very bland and it’s easy to figure out what’s going to happen next.
The acting is, however, pretty solid and well-done. The cast did the best they could with the script they had available to them.
The main cast is rounded out by some pretty recognizable faces, with Miles Teller of “21 & Over,” Kate Mara of “House of Cards,” Michael B. Jordan of “That Awkward Moment,” and Jamie Bell of “The Adventures of Tintin,” but even this well-known cast couldn’t save the film from the disaster it became.
One of the main plot points in the movie is how the main character, Reed Richards – played by Miles Teller – creates this device that allows him to travel across space and time. A group of scientists that work for the U.S. government decide to build a large version of his machine and eventually discover that it leads to a planet similar to Earth.
After getting drunk, several of the characters decide to travel to this other planet via the machine and end up getting soaked in green mysterious “goo-liquid” when they get there, which is the source of their superhero powers.
One of the main problems I have with this important scene is that the character Sue Storm (Mara) becomes affected by the aftermath of the device returning to Earth and develops the power to turn invisible, but she never actually went with the rest of the crew to the other planet. This drives me to ask why she alone was affected and developed superhero powers, but nobody else in the lab facility, such as other nearby security guards or scientists were affected in the process.
It also bugs me that since the majority of this film is an origin story, why the audience never discover what the mysterious green liquid on the planet they travel to is.
These are just a small number of the plot holes in the film.
Richards ends up abandoning the rest of the affected members of his team once they return back to Earth. One of the affected members, Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), begs Richards to stay and help him. The characters are supposed to be best friends since childhood and Richards leaves him behind anyways. The writers of the movie essentially decide to turn the main character into a coward, at this point.
As students, it’s safe to say we’ve all had to write papers at some point in our lives that we had to fill with fluff or boring details just so we can get the papers complete and the right length our professors asked for.
I’d honestly compare watching this film to writing one of those papers.
It’s also important to mention that this film is a reboot of the movie “Fantastic Four,” which was released exactly a decade ago this year and starred veteran actor Chris Evans and actress Jessica Alba.
I should also point out that the current IMDB rating for the newer movie is 3.9 out of 10 stars and the older version has 5.7 out of 10 stars.
Honestly, neither film is particularly great and it’s been a while since I’ve actually seen the 2005 version, but the former film succeeded more than the newer one because the older film’s script was more believable, funnier and most importantly, action-packed. Who wants to go see a superhero movie where there is little action?
Apparently, the writers of this film, that’s who.