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petebestest-blog · 9 years ago

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Fantastic Four (2015)

-No.

-No, no, no.

-Okay, I’ll try.

-We start off with a pointless prologue where Ben and Reed are kids, establishing their lifelong friendship that doesn’t matter since they will barely interact now.

-Then we get the real opening, where Dr. Storm and his daughter Sue (pointlessly adopted from Kosovo and brother to Johnny, though they never really interact or act like siblings or parent/child, so she might as well be his lab assistant) visit a science fair where Reed and Ben are trying his teleportation experiment for the first time–instead of testing it before the fair and then just doing the same thing again. The judges dismiss it as a magic trick, even though he clearly teleported something, but then the Storms recruit Reed for their ‘Baxter Foundation.’ Ben goes back home (pointlessly not to Yancy Street) after leaving Reed with a memento of their time together: a Swiss army knife. This will never come up again.

-Now that they’ve got Reed, Doc Storm needs his old protege Victor von Doom to come back and work for them. Doom previously set Storm’s place on fire, openly espouses ending the world, and has a stalkery crush on Sue Storm. Naturally, Dr. Storm trusts him implicitly.

-By the way, I swear to God, this is how they introduce Victor von Doom, ruler of Latveria.

-He’s sitting in the dark, playing Watch_Dogs and surfing the net, while listening to classical music (because he’s really smart!). Like, dude. Duuude.

-But despite his cynicism, Doom agrees to help out–for some reason. Ben is still off-screen, back at home, not doing anything. Now we see Johnny get into a street race and crash his car, with Dr. Storm picking him up from the emergency room.

-Just FYI: Johnny is angry at his dad because Dr. Storm doesn’t pay attention to him and didn’t spend time with him growing up. I know, I know, shocking, right?

-Now I know thug is a loaded term, so let me put it this way. Johnny is clearly an irresponsible punk. Fair enough? Dr. Storm says “you need to take some responsibility, otherwise I’m not giving you your car back.” So, he makes Johnny get a job at Arby’s or something, right? Nope! He gets Johnny to help engineer the quantum portal, since, you know, fixing cars totally prepares you for building interdimensional portals. This would also seem to be a good point to bring in Ben, since if Johnny can help build the damn thing, surely Reed’s best friend is also trustworthy and skilled enough to render an assist, but no, the heart and soul of the FF gets treated like an afterthought.

-Anyway, Reed and Sue flirt a little to fulfill the romance portion of the movie, and they’ve totally dutzed up her characterization as the warm and sympathetic one, since she’s yet another ‘mean pretty woman’ comic book heroine. Look, I know Black Widow’s popular, but can we have one female character who isn’t just her with a different hair color?

-The flirting actually doesn’t come to anything, as Reed and Sue end the movie platonic friends. Yeah, Tumblr, I’m sure you love that, but they’re the First Couple of Marvel! Isn’t there a little obligation there? It’s like a Superman movie where Clark and Lois don’t get together.

-Dr. Storm promises the group–well, the boys–that they’ll be the first ones to go through the quantum portal, despite the fact that… they’re fucking teenagers and super-scientists far too valuable to risk and such? Despite this, it’s played as a huge betrayal when the government guy* says that they’re going to get NASA to take over. Victor even goes off on a tangent about the CIA water-boarding people in the fifth dimension and gives them the finger, since why should Victor von Doom have any dignity?

-By the way, it’s never really clear who’s backing the Baxter Foundation besides a nebulous ‘the Government’. Dr. Storm apparently has free rein to give his punk kid a highly sensitive position, as well as the screaming security risk that is Victor von Doom, but then they also take orders from ‘the Government’? And later they work for the military? Or are they funded by the independently wealthy? It’s never really clear. Just, ya know, shadowy white men wearing business suits.

-And there’s a really weird ‘millennial angst’ theme here, with Dr. Storm talking about all the mistakes his generation has made and how you hip young kids have to save the world. Which is a very funny thing to get from a source material where half the characters are middle-aged.

-So Reed decides to be a fame-whore, calls up Ben to come over, and they and Johnny and Victor go through. Sue isn’t invited, because fuck you, women. I mean, women aren’t ever reckless or thrillseeking, they’re always a wet blanket responsible.

-They literally wake Ben up and say “Time to be in the movie, you’re in the comics, you’ve gotta be in the movie” and get him through security just by saying “He’s with me!” and bang, he’s in another dimension. A+++!

-I should mention that A. Michael B. Jordan is totally just playing his character from Chronicle here. B. He’s a complete asshole to Doom based on, no kidding, Victor being a foreigner, calling him ‘Adolf’ and ‘Borat’. You’d think someone whose adopted sister is from Kosovo would be a little more sensitive, but I guess Kanye is allowed to be a dingus.

-See? See how offensive that is? Why does he get away with that?

-Here’s where the team turns into the worst scientists this side of Prometheus. The plan is simply to go through, walk around a bit (on ‘Planet Zero’, which you’d think would be awe-inspiring or psychedelic, but is basically just a boring version of the Genesis Planet from Star Trek 3. Your average episode of Doctor Who has a more interesting setting than the main plot point in this big-budget movie), and plant a flag. That’s it. Instead they see this strange green energy in the distance and go “Let’s check it out!”

So they rappel down a fucking cliff…

Walk right up to this mysterious glowing energy they know absolutely nothing about

And Victor, possibly the smartest man on Earth, sticks his hand in it.

Just straight-up fingerfucks the thing! And of course it explodes, gives them all superpowers. Ben gets hit by rocks, so he becomes a rock creature. Johnny is set on fire, so he becomes a fire guy. Sue is hit by… a shockwave, so she… turns invisible. And Reed is… fuck you, Reed can stretch.

-Here’s where the movie should’ve started. They all go to Planet Zero, get their powers, Victor is presumed dead, then we cut ahead a year to VIPs being briefed on what happened. That should’ve been the first ten minutes, so we could skip all the boring stuff and skip straight to them being comfortable in their skins and having mastery over their abilities.

-Oh, but wait, despite the time-skip, they’re still training and Ben is anguished both over being a rock monster and having a kill count in the double digits. I’m not kidding, the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing has killed at least forty people in this continuity! You know, for kids!

-And, fuck, he’s a cartoon character! Literally a cartoon character! But I guess if Josh Trank were adapting a Disney cartoon, he would make it so Pluto used to be a fight dog for Michael Vick.

-That’s the chief failing of this movie. For all the talk of friendship and their being a family, the Fantastic Four really spends most of the movie hating each other and being annoyed with each other. It takes until the final scene (clearly a reshoot, and just as clearly ‘inspired’ by the last scene of Avengers: Age of Ultron) for there to be any bantering or joking around between any of them. I guess they all like each now!

-But yeah, Reed has escaped from military custody and is in Panama–where he can shapeshift like Mystique to avoid detection, so, okay–trying to find a cure. Everyone else is pissed off at him for running off. Johnny is surprisingly eager to be used as a tool by the military-industrial complex. Seriously, he is downright jazzed to murder people for the government like his pal Ben! And Sue is a girl, so she doesn’t have much going on.

-By the way, everyone needs their super-suits to control their powers. Because fuck you, that’s why.

-Sue finds Reed, because she’s a genius for pattern recognition so long as she’s listening to some phat rhymes on her Beats headphones. They send in Ben and some Army guys to apprehend them, which they do after a ground-breaking thirty seconds of fighting. This has been, like, the only action in the movie.

-They take Reed back and say that they can’t build a new quantum portal and fix his friends without his help. Which… is that how that works? Because he already build a working quantum portal. Can’t they just build a new one from his notes? Apparently not! He rewrites the source code–stop me if I’m getting too technical for this hard sci-fi take on the Fantastic Four–and then some astronauts go through, lickety-split.

-On Planet Zero, they find Doom, whose spacesuit has fused with his body to give him… kinda sorta a Doom look. Also, somehow he found some green hobo rags to kinda give himself a cape. I have no idea where he could have possibly gotten that, but HARD SCI-FI, YOU GUYS!

-They take Doom back to Area 57 (yeah, they’re doing the ‘it’s not Area 51 but not’ gag, just like Muppets: Back In Action), where in addition to all the other stuff that’s been cut out, that scene of Reed and Doom talking has clearly hit the editing room floor. Instead, Doom talks to one of the sinister military guys who–really hasn’t done anything that sinister or betrayed the team in any way, but nonetheless, everyone is really cynical about the government anyway. Doom joins the long list of supervillains who allow themselves to be captured as part of their master plan, yeah, in 2015, and he breaks loose with his vague, ill-defined powers of… making people’s heads explode? Stopping bullets with forcefields? It doesn’t seem like anyone has made up their mind as to what powers he has beyond “CGI!”

-Doom kills Dr. Storm, who I guess probably shouldn’t have trusted him, and reveals himself to not be an interesting, noble antagonist with a well-reasoned point of view, but just a crazy person who wants to destroy the whole world so he can be left alone on Planet Zero to, I don’t know, jack off or whatever. This might be a little affecting if we had seen any sign of characterization from him besides “wake up, sheeple!” and Sue derogatorily referring to him as Dr. Doom, but nope, he’s just a wacko.

-Doom opens a ‘chain reaction’ portal to Planet Zero which will black hole all of Earth into it–naturally, this takes the form of a big blue laser shooting into the sky and stuff getting sucked into it–and the four pursue him, with Johnny flying and the rest inside Sue’s forcefield. So… I guess you can just hop from one dimension to the other. HARD SCI-FI!

-On Planet Zero, Doom turns out to be able to control the elements of the planet–oddly, he doesn’t use his head-asplode power on anyone, though you’d think that’d be the go-to move. This would also seem to make him more a version of Ego the Living Planet than any variant on Dr. Doom, but I guess in addition to the actors, Josh Trank told the writers not to read any comics, so this is all just based on a Wikipedia page. Maybe if someone edits it fast enough, the next FF movie will be based on Galactitty and the Silver Dildo.

-This is all in, like, the last ten minutes of the movie. For about ninety percent of the story, there is no villain, and Doom shows up at the end like a complete afterthought to try to destroy the world for no reason and get into a CGI fight with the FF. Spoiler alert: it turns out the trick to defeating him is to work together. And now the FF are all on the same page and good friends, despite how they all hated each other five minutes ago.

-They make a deal with the government to be put in charge of a black-ops site–no, not the Baxter Building, this place in the middle of nowhere called Central City. And they’re not celebrities or superheroes with public identities or anything, but a black-ops group that the government is going to sponsor despite not having any control over them or seemingly getting anything out of it? But Ben growled and Johnny said “Say yes!”, so I guess that really does explain it.

-Also, Billy Elliot’s effete voice coming out of a giant rock monster with barely any modification never fails to sound ridiculous. Say what you will about Michael Chiklis, but he made some effort to come up with a gravelly, gruff ‘I’m the Thing’ sort of voice. Billy Elliot I think actually puts less effort into his accent once he’s the Thing than he did before.

-I still can’t figure out why the Thing doesn’t have pants. Even if he’s got no penis or buttcheeks, shouldn’t he wear pants as a simple matter of dignity? Don’t you think he’d be a little sensitive to being dehumanized, or treated like some pantless monster?

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