Review: Fantastic Four

First of all, lemme preface this by saying that I owned lots of comic books and comic book collector cards back in elementary school, so I tried to learn lots of stuff about Marvel Comics’ heroes and villains… Spider-Man was my favorite (of course), and the X-Men were popular and cool…but the Fantastic Four had been around for a long time and weren’t quite as popular anymore… Sure, they were a staple of comic book heroes, but they just weren’t that interesting for a kid in the 1990s.

Flash forward to today, 2005. Comic book stories are a hot property for the motion picture business, so Fantastic Four gets picked up for a movie deal. How’d it turn out, you ask? Pretty well, overall. As far as the story goes, I’d classify it between Spider-Man and X-Men: it has the “what the hell happened to us and how do we deal with it?” of Spider-Man, as well as the variety of powers and characters of X-Men, which makes it a bit more interesting. The acting was relatively good, but perhaps could have been a little better…just seemed awkward at parts toward the beginning, I guess, but it got lots better later on… The dialogue was on par with other movies in the genre with few dumb lines (“It’s clobberin’ time” just had to be said, folks…it’s classic!). The special effects were good and the action was fun to watch, although, sadly, the bulk of the action was at the very end of the movie and it would have been nice to see more throughout…but again…when you have four people fighting against one adversary, there’s only so much you can do…

I only had a few real complaints with the movie:

1). The Thing was focussed on a lot compared to the others. This is, of course, because his power was more obvious and had him affected by the outside world more than the others. He steps outside, you see him, you stare at him, he gets affected… It was easiest for the audience to identify with his character more than the others since the others could still live out “normal lives” if they wanted, while the Thing couldn’t… I just would have liked to see more of the others, I think…and certainly more Jessica Alba (heh…)

2). Dr. Doom’s entire character was overhauled for the movie. In the comics, he wasn’t on the ship, wasn’t changed like the others, and couldn’t shoot lightening out of his hands. Now, granted, it made the story easier to deal with and more fun to watch on TV…but still…it was all a bit too convenient, I think. That can be overlooked, however.

So in short, the movie overall was good. Not as good as Spider-Man or X-Men…but it was good… It was good mainly because it was a “super hero” movie that was different enough to be interesting yet similar enough to be entertaining… Frankly, it’s a 2 hour long movie and I didn’t look at my watch once, which is more than I can say about many other movies I’ve seen this year. Does it make sense that “cosmic rays” can “fundamentally change” their DNA to give them super powers? No, not really…but it can still be fun to watch…