As some Twitter reviews have already confirmed, the new Fantastic Four reboot, apparently made at a budget of 120 million dollars, is an absolute mess that provides not even a brief moment of entertainment. It unfolds as an ‘origins’ film about four genius kids — Reed (Miles Teller), Sue (Kate Mara), Johnny (Michael B. Jordan) and Victor von Doom (Toby Kebbell) – who crack open the science of interplanetary travel to a parallel dimension.
A good 60 minutes is used up to explain this before it is finally revealed that the four kids have accidentally gained superpowers. Victor, after learning that the military industrial complex wants to turn them into weapons, decides that the only solution is to destroy earth. Around this time, the film is scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas.
Genre: Superhero
Director: Josh Trank
Cast: Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B Jordon, Toby Kebbell
Storyline: Four genius kids accidentally gain superpowers
Despite turning Victor, a grumpy ‘intellectual’, into a blood-thirsty villain, the film still fails to find decent lines for him, and makes him perhaps the most boring superhero villain in recent times. The chief problem of the film is its story idea. Imagine if Spiderman was a 100-minute account of how Peter Parker gets bitten by a radioactive spider. Fantastic Four squanders the possibility of exploring how the human race reacts to highly mutated humans. It could have launched an inquiry into humanity itself, as brilliantly done by the X-Men movies. Instead, Josh Trank mounts a film in which even the stunt scenes seem like they have been edited out of leftover footage from the Fantastic Four movie made almost ten years ago.
The VFX is so ordinary for a 2015 film. The studio bosses should have gone with their gut and snuffed the film out early when it was reported that they were having problems with Josh Trank, the film’s director. It is really a film that shouldn’t have been made. And then, the film went ahead and replaced Jessica Alba with Kate Mara. As I said, there are just no positives.
