Fantastic Four (2015) - Review Thread

All that fuss and you aren't even gonna go see it?

Yep, it's pretty bad.  The reasons why are already beginning to creep into the media, and there are sure to be more on the way.  The main story I've seen so far is that after Fox and Trank agreed upon what the movie should be and prepared to move from pre-production to filming, Fox decided that they wanted to slash the budget at the last second.  Fox decided the best way to do that would be to remove three big action scenes which they had previously given Trank approval on.  Fox also decided to change the finale, and take away the final edit from Trank and his team. 

Having seen the movie myself, it explains a lot.  There is very little action in the film, and the finale doesn't have any setup worth speaking of.  It's just, "Doom's arrived, and he's killing everyone for no readily apparent reason."  His character for most of the movie is that of a highly intelligent smug ass who looks down on others, but is in no way unstable. At the finale, Doom is suddenly a genocidal megalomaniac who kills as casually as a child stomping on bugs in the back yard.  I wouldn't be a bit surprised if it was the Assistant Director and not Trank that handled the finale, because it has a completely different tone from the rest of the movie.  A great deal about the home life of Reed Richards as a child was clearly left on the editing room floor.  He's got scars all over his face, and it's vaguely implied that his step-father is responsible for them.  This would be a spoiler if it was part of the story or Reed's character development, but it's not in any way.  It's ignored, aside from one throwaway line.

While I'm willing to lay much of the blame on the studio, Josh is not without fault.  So far at least, there is no indication that the look of Doom is any different from what Trank wanted, and it's beyond terrible.  He looks like a crash test dummy that's had glow stick fluid spilled all over him. 

The story about Doom being the Avatar name of an internet blogger named Victor Domashev that was leaked last year is total BS.  He's named Victor Von Doom and he's from Latveria, although there's no mention of him being royalty or anything like that.  I don't know if this was changed due to nerd rage or if it was always BS, though.

I am willing to bet Bryan Singer could have done more with this and not been making excuses. But this has Bomb on it due too the fact its in aug and if you dont clean up first weekend there is no hope. my feeling is the man from uncle will be a hit that this should have been.

Also, Trank is 31?

Maybe Chronicle was a fluke, but he's young enough to rebound.

I also think there is no 31 year old American that can competently direct a "blockbuster" currently. This is setting a chump up for failure.

Maybe I am reaching too much, but when Johnny Blaze was re-cast as a black person and the origin story changed to accommodate that, I had a suspicion the movie was going to suck. It's not because he is black, but I got the impression they were trying to be edgy and progressive, and that already struck me as wanting to have some agenda rather than focusing on making the age-old story great. While my misgivings may have been false and the movie would have sucked if he was white and they weren't really focused on making the movie more present-day-inclusive, this could be confirmation bias for me. I dunno, it just struck me as an odd move, something that said to me "Great, these people aren't interested in giving us the Fantastic Four, let's see what else they re-interpret."

From the reviews I have read, I have seen a universal response that Ben Grimm was not Ben Grimm and was a major letdown. I'm no huge FF fan by any means, but even I have a good idea of how Ben is supposed to be.

I will not be seeing this movie.

Those movies weren't fine, I don't think anyone was being unreasonable in hoping for better than what those movies offered. The fact that this is far worse than those movies is the most astounding part of all this. You would've thought the only place to go was up, but nope.

These movies suck, but not because of the light tone. They suck because they're lazy, uninspired, soulless, and boring.

Mr. Sunday put together a really good collection of all the various articles and interviews regarding what went wrong with this film.  I've seen most of it before from the individual sources, but not all brought together like this into a cohesive narrative.  His video provides excellent context as to how FF imploded so badly.

My problem was i did like the 2005 Fantatsic Four cast and felt that The Sequel suffered from the run time being too short and not doing a better job with showing Galactus. Rise of The Silver Sufer gave you a cool character but fans still did not go. I think Studios panic and messed up ff and spiderman for sony. Would loved to had seen was Joss Whedon could have done with the cast we had in 2005 on a effects ability from today. This movie felt missing the family element and thats why 2005 ff is my definative version unless Marvel can do better.

Not a trainwreck and yet you gave it 1.5 stars.

Is a 1.4 still considered a trainwreck?