Review of Fantastic Four (2015) by Random V — 29 Mar 2018

After being hired by the Baxter foundation to work on designing an inter-dimensional portal to another planet, Reed Richards (Miles Teller), Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), Sue Storm (Kate Mara) and Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan) are accidentally transformed into beings with superpowers during thier first mission. While the government wants to use them to preform shady missions, another problem arises when another person, Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell) thought to have died in the mission, reemerges with sinister motivations...

Despite the failures of the last three attempts to bring Marvel's first family to the big screen, Josh Trank's attempts to mix Cronenberg style Body Horror and Spielberg style fantasy throughout the first hour does at first seem interesting. Aside from Kebbell's awful representation of one of the most iconic Marvel Villians of all time, most of the acting is OK to good times, with Jamie Bell and Michael B. Jordan getting the best moments as The Thing and Human Torch respectively.

The moment after Reed escapes from Area 57 however, is a time-skip which completely derails the film's pacing and ruins Trank's intentions of making a character driven piece as these last 40 minutes cram in a manhunt, a character death, showing the groups use of their powers, setting up Dr Doom and bringing the characters together to stop him.

Speaking of Doom, the costume design of him is so bad that it puts X-Men Origins's Deadpool to shame with it's resemblance to a metal crash dummy. Although the design of the heroes costumes and Planet Zero itself also look bad in their laziness in originality, it's a shame that this laughable mess will prevent Doom from being on screen for a loooonng time afterwards.

Overall Fan4stic has a good film buried deep within it's terrible editing and rushed pace, but Fox really shouldn't have turned this interesting take on Marvel's first family into the almost unwatchable mess like all of it's predecessors.