Review : The Fantastic Four

THE FANTASTIC FOUR

A group of astronauts gain superpowers after a cosmic radiation exposure and must use them to oppose the plans of their enemy, Doctor Victor Von Doom.

 

Four Superheroes with unimaginable, supernatural abilities, One master villain, zero chances to fail. The Fantastic Four assemble. Going into the story in full detail, In plot summery you have, Reed Richards, a brilliant but timid and bankrupt scientist, who is convinced that evolution can be triggered by clouds of cosmic energy, and has calculated that Earth is going to pass one of these clouds soon. 

Together with his friend and partner, the gruff yet gentle astronaut muscle-man Ben Grimm, Reed convinces his conceited MIT classmate Dr. Victor Von Doom, now CEO of his own company enterprise, to allow him access to his privately-owned space station. Von Doom agrees in exchange for control over the experiment and a majority of the profits from whatever benefits it brings. 

He thus brings aboard Susan Storm, his shy, though assertive chief genetics researcher and a former lover of Reed's with whom she had an acrimonious break-up, and her diametrically opposed brother Johnny, the maverick and hot-headed playboy pilot. The astronauts make it home intact; however, before long they begin to mutate, developing strange and amazing powers as a result of their exposure to the cloud! Reed is able to stretch like rubber; Sue can turn invisible and create force fields, especially when angered; Johnny can produce fire at supernova temperatures, and is able to fly; and Ben is transformed into "The Thing", a large, rock-like creature with super strength. 

After Ben, brooding about his situation on the Brooklyn Bridge, inadvertently causes a major traffic pile-up whilst attempting to stop a man about to commit suicide, the four manage to use their powers to prevent any loss of life and to rescue a fire truck and its crew from falling off the bridge in a resulting explosion. 

The media dubs the team the 'Fantastic Four', and whilst Johnny eagerly embraces his powers and new life, Ben - the most heavily disfigured - particularly suffers from his transformation; his disfigurement has caused his fiancée to abandon him and has seen him shunned and feared by much of New York. 

In the end the master villain of the piece is Dr Doom and everything comes to it's natural conclusion with a big dramatic fight scene. Then in the end, The Fantastic Four are regonised as the people they really are, the end. Into that simplicity, there is quite little if not no logical story behind his whole engagement of a thrill seeker film.

Here's the Trailer

 

I know super hero films are a hard thing to come by, but with this I expected more from it. To the extent of their being more action, backed up with logical story telling and reasoning for the action being there. If you have just mindless, effective action sequences that are only there for the dramatic interest of the viewer, then I dare to question the reason behind it. 

Survicive to say, the whole film seemed a bit up and down for me, it never quite steps off on a steady pace at all. The beginning was rushed, the middle was slow and the end was just... there. The final 'epic' battle, I say epic in inverted commars, went on for far too long. There were pivital moments where I felt that 'it could end here' or 'it could end here' but alas no.

 

Dr Doom was sadly thrown to the side for the sake of romantic character development being more important, there were explinations which could of been concentraited on a bit less in order to allow the villian to prove his worth to the veiwers. Dr Doom deserves more screen time than he got, and he gets absolutly trashed by the four in the final battle, almost too easily.

The effects were interesting, worked well within the world of the film and were there to engage beyond the imagination of the veiwer. What the film wanted to do was take the comic from paper to screen and make it belivable to capselate. That's basically it, and it does that. It does it, and it tries to as well. The music is atmopsherically compelling, with suttleties in moments of desperation and bombasticly loud in fight scenes.

A comic on the screen, it's a 6/10.

NEXT : The Fantastic Four - Rise of the Silver Surfer.