Fantastic Four (2015)

The creation of new Fantastic Four films is like some sort of mind-bending thriller plot where they do the same thing over and over again in some bizarre torture-loop. Like, when they become aware of the awful hell they've been subjected to, a switch is flipped and then it's like 'go back to the start, make another origin story, show again how they got their powers. You won't remember any of this when it's over.' Then the screams are drowned out by forcefully canned, "triumphant" opening credits music and the sound of Reed Richards trying to coerce his friends into space again.

This one is the worst one. And probably one of the worst superhero movies ever made at that. Josh Trank, who made the excellent Chronicle, directed this, which is a shame as he deserved more than the studio meddling he got here.

Director: Josh Trank

Starring: Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan

IMDb

Co-written with Tony.

I mean, hell, it's barely even a superhero flick to begin with. Calling it a movie is even a bit of a stretch. You start off with like, 20 minutes of Reed Richards as a kid. Apparently he's a creepy little fuck in this who spends all his time making a doorway to another dimension. I love how even the teacher in his class is sarcastic at him and doesn't even support him a little bit. Dude, you're teaching 5th graders, quit acting like you're Simon fucking Cowell, you weirdo.

But to be fair, Reed is the kind of kid who waits in a car at night like a horror movie villain outside the junkyard, where his classmate Ben lives. Ben, being a total idiot, apparently considers this to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. They begin that night using parts from the junkyard to make Reed's science thingy.

Oh and Ben, by the way, is apparently just bullied by his big brother, who says “It's clobberin' time” to him as he's hitting him. That's where that catchphrase came from, kids!

Reed and Ben then go back to Reed's garage and put the finishing touches on the whole dimensional gateway machine that every kid had in their garage back in the 90s – oh the nostalgia. I love that there's really no explanation of why he wanted to make this or, really, what it even does. He could be trying to become the new Adolph Hitler for all Ben knows. Maybe the door to dimensions opens up the door to the DC Film Universe, which would at least explain why this sucks so bad.

Oh, and they shut off power in the entire neighborhood. You would think this would be enough for people to ask questions as to what he was doing. Or for his parents to keep a closer eye on him from then on to make sure he doesn't burn down the house or isn't torturing anybody in their garage. This could almost be an interesting plot point or character moment... WHICH IS WHY WE THEN SKIP SEVEN YEARS AHEAD!

Yup. Seven year skip just out of nowhere. Reed is now closer to college and still making the same dumb dimension door thing, and Ben is still helping, because why would anything change in your life in the most formative years of said life? Everything always remains the same during that time of your life.

Incidentally, a dimensional door, huh? I guess this is how Stranger Things happened... either that, or it's just bland chopped-up sci fi cliché stew, delivered lukewarm, and with a few mysterious hairs in it that make you question whether you're hungry at all.

There's a scene where Victor Von Doom, who is portrayed here as a greasy neckbeard weirdo with a fascination with Sue Storm, and the other dudes all decide to go into the door and fuck around in the other dimension. It goes horribly and they blow everything up. All hail white dude mediocrity, right? I love that they don't even bring Sue with them, but she gets hit by radiation anyway even just sitting back in the regular world. I'd be so pissed. I'd be like 'goddammit, motherfuckers.'

Most of the rest of this sinks into an insufferable muck of boring crap. It's trying to be all dark and “mature,” in the way that only a kid listening to Nine Inch Nails and death metal while mad at their mom at age 15 can be. I guess director Josh Trank had this whole vision that was ruined due to re-shoots, since honestly, all art is always improved by constant last minute tinkering by guys who wear sandals with socks. YOU KNOW BEST, CORPORATIONS!

But it really just comes off as silly. They have a bunch of scenes with them strapped to tables in dark, creepy lab rooms with scientist guys in dark glasses not answering their question. It's like if Stephen King wrote a Firestarter spec script while drunk off his ass. How do you like these scenes for your kids, parents? Don't you love that the happy-go-lucky Fantastic Four have been turned into this vague, dark pile of bullshit? Wasn't THIS how you always pictured these iconic heroes?!

Then they just skip ahead a year again without really exploring the characters or the world. This whole movie is like they just filmed the Wikipedia summary of a plot. There's really just zero character development. They don't bother to explore even the littlest parts of who these people are or why we should care. I know that's like expecting a McDonalds to carry high-class cuisine at this point, but eh fuck it, I'm already critiquing everything else anyway.

They find Victor Von Doom in the other dimension, who got lost there before. He's now turned into some kind of weird fantasy monster, like a shitty D&D creature made by the kid your mom forced you to play with because he didn't have anyone else. He comes back and tries to, I dunno, destroy the world or something? He says some vague things about 'sucking the world into his own dimension and making a new dimension.' This is all a bunch of gobbledegook and the kind of thing a 10 year old would find too lame to even play with his action figures.

They beat him, I guess, and they're really only acting as a whole team for like, what, 10 minutes of the super goofy, lame CGI-fest climax? Otherwise, this isn't a Fantastic Four movie. It's a 'random dark action movie where people have strange, silly powers for no reason.' Hooray for that? Meh.

This movie sucks and anyone who likes it, I strongly think is a foreign agent against their own government. Be suspicious of them.

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The Fantastic Four (Unreleased, 1994)

With the impending release of Marvel's gargantuan Infinity War spectacle, it's kind of hard to believe there was a time when superhero movies weren't these million-dollar blockbuster productions with huge actors signed on for years at a time. But there was! And while the Tim Burton Batman and the 70s Superman were viable successes, they were outliers and didn't blow up into a huge trend like we have now. The Fantastic Four from 1994 is a film that was never even released and can be legally watched on YouTube just like you're searching for a Kendrick Lamar video or something. And it's, uh, really something.

Director: Oley Sassone

Starring: Alex Hyde-White, Rebecca Staub, Jay Underwood

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

The history behind this thing is that, apparently, Executive Producer Bernd Eichenger wanted to retain the rights to the characters before they expired, so he had to have this at the 11th hour in 1994. So he teamed up with famous producer and director Roger Corman and they ended up putting this movie together, full of a bunch of actors you've never heard of.

It wasn't required that it would be released, just that it existed. And though some people like Stan Lee claimed it was never intended to be released, Eichenger and Corman denied that and claimed that it was. But if you believe the myth, essentially, this is an entire movie with a full cast and crew made just so some guy could make other Fantastic Four movies. Wow. If you ever needed a reason to feel worthless... there you go.

The thing is, it's not even too bad of a movie! Sure, the budget looks pretty low and the effects are goofy as fuck, but it wasn't like this was the top of the crop in terms of that for 1994. The acting isn't bad at all and the story is honestly pretty standard for these kinds of movies.

You get Reed Richards and Victor Von Doom, the latter of whom surely had the most punchable name in school and got beat up all the time, driving him to science. They try this wacky experiment as a comet is passing by, but I guess their numbers were off and Victor gets horribly burned and electrocuted. Whoops! I hope the kid from Species III still gets to do his stupid experiments and the science lab isn't a martyr to this cause now.

Years later, Reed recruits these two random people who lived near him, Sue and Johnny Storm, to go into space and try to do the experiment again. Because they would totally let him do this after his first experiment left one guy maimed. How did he even get to do this at all? What coke-addled executive let this yoohoo go into space again? And it just makes sense to take two random, un-trained people in space, because why would I want ASTRONAUTS going on my super cool science mission? Fuck expertise! Give me amateurs!

But it doesn't work, because a hideously deformed man wearing a monocle and a fedora, called The Jeweler, breaks in and steals their magic jewel thing from the spaceship, which was apparently the only thing keeping them from being fried and their genes rearranged. He replaces it with a replica of the same jewel, you know, just the kind of thing you carry around!

So then they get shot out of the sky and crash-land in a random field, somehow coming out mostly unscathed and with no major injuries. They did get superpowers though, which Reed is mostly nonplussed about. He's just like “yeah, whatever, guess we'll see what happens.” Never even an iota of concern even as the other three are all freaking out. I guess the thought of taking Sue to bed is his main concern.

They get taken in by a lab run by Dr. Doom, who sits on a throne surrounded by flaming pyres and speaks in constant community-college-Shakespearean tones. It's pretty goddamn silly. It's obviously Victor, who was presumed dead by Reed but apparently spent his time after being burned turning into a supervillain with his whole lab and trying to blow stuff up. But Reed didn't know. It's crazy to me that these guys were friends and then after the accident, he's just like nah, I'm not telling anyone where I am, WORLD DOMINATION TIME!

Meanwhile, the Jeweler guy plots to kidnap this blind girl, because I guess he's so delusional that he thinks the reason he can't get a date is because of his looks. How silly! It's because of his shitty personality. I can't even believe they're doing a 'kidnapped woman forced to be a bride' plot. What is this, the fucking 1960s? They do it later with Dr. Doom, too. It's like why not make the same dumb, cliché mistake twice in a row?

And it's so surreal every time this Jeweler character is on screen, because the music gets all campy-goth-style like a musical and he talks like an even worse Shakespeare imitator than Doom does. It's really like they took this character out of a whole different movie and put him in this.

Ben gets mad and ends up leaving, fearing he'll never fit in, as back in the 90s, giant orange rock men just weren't accepted by society. He just kind of wanders the city and it doesn't take long for him to run into the Jeweler's weird underground society of deformed-looking people, feeling that this is the only way I guess. My favorite part is that the others don't even try to find him. They're in the middle of making up a name for themselves, the Fantastic Four, and making costumes! But finding one of their actual team members that make up the 'Four'? Nah, fuck that! Who cares if we have to turn it into 'Fantastic Three' and spend money doing that?

Through some more convoluted events, they find The Thing and then end up fighting Dr. Doom. Doom fires a laser to destroy New York City, motivated no doubt by its obscene rent prices. Johnny does the whole Human Torch thing and the CGI here is actually gorgeous in how silly it is – it turns basically into an early computer game animation, and it looks amazingly silly. But it is a bit endearing. I bet they put as much work into this as people nowadays do on Marvel movies.

Okay. That might not be true. But I'm sure it's true compared to the writing in a DC movie.

That's Fantastic Four, ending with a shot of all of them coming out of a church after a wedding – they're all married now! Or maybe just Reed and Sue. Oh, and Ben and the blind girl he saved from Doom/Jeweler, too. Because I guess saving a girl means she is yours as a prize! People can be prizes! Isn't that great?

That's the movie though. It's silly, it's utterly ridiculous, the budget was clearly low... but it ain't bad. I've seen worse. I mean, most of this is pretty average so far as writing goes. It may be full of cliches and dated bullshit, but I'll take it over any non-Wonder Woman DCEU flick any day.

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