It’s getting terrible reviews and even it’s director is bad mouthing it but I braved the storm of negativity and went to see it. It wasn’t horrible. It’s not light and science fiction-y like a FF movie really should be but for what it is, it was serviceable.
I think the beginning is a tad slow but not the plodding bore some have said and I would have liked to see them use their powers more (maybe they could have borrowed some of the fights from Man of Steel :)) but I liked this version of Reed Richards and was invested in his story.
It seemed to me this movie already had strikes against it before it even came out and unless it was a complete triumph it was doomed from the start with people already deciding going in that it stank but It really isn’t that terrible.
The good: Sue Storm gets to be more than just a pretty face. Cast chemistry overall was good, which I think the last quartet lacked.
The bad: The Thing - just WTF.
I always liked that Ben was smart too. Nope, gotta make him dumb as a rock.
And the story. Who the hell thought this was a good idea?
they’re all 17 or so and develop a teleporter. What’s wrong with college? Could we have a soupçon of plausibility with our superhero film?
It wasn’t terrible, but the filmmakers made some questionable choices. I did feel at the end that we had just finally gotten to a place where the team could do some interesting things. It was a let down to realize the whole movie was over at that point.
I think it was more than the studio knew they had a dog on their hands in addition to a troubled production. If rumors are true Trank had trouble keeping himself together handling that big a project. A months worth of reshoots - probably to try to rescue the ending - late in the game is probably why it feels like it was weirdly edited.
In any event, with a $26.2MM weekend gross on a $120MM budget this isn’t looking good. It might be out of theaters in a month or less. The Man From UNCLE is up next week in the lead spot. That doesn’t look - to me - like a real winner, either, but I can’t believe it’ll be worse than FF. After that there’s not a big release until Everest and the second Maze Runner movie in mid-September.
Oh well, maybe it’ll get Fox to give in and cut a deal with Marvel to allow Feige and company to include the FF in the MCU. What’s better? Losing your shirt or getting a piece of the action for what will likely make a metric pantload of money? You’d think that wouldn’t be a difficult decision.
Sounds about right. Trank done got himself fired from the Star Wars sequels by a SW producer who was part of the FF crew. 'Course, Trank says he quit them.
It sounds like he’s making excuses. It’s not like it was a surprise that the movie sucked. Even if failing a task as simple as making the brother and sister the same race wasn’t enough to ruin the movie, it was still evidence that these idiots were going to be making changes for change’s sake instead of only changing things necessary to make the movie better.
The well-received Marvel movies are full of ‘changes for change’s sake.’ Changes don’t make a story suck just because you don’t like the change.
That said, this Fantastic Four is a fairly accurate adaptation of the comics it came from. The problem is that apparently many FF fans have never heard of or read Ultimate FF. It hews very closely to that story, even borrowing whole scenes from it.
The movie’s unfairly taking flak for sticking to a story that older fans just aren’t familiar with.
I only read the first couple of issues, which were good.
Point is, though, they didn’t make ‘unnecessary changes’ to the origin. They pretty much stuck to the origin. They were being pilloried for something they were completely innocent of.
Interesting thought though I would argue that Marvel successfully did that with Iron Man and Captain America. Both characters are now more popular than they were before their movies came out.
Another thought: Would the Fantastic Four movie have been better if it actually wasn’t the Fantastic Four? If they were 5 random-ish people who find their way to another dimension and become heroes and a villain but not existing characters?