Just got back and saw it as well. Not bad, but they mangled Dr. Doom. No real problems with the Thing costume–it seemed more like early Kirby Thing, rather than the more rock-like hero we see later on.
Oh, and I found this exchange
Doom: Let’s not fight. Sue: No, let’s!
cringeworthy, like Storm’s infamous “Toad and Lightning” line in the first X-Men movie.
Overall I’d rank the Marvel films
[ol]
[li]X-Men [/li][li]Spiderman (would be fun if Peter Parker and Johnny Storm met…aren’t they pals in the comics? Not that it’s gonna happen)[/li][li]Fantastic Four (hoping for a Galactus sequel too)[/li][li]Daredevil (despite Ben Affleck)[/li][li]Elektra (I’m an Alias fan, so I give Jen Garner a pass)[/li][li]Hulk (tried too hard)[/li][li]Punisher[/li][li]Blade III (I and II were okay, but this just sucked, despite Biel eye-candy)[/li][/ol]
Just saw it; enjoyed it more than I expected. Mike Chiklis as Ben Grimm/Thing was the best part of the movie. Didn’t really like how they changed Doom, but I liked the movie’s lightheartedness. I think Ebert was just in a bad mood when he saw it.
Nitpick:
Okay, I expect all the science to be completely goofy in a comic book movie. Physics bears little resemblance to that in the real world, and experiments never just fail, they go spectacularly off-course, spontaneously turning people into either superheroes of supervillains.
But – why can’t movies use the term “T minus x minutes” correctly? I’ve heard this error in movies since at least 1979 (“Alien”): A computer is giving a countdown, and something, say, a ship’s self-destruction, is going to happen in, say, nine minutes. The computer says, “Self-destruct in T minus nine minutes.” No, no, no! Self-destruct is in nine minutes. The time now is “T minus 9 minutes”. “T” is the expected time of the event in question.
I saw it today. (I get in free to movies and it was raining.)
It was just kind of there. Jessica Alba is just way to young looking to be a brillant DNA reseacher/astronaut. I finally realized where I recognized Mr. Fantastic. He is one of the officers in Titanic. (the one that goes back and finds Kate) I didn’t mind Johnny Storm as much as I thought I would and the Thing wasn’t so bad. I did like him as Ben and as the Thing.
What wasn’t so good was Doom. His character doesn’t really have a huge evil scheme. In Superman Lex is going to DESTROY CALIFORNIA! Or in Sup II they baddies take over the WORLD. Doom just basically is pissed off that Reed’s expierement went bad and it cost Doom so much money that it destroys his company. So HE MUST DESTROY THE FANTASTIC FOUR! Right, whatever.
The interplay between Johnny Storm and Ben/The Thing is funny but they played on that a little too much at the expense of plot.
But hey, got to see Alba in her underware so that’s a plus.
Please forgive me before hand, I am a bit inebriated but I need to comment:
Well the movie was a straight C movie in my opinion because . . .
[spoiler] the movie had no reasonable climax. What the heck was with the last scene? Mr. Fantastic was basically like, “Ok chaps, you red thing over there, please put down your tea and supernova near Lord Doom, then Invisible Girl you go and contain it!” Then, incredibly, for almost no reason, we are shown a scene of the Invisible Girl’s nose bleeding! It made no sense! Why not her hands? Or arms or any place else? Why the nose? I mean, that really got to me!
Then Mr. Fantastic says, “GUESS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU ADD WATER TO HOT METAL!!*(!!!111oneone” then he tells his slave, Ben Grimm, to throw water on Dr. Doom. Mr. Fantastic hasn’t lifted a finger, while everyone else is exhausted.
Dr. Doom was was a flat-out, no-fighting pansy. He put up no fight at all. Either that or the Fantastic Four was just too powerful. [/spoiler]
In regards to Johnny Storm:
Putting him being drop-dead gorgeous aside, I thought that his power was ridiculous. He basically could become hotter than the sun or something ridiculous like that. The movie basically was like, “NEVER SUPERNOVA BECAUSE YOU CAN DESTROY THE PLANET!” I mean that is just dumb. I didn’t know whether we were talking about Gohan releasing a kamehehaha blast at Cell or whether we were talking about Jesus’ power during the Second Coming.
I don’t really want to watch the movie, but I loved Ebert’s review. Such gems as:
“Sue Storm (Jessica Alba) can become invisible at will and generate force fields that can contain propane explosions, in case you have a propane explosion that needs containing but want the option of being invisible.”
" The Human Torch, to repeat, can burn at supernova temperatures! He can become so hot, indeed, that he could threaten the very existence of the Earth itself! This is absolutely stupendously amazing, wouldn’t you agree? If you could burn at supernova temperatures, would you be able to stop talking about it? I know people who won’t shut up about winning 50 bucks in the lottery."
“Invisible Woman could maybe create a force field to contain the sun, which would be a big deal, but she’s too distracted to explore the possibilities; she gets uptight because she will have to be naked to be invisible, because otherwise people could see her empty clothes; it is no consolation to her that invisible nudity is more of a metaphysical concept than a condition.”
The movie ain’t bad. The Thing ROCKS!!(I had to say that!) I’m sure pics of Chris Evans will punctuate all the gay sites and the pics of Jessica Alba half-naked will likewise give adolescent boys hardons. I give it: :mad: :mad: :mad:
Ebert then goes on to say that the Human Torch looks like the Flash and that the Invisible Woman has much of the same powers as the X-Men’s Storm. I think he needs to spend more time reading comics.
I remember when he reviewed Chronicles of Riddick and kept making references to stuff that just never happened in the movie, such as Riddick stealing a Necromancer fighter and flying around in it. That was around when I stopped paying attention to his movie reviews.
Another thing that Ebert said was how the **FF ** powers were like The Incredibles! And that’s a bad thing in his review. Does he realize that it was really The Incredibles that ripped off the FF, but that film got released first?!
Dude, Ebert frequently doesn’t even watch the whole movie. As Raguleader points out, it’s quite often the case that he’ll comment on things that simply were not in the movie. Just recently in his War of the Worlds review, he complained that aliens would never have tripods because they’re unstable, as evidenced by when Tom Cruise knocked one down by destroying one of its legs.
Except, of course, that such a thing did not happen in the movie.
In any event, saw F4 tonight. It sucked. I was bored to tears.
It was better than I expected, and I’d give it a B-. It was a cheesy, corny, but fun flick.
Pros
*The guy who played Dr. Doom was way cool. I also liked his assistant, “Leonard.”
*Funny and lighthearted.
*I liked the Johnny Storm actor.
*Chiklis was superb as the Thing.
*Decent direction and cinematography.
*Pretty OK F/X.
*Suprisingly decent dialog.
Cons
*Ioan (how do you pronounce that, anyway?) lacked the gravitas and feel of super-intelligence needed for Reed Richards. He was OK overall, though.
*Gawdawful physics all 'round. The “supernova” idea was completely ignorant. When the Thing is interacting with the fire engine, it is clear that he does not have enough mass to prevent himself from being lifted off the ground (now had he been grabbing onto something, that could have made sense). “The suits were in the storm too, so they have been altered to match our powers perfectly” (makes no sense). Etc. Such scripts should be vetted with someone with a modicum of scientific understanding.
*I agree that something feels missing from the plot. As stated in posts above, Doom lacks a major purpose, and the final battle is anticlimactic (or at least not suitably climactic). It’s this lack of a really good plot that takes the most off the movie’s grade, in my book.
A question: Why do people think that J. Alba is so hot? She’s just totally average-OK, not even 1/10 as hot as the blind black chick.
No mention of Cruise. To be fair, the soldiers who fired the RPG were hitting the body area around the central eye, and we don’t see any major damage to the legs. Maybe the joint was damaged, maybe the control systems were knocked out. In any case the thing fell over.
I don’t always agree with Ebert, especially when it comes to action movies like these, but I haven’t noticed any major factual errors.
Do you have solid proof of this? Because if I were Ebert, I’d consider this slander. So far as I am concerned, Ebert is one of the few honest movie critics out there. I have tremendous respect for him.
Just saw it last night. Despite never having viewed any of the F4 comics, I was actually looking forward to this. Here’s my impression.
I thought the movie started out well. I was willing to suspend belief and accept that a 24 year old vixen is a world renowned physist and research analyst. I mean, she looked good in glasses, so what more proof do I need? I could accept that her younger brother would be chosen to fly a billion dollar mission. Obviously he put in a lot of flight time from birth on up.
I’d even accept that a man known for never ever ever being wrong and quintuple checking how much change he should be getting back on his combo meal would suddenly blank out and not realize until mere minutes beforehand that his estimates were off and the radioactive storm came too soon. I’d probably fire half the people at misison control but I understand the need to further the plot. Ya gotta get your super powers somehow.
But here’s what I don’t accept: a script where literally a third of the movie the characters voluntarily lock themselves into an apartment to hide from the world and do research. What? Why? How? Who? Where? Did no one realize how little this furthered the plot? You have people going nowhere and doing nothing and this is our great introduction to the Fantasticness of their characters?
You have Dr. Doom who is by all rights a pretty scary character. But what do I know, I’ve never seen the comics. So my only introcution to him is within this movie where I learn that Dr. Doom is a bad guy pulled by the strings of plot device to further his goal of…uh…neighborhood domination.
Why does a billionaire with no descernable skills go up on this space mission? Because someone needs to help accidently infect everyone with the radiation so it might as well be him.
Why is he so intent on destroying everyone from the Fantastic Four? Because…because…look, the script says that he is and so that should clearly be good enough for me. Asking “what is this fight about” is a mental excercise that Zen masters wouldn’t even attempt. It’s much easier to contemplate trees falling in the forest than trying to cull out the motivations of the characters within this film.
So overall a pretty Average Four fight Dr. Demento in a fight to see who can detroy the city most and I think the viewers end up losing. But the film must have left some sort of an impresion on me. as I left the theatre jonesing for a Burger King whopper and a large Mountain Dew.
It was a fine movie, for what it was. Not having any familiarity with the comics, I found the movie to be rather engaging and humorous at times. And I liked that the final battle wasn’t a 30-minute explosion-fest but was rather low-key (as these things go.)
