Not As Bad As They Say - Fantastic Four Ryview (Spoiler Free!)

Fantastic Four, by 20th Century Fox.

By now, you've probably heard about how absolutely atrocious this movie is (it has a 9% on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of this writing).

Reviewers have complained about plot, acting, editing, comic book movie self hate, and a whole lot of other things that generally contribute to a movie.

I'm here to tell you that it's not quite as bad as people say. If I was going to slap a ryviews label on it, I'd probably give it a slightly above passing grade.



Now, I am definitely a movie fan, and a comic book fan, so I may be biased a bit, but this movie was legitimately fairly enjoyable. I found myself entertained for most of it, and at no point did I consider getting up and leaving, which is better than some movies I've seen.

Seriously, I don't know how I made it...

The film stays true to what a lot of the buzz was before it came out; it's more of a sci-fi movie than a comic book movie. The first half (and the second half, to a lesser extent) focus a lot more on the sci-fi aspect of the plot and origin story than the actual comic book nature of it. That actually means that a lot of the powers portion of the movie felt a little dry and funless (it's not a word, just roll with it). They spent too much on the science and not enough on the comic book zaniness.

Unfortunately, while I know these characters from various other media, this movie does a terrible job of getting us to know and care about them. There's practically zero chemistry between any of the main stars. The interpersonal conflicts felt superficial and baseless because we didn't see any development or meaning to them. And even the movie's climax felt shoehorned in. Nothing felt like it had weight.

The acting was alright, but the script and editing left quite a bit to be desired. There were indeed several cliches that basically made up the entire script for the second half of the movie, and several lines that could have carried good emotion were ruined by poorly executed timing or pacing. By and large, that makes the move feel cheap and poorly thought out, especially when the scripts main vehicle for having us care about these characters was a speech full of cliches.

Plus, he's not even wearing pants in the movie. How can I accept The Thing without pants?

But at the end of the day, I enjoyed my time in the theater. It was a fun movie about science gone awry and the consequences of that awryness (once again, you know what it's supposed to mean. Who cares if it's not a real word? I mean, Shakespeare made up all sorts of shit and they still teach that stuff in school. Who says they won't be reading this blog post 200 years from now applauding my pioneering with words like awryness? Everyone, that's who).

So that's why I say it deserves a passing grade. It's a movie that delivers some interesting science and some fun ideas on screen. Just turn your brain down a bit to avoid listening to the cliches and enjoy watching some dude light on fire while his adopted sister uses a force field. What more could you want (besides a coherent plot and climax)?

Let me know what you think of the movie!

Until next time,

Ryan