Mediocre Movie Month 2016: Some Thoughts on "Fantastic Four" (2005)

The jokes write themselves.

Fantastic Four (2005)

Directed by Tim Story
Produced by Avi Arad, Bernd Eichinger, Ralph Winter
Written by Michael France, Mark Frost

Starring Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans, Michael Chiklis, Julian McMahon

Budget: $100M

The early 'Aughts were a rough time for superhero movies. Though we had movies like X-Men, Spider-Man 2, and Blade, we also had the disastrous Spider-Man 3 and X-Men 3: X-Men United to even things out a bit. Primarily most of these criticisms can be laid at the feet of Avi "Throw Venom in, it'll be awesome, come on" Arad, and since he's taken a backseat with the other Marvel movies most of them have come out alright.

Now, Roger Corman released a version of The Fantastic Four in 1994 which went unreleased and unnoticed until the internet brought  its wonder into the spotlight. That movie is an achievement in low-budget superheroism, with its $1M budget and classic Corman efficiency showcased to a...magnificent degree.

I remember when I started learning Macromedia Flash.

The 2005 version? Not so much.

I doubt anyone reading this is unfamiliar with the origins of the F4, but considering every single movie version covers it I figured I might as well, too. Scientists Reed Richard (Gruffudd), Sue Storm (Alba), and Victor Von Doom (McMahon), alongside pilot Johnny Storm (Evans, lol) and Ben Grimm (Chiklis) all encounter some cosmic space nonsense that gives them nonsense superpowers. The guy with the villainous name turns evil, they all fight, and the day is saved.

While this wasn't really stand-out bad back in 2005, watching this in a post-Winter Soldier world was absolutely bizarre. The lighting was so bright it made every scene look like a soap opera set. the acting is, to put it nicely, sub-par, and the acting is really not very good.

Oh, I'm sorry, did I list acting twice? That's to represent that whoever wrote edited this movie was a hack. Considering the director's last name is Story, you'd think they would manage some sort of logical progression of events, but all this guy has really done are the two (soon to be three) Ride Along movies and a bunch of music videos from the 1990s. Considering the soundtrack consists of various Sum 41 songs and similar fare, I wonder how much of that was intentional.

The Corman
There's really not a lot here to list as a positive. Maybe if you go into it expecting a bad movie, sure, but even then this isn't the kind of thing you put on to laugh at. Honestly it just makes me wonder whether we can actually do a good Fantastic Four movie. All it really brought to mind was that I want a proper Doom movie, where he's already ruler of Latveria and has to deal with some sort of crisis as a crazy supervillain.

Jessica Alba's hot, I guess.

The Fant4stic
Well...where to begin? I guess I could start by saying that picking any specific bad part of this movie could be contained in simply posting a link to the full film here and letting you experience it yourself.

The Thing suit looks like it's made out of brownie.

The directing is flat, and attempts at wit or clever film-making fall pretty flat. There's a moment when Ben wakes up after the accident and it's a point of view shot as Johnny fakes us out about him transforming into the Thing. It's not really funny at all, and the PoV looks unnatural. Stemming from this, there are bizarrely placed attempts at humor throughout, from Johnny messing with Benn to awkward one-liners from Johnny...actually, most of the bad humor falls squarely on Evans's shoulders.

Of course, where Corman's version had charm (cheap though it may have been), this version is just bland. The effects for the Human Torch and Mister Fantastic are really bad. Whenever Reed stretches it shows it from a really strange angle that doesn't so much convey his stretching as it does a misguided attempt at hiding your poor visual effects.

I'd be willing to let the poor effects go if the rest of the movie was competent, but it isn't. During the final action scene there are two Wilhelm Screams used within shots of each other. Even in 2005 that was a played out sound clip. Of course, the final fight scene is an example of how little any thought went into the logic of this film. After successfully freezing Doom in place, the damaged city square is immediately flooded by cheering crowds. If Doom had broken free he could have murdered everybody, but it was the end of the movie, so he's beaten!

And instead of putting him in some sort of prison, they stick him in a shipping container on a boat.

Verdict
This isn't a ha-ha-bad movie. Though it's closer in tone to the comics than Fant4stic, it's another in a line of failed adaptations of a property which should really just be given back to Marvel.