Fantastic Fail: A "Fantastic Four 2015" Review

I started out wondering whether I should NOT see this year’s Fantastic Four because everybody’s been saying that it’s bad, or if I SHOULD see it so I would know how bad it really is. The fact that my friends hated it so much actually made me curious enough to buy a ticket and risk wasting my precious time and money, just to know what the fuss is about. Well, I’ve ended up seeing the movie, and given that most of the people I know already have so much hate for the film, I will try to describe it in the nicest yet most honest way that I can:

This movie sucks.

And I’m not saying this just so I can join in the bandwagon - it really is terrible. Well, maybe not as bad as Aftershock (I don’t think anything can top that film in the awful-meter, I swear), but to give you an idea, I'd probably put Fantastic Four right next to a kiddie Nickelodeon movie.

Fantastic Four (2015) Trailer

To be fair, the film started our pretty well. At first, it was actually engaging and interesting enough for you to pay attention to what’s going on in the screen, and despite the lengthy exposition, it wasn’t boring. It did seem like it had a good narrative, and the characters were established quickly yet effectively. Surprisingly, the character that appealed to me the most was Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell). The film portrayed him as a charming, likeable guy who doesn’t mind a little bit of bromance, and I suspect that this was done so that we would feel much sorrier for him when he transforms into the Thing. Makes sense since he’s obviously the one who suffered the most from the accident.

I wish somebody would also look at me that way.

Sadly, when we’re already halfway through the film, and just when our guys got their superpowers, things start to spiral down. We start getting one ridiculously bad scene after another, that it made me wonder if the filmmakers suddenly felt lazy and just wanted to get the whole thing over with. CGI in the latter half of the movie was so bad that it looked like a videogame cut-scene.  And don’t even get me started with the amateur green screen executions.  Gosh, Game of Thrones does an even better job at special effects.

See what I'm talking about?

As if the CGI wasn’t bad enough, the script and direction also started becoming wobbly. The scenes felt like they were hurriedly done and worse, the plot and even the dialogues became predictable. The personality and motivations of the characters also started becoming inconsistent, and there are some significant parts of the plot that were left unexplained. For instance, Reed (Miles Teller) had to leave everybody behind when he escapes so he can find a solution to their predicament on his own. But when he was captured, he was so quick to shift his motivations, and started working for the very people he ran away from in the first place. I’m not saying that Miles Teller did a poor job because I strongly believe that he’s a great actor. It’s just sad that he had such a poor material to work with.

I bet this was how he looked after seeing the movie.

***

I have to admit, some of the negative comments and reviews about Fantastic Four that I saw online were a bit exaggerated. Is it the worst film ever? Definitely not. But is it bad? To that question I would say yes. I have seen some of the actors do great performances in other movies, and it feels so bad to see such great talent go to waste because of poor material.

Credits to the images and videos used in this post go to "Fantastic Four" and/or to their respective owners. I do not own these materials. No copyright infringement intended.