Reel Snippet – Fantastic Four (2015)
Fantastic Four (2015) was an absolutely joyless experience that was just unpleasant to watch. In fact, unpleasant is the perfect word to sum up the movie. The characters act unpleasant, the visuals look unpleasant, and the story feels unpleasant. The CGI breaks the pattern by being jawdroppingly awful. It all looks fake and unconvincing, even in strange places where there doesn’t need to be any CG. One scene jumps to mind involving a monkey; they could have used a real one and nothing would have changed, but instead they blew some of their CGI budget on an obviously fake creature that looked like it belonged in Planet of the Apes. In fact, it kind of looked like Caeser from Planet of the Apes. Maybe he really needed a paycheck before the next sequel.
What baffles me about the whole production is how the studio followed the same beats and made the same mistakes as their 2005 film, yet somehow made it all worse. The team not actually fighting crime until the last third of the movie? Doom’s out of nowhere attraction to Sue? Ben going from Reed’s best friend to his mortal enemy in a fight? Check to all of them, but somehow with infinitely less heart and effort. The Storm family doesn’t even feel like a family, they just talk to each other like acquaintances in a classroom. Say what you will about Jessica Alba as an actor, but her Sue Storm never sounded like she was sleep talking through her lines like this one does. It gets extremely baffling just how little the makers care as the movie goes on. Apart from Doctor Doom being turned into a total loser without the slightest bit of gravitas, he has a one-hit-kill power that he demolishes an entire building staff with and doesn’t even think to whip it out during the final fight. And Ben Grimm being deployed by the government for covert ops? The man is a 200-ton orange rock giant. There is no universe where any of that qualifies as covert apart from this half-baked one I just watched.
It’s not even a so-bad-it’s-good kind of movie, just a really draining experience that put a damper on the whole evening. It didn’t even leave me with enough energy to muster any hate towards it. Simply put, nobody cared. The filmmakers didn’t care. The actors didn’t care. The effects team didn’t care. The audience didn’t care. As such, I didn’t care.
Goto Home Page
Posted under