Based on a scientific project that Reed Richards (Miles Teller) has been developing (which can transfer matter from one dimension to another) the Fantastic Four use themselves as Guinea Pigs in order to transfer themselves to another dimension (in the belief that there is something in this other worldly dimension that will benefit their own planet). However, something goes wrong for our foursome during the transportation process and they end up with drastic physical transformations (some which are much more noticeable than others). Worse still, they tried and failed to save Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell) and leave him behind believing him to be dead. Later on, a team go back to the other dimension and discover that Victor is still alive and bring him back to Earth in order to assess his condition. But Victor has no intention of staying on Earth and is determined to create a new world in this other dimension and will stop at nothing to achieve his objective. Victor has also suffered a physical transformation, but he has become much stronger and more powerful than his former friends and the Fantastic Four find that they must work together to try to stop him from carrying out his evil plans.
The film opens up with some promise whereby we're given an insight into how our illustrious foursome ended up becoming the formidable team that we saw in the earlier films. Despite a fairly promising beginning though this reboot completely fails to bring about a lot of the magic that we witnessed in the 2005 version of this film.
A big problem for me lay with the tone of the film; firstly it takes itself WAY too seriously and as a result it made the film quite boring to watch. When watching this it felt like I was watching a science documentary (with all its wordy geeky exposition) rather than what should be a fun comic book type movie. This brings me on to my next point 'What fun'? In the 2005 film (and the 2007 film as well) there was much more in the way of camaraderie between the cast making the film much more fun to watch. As a villain Von Doom isn't particularly well-developed here and I felt his motivations for world-domination were a little sketchy here - I criticised Von Doom's motivations in the original film, but compared to his motivations here they now seem more plausible in retrospect.
I appreciate that this is a reboot and therefore the filmmaker's are trying to put their own stamp on things (presumably that explains why Johnny Storm is black in this film and also explains why their powers have been attained in a different manner to the original film). The problem with this reboot is that they've failed to do anything to improve on the original film; the story isn't as interesting, the characters are much weaker and are poorly developed, there is no real exploration of their super powers (this was a big thing in the previous films and made sense as they were a big life-changing aspect for the foursome), but here they just kind of have the super powers and then that's it - off to destroy Victor Von Doom. The only real super power that is explored is that of The Thing and even that super power is exploited in a rather lame way.
The cast are another big problem with this film as they totally failed to engage with me (as well as each other); Miles Teller is really bland as Reed Richards (even more bland than Ioan Gruffudd was in the original films) which is surprising as he put in a very good performance in Whiplash 2 years ago. Kate Mara is very pretty, but she's terrible in this film (again probably worse than Alba was in the original films). Michael B Jordan tries his best as Johnny Storm, but he lacks the charisma that Evans brought to the role in the original films and as a result suffers badly in comparison. The Thing for me is probably the best character in the film, but he lacks the touching back story that we lay witness to in the original film and again suffers from not being developed sufficiently enough to make me really care about him here.
The ending is also poor and lacks any kind of intensity and tension and has the Fantastic Four doing 'the obvious' to wrap the film up.
All in all it's a very disappointing film where the serious tone is perhaps a bigger enemy to the film than Doctor Doom. It's big and bloated, but it's also boring, and lacking in both fun and imagination. I'd recommend giving it a wide berth.
The film opens up with some promise whereby we're given an insight into how our illustrious foursome ended up becoming the formidable team that we saw in the earlier films. Despite a fairly promising beginning though this reboot completely fails to bring about a lot of the magic that we witnessed in the 2005 version of this film.
A big problem for me lay with the tone of the film; firstly it takes itself WAY too seriously and as a result it made the film quite boring to watch. When watching this it felt like I was watching a science documentary (with all its wordy geeky exposition) rather than what should be a fun comic book type movie. This brings me on to my next point 'What fun'? In the 2005 film (and the 2007 film as well) there was much more in the way of camaraderie between the cast making the film much more fun to watch. As a villain Von Doom isn't particularly well-developed here and I felt his motivations for world-domination were a little sketchy here - I criticised Von Doom's motivations in the original film, but compared to his motivations here they now seem more plausible in retrospect.
I appreciate that this is a reboot and therefore the filmmaker's are trying to put their own stamp on things (presumably that explains why Johnny Storm is black in this film and also explains why their powers have been attained in a different manner to the original film). The problem with this reboot is that they've failed to do anything to improve on the original film; the story isn't as interesting, the characters are much weaker and are poorly developed, there is no real exploration of their super powers (this was a big thing in the previous films and made sense as they were a big life-changing aspect for the foursome), but here they just kind of have the super powers and then that's it - off to destroy Victor Von Doom. The only real super power that is explored is that of The Thing and even that super power is exploited in a rather lame way.
The cast are another big problem with this film as they totally failed to engage with me (as well as each other); Miles Teller is really bland as Reed Richards (even more bland than Ioan Gruffudd was in the original films) which is surprising as he put in a very good performance in Whiplash 2 years ago. Kate Mara is very pretty, but she's terrible in this film (again probably worse than Alba was in the original films). Michael B Jordan tries his best as Johnny Storm, but he lacks the charisma that Evans brought to the role in the original films and as a result suffers badly in comparison. The Thing for me is probably the best character in the film, but he lacks the touching back story that we lay witness to in the original film and again suffers from not being developed sufficiently enough to make me really care about him here.
The ending is also poor and lacks any kind of intensity and tension and has the Fantastic Four doing 'the obvious' to wrap the film up.
All in all it's a very disappointing film where the serious tone is perhaps a bigger enemy to the film than Doctor Doom. It's big and bloated, but it's also boring, and lacking in both fun and imagination. I'd recommend giving it a wide berth.