If you loved Lost in Space….
Spoilers, if anybody cares.
Yeah, Fantastic 4 is right up there with 1998’s Lost in Space. A story that makes no sense, special effects that look like a school project, and a group of actors that all looked like they wanted to be somewhere else. The music was pretty generic soundtrack fare, but it’s not like Philip Glass and Marco Beltrami could have saved this pointless turkey with a great score anyway.
The bulk of the film is an origin story. I hate Origin Stories. We are treated to precocious kids who build a transdimensional portal in their garage. We also see high school teachers unimpressed when the kids rip a hole in the time/space continuum. In standard Spielberg fashion, we are told the villains are those nasty bastards from The Government. The usual bad guy, Dr Doom, spends the bulk of the film in the other dimension and only shows up at the end like Moby Dick.
But much like Ultron, where the real bad guy was Tony Stark, in the Fantastic Four the real bad guys are a our drunken heroes. Three drunk teens decide to do a bit of dimenson hopping. Once on the other planet they decide to climb down a sheer cliff face to look at some obviously radioactive goo and one of them sticks his hand in it. Yeah, Super Genuises, just like Wile E Coyote.
And here, at last, we get our Origin. Turns out they get their powers from a Teleportation Accident, much like the The Fly. The Thing has rocks in his pod and Johnny was on fire. There’s no real reason Reed ends up stretchy and Susan ends up invisible.Next we end up at Area 57, really? And then we find out that Reed Richards is a total coward who up and runs away. This leaves the way open for The Thing to become a mass murderer for the Government, well what else is he good for?
Dr Doom seems to be some kind of god, I’m thinking Aztek. There’s a lot of blood splatter and exploding heads, not something you saw in Age of Ultron.
And so on and so forth. Yeah, Fantastic Four sucked. But the music wasn’t all that bad.
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