dreamshark (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dreamshark) wrote2005-07-10 02:37 pm
dreamshark) wrote2005-07-10 02:37 pm
Movie Review: Fantastic Four
What to do on a weekend day when it's too hot to move? Go see a movie in an air-conditioned theater! Yesterday's pick was Fantastic Four at the new Eden Prairie AMC Megaplex.
Theater: excellent, except that walking from the ticket counter to your movie can resemble a ramble down the Gold Concourse at the airport. Comfortable seats, good line of sight, superb A/C (bring a sweater!), big screen, excellent sound. And never terribly crowded, for some reason.
Movie: enjoyed it while watching it, had second thoughts afterwards. Which I guess makes it a quintessential Summer Movie. The special effects were great, the pacing was good at the beginning, only bogged down a little bit during the mandatory wall-to-wall-action-scene in the middle, and the end came mercifully quickly, somewhat disguising the fact that the writers had abruptly run out of ideas. The plot was pretty lame, but really, what do you expect? Most comic-book plots are lame too. It would have been okay if it hadn't left one very large unresolved plot thread that runs against the mythos of the comic book (that machine in the lab, still working fine except for a few blown transistors.)
My major reservations had to do with the way the characters were handled. I'm not a huge comics fan, but I did read the Fantastic Four for a year or two after Richard's comic collection moved into my house, and I liked it enough to even read some of the back issues. The charm of the FF comics is the character interaction, and the movie correctly focused on that. Unfortunately, they got some of the characters right, and some of them spectacularly wrong. R and I talked it over and here's our assessment:
- Ben Grimm (Thing): well written, well-cast, and spectacularly translated to CGI. You'll believe stone can breathe!
- Johnny Storm (Torch): perfectly written and played - stole the movie every time he showed up. He's the only character who is actually having any fun, and the audience has fun too when he's around. Great animations, too.
- Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic): just okay. It's appropriate for him to be scientist-geeky and a little stiff, but his character is too tentative and passive, and the scientific genius part is a little in question. Are comic book geniuses supposed to make so many mistakes? The actor was fine, but nothing special. The elastic powers came out great, though. CGI was just made for stretchy body parts.
- Sue Storm: written as a vapid, whiny girlfriend character who can't even make it clear to anybody whose girlfriend she thinks she is. Played as a pouty Barbie doll with distractingly bee-stung lips and overpowering lipstick. Invisible Girl wasn't a strong character in the comic either, frankly, but she was better than this!
-Victor Von Doom: WRONG WRONG WRONG!! I don't really mind when comic history gets rewritten a little for the movies (after all, comic books themselves frequently rewrite their own history), so I suspended judgement on Doom throughout most of the movie, thinking they might have a final transformation in mind that would allow that Tony Curtis lookalike to morph dramatically into the Real Dr. Doom. But, sadly, it didn't happen. Dr. Doom is one of the great comic book villains of all times, more or less the model for Darth Vader (sartorially speaking, anyway). What a waste to turn him into a mincing, whiny, power-mad tycoon. What happened to his scientific genius? He isn't even an effective tycoon. In fact, his position in Von Doom enterprises is a little unclear - he doesn't seem to own the company or control the stock or control the Board of Directors. If anything, he projects the image of a slightly unstable Director of Marketing. Blecch.
Still, it's worth seeing, provided one sees it in a state-of-the-art theater with good A/C. Better yet if you can see it with a devoted comics fan who can happily spend the next two hours seriously discussing the characters and the plot of a movie based on a comic book.
Theater: excellent, except that walking from the ticket counter to your movie can resemble a ramble down the Gold Concourse at the airport. Comfortable seats, good line of sight, superb A/C (bring a sweater!), big screen, excellent sound. And never terribly crowded, for some reason.
Movie: enjoyed it while watching it, had second thoughts afterwards. Which I guess makes it a quintessential Summer Movie. The special effects were great, the pacing was good at the beginning, only bogged down a little bit during the mandatory wall-to-wall-action-scene in the middle, and the end came mercifully quickly, somewhat disguising the fact that the writers had abruptly run out of ideas. The plot was pretty lame, but really, what do you expect? Most comic-book plots are lame too. It would have been okay if it hadn't left one very large unresolved plot thread that runs against the mythos of the comic book (that machine in the lab, still working fine except for a few blown transistors.)
My major reservations had to do with the way the characters were handled. I'm not a huge comics fan, but I did read the Fantastic Four for a year or two after Richard's comic collection moved into my house, and I liked it enough to even read some of the back issues. The charm of the FF comics is the character interaction, and the movie correctly focused on that. Unfortunately, they got some of the characters right, and some of them spectacularly wrong. R and I talked it over and here's our assessment:
- Ben Grimm (Thing): well written, well-cast, and spectacularly translated to CGI. You'll believe stone can breathe!
- Johnny Storm (Torch): perfectly written and played - stole the movie every time he showed up. He's the only character who is actually having any fun, and the audience has fun too when he's around. Great animations, too.
- Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic): just okay. It's appropriate for him to be scientist-geeky and a little stiff, but his character is too tentative and passive, and the scientific genius part is a little in question. Are comic book geniuses supposed to make so many mistakes? The actor was fine, but nothing special. The elastic powers came out great, though. CGI was just made for stretchy body parts.
- Sue Storm: written as a vapid, whiny girlfriend character who can't even make it clear to anybody whose girlfriend she thinks she is. Played as a pouty Barbie doll with distractingly bee-stung lips and overpowering lipstick. Invisible Girl wasn't a strong character in the comic either, frankly, but she was better than this!
-Victor Von Doom: WRONG WRONG WRONG!! I don't really mind when comic history gets rewritten a little for the movies (after all, comic books themselves frequently rewrite their own history), so I suspended judgement on Doom throughout most of the movie, thinking they might have a final transformation in mind that would allow that Tony Curtis lookalike to morph dramatically into the Real Dr. Doom. But, sadly, it didn't happen. Dr. Doom is one of the great comic book villains of all times, more or less the model for Darth Vader (sartorially speaking, anyway). What a waste to turn him into a mincing, whiny, power-mad tycoon. What happened to his scientific genius? He isn't even an effective tycoon. In fact, his position in Von Doom enterprises is a little unclear - he doesn't seem to own the company or control the stock or control the Board of Directors. If anything, he projects the image of a slightly unstable Director of Marketing. Blecch.
Still, it's worth seeing, provided one sees it in a state-of-the-art theater with good A/C. Better yet if you can see it with a devoted comics fan who can happily spend the next two hours seriously discussing the characters and the plot of a movie based on a comic book.