X-Men for four year olds

Rating: 2/10 (3 February 2006)

Comic book adaptations suffer from one fundamental problem. The extent to which the makers take the story seriously can damn or save them. Sadly, Hollywood seems to believe that if they make every film for an imaginary all-ages audience, they will recoup their costs. Unfortunately, after all the flops like Batman & Robin or Daredevil, Hollywood is still failing to learn that audiences want original ideas, good ideas, or both. Making a film out of the Fantastic Four, on paper, could have been a great idea. Unfortunately, the film soon descends into an extended episode of the morning cartoon series that introduced and wrapped every crisis or conflict in five minutes or less. In a market that is not overly saturated with CGI-riddled adaptations of comic books, this might not be such a big problem. Unfortunately, films like Fantastic Four have to compete with the likes of X-Men 2. Bryan Singer brought something to the table that is so scarily real the audience can feel the pain of the characters. Tim Story brings nothing, and makes a film that is worth nothing.
Not that we cannot give him marks for trying. There is an attempt to make Thing seem more human by giving him a fiancé who is unable to continue her relationship with him after she learns what has happened to him. The problem is that since nothing is made of their relationship before the incident, and no character development is offered, this plot tangent has exactly zero impact upon the viewer. In fact, apart from the television show I watched in fits and starts as a boy, I had little idea of who or what the Fantastic Four were, and I have about the same idea now. I cannot help but draw comparisons to X-Men, which gave me remarkable insight into Wolverine and Magento especially as characters. A big part of the reason I know less about the characters after watching the film than before is because the film gives me no incentive to know the characters. Susan Storm is probably the worst example. Jessica Alba tries valiantly to portray a character other than her Dark Angel persona, but is deeply hampered by the poor development of the script.
To the film's credit, the special effects used to realise the situations and the solutions used by the characters are well-realised. Hollywood will never credit them with this, but the crew who worked on Hollow Man have forever changed the depiction of invisibility in film. So much so, in fact, that this film is able to offer scientific explanation and progressive defeats of this natural camouflage. I just wish they could have put as much effort into telling a story. Much of the film concerns itself with celebrity and the media's ability to make a bad situation worse. Dialogue is occasionally offered in which The Thing informs Sue that he would give anything to be invisible, for example, but the feelings of the Four regarding their powers and abilities are never given anything more than a superficial exploration. It is only just now that we are beginning to learn that superhuman abilities and their concordant subtractions are a little more real than we were led to believe in the 1980s. The problem that films like Fantastic Four are incapable of exploring is that our society is creating far more Doctor Dooms than Sue Storms.
Another big problem for the Fantastic Four is that rather than working to go as far as it can within the notorious PG-13 limits, the film is as softcore as they come. Variety might be the spice of life, but Hollywood might as well be a McDonald's at this stage. About the only thing in this particular Big Mac that has any resonance in real life is when when the Four affirm that they do not wish to be "cured" of their powers, as terrible as the challenges they introduce to their lives might be. That I was able to type that out before the film finished on its first viewing should tell you a lot about the capacity this film has for genuine surprises. As much as I love a good film about terrible things happening to good people, this is probably one of the worst that august genre has ever produced. Roger Ebert says it all in the quote: "I wasn't watching Fantastic Four to study it, but to be entertained by it, but how could I be amazed by a movie that makes its own characters so indifferent about themselves?". We just do not care about these people, and therefore we do not care about the film.
Anyone who knows me well enough knows that when I rate a film a step above the worst possible, it means that the film is too bad to entertain in a good way, but it is too good to derive the kind of unintentional comedy that saves a lot of B-films from historical oblivion. Plan 9 From Outer Space is remembered fifty years after its release because it was made badly with a heart and soul. Its author genuinely believed in it. Fantastic Four is nothing more than a cynical cash cow, and it deserves to be forgotten in five years.