Awful

Rating: 1/10 (4 October 2005)

I don't give such bad reviews often. After all it's only a movie and why should one take it so seriously ? But sometimes it might send a message to people who trounce on something good and make it bad.
If the movie was an original plot created by the producers, the director, and the screenwriter, then they can do anything they want with it. But when you take a material someone else have worked hard to make good and establish it's worth over the years, it's like walking into an established culture, and you need to take respect for the work that's already been laid down. Suppose you walked into another culture and just superficially swiped the exterior and presented it through your opinion, have you desecrated the value of that culture ? Most likely.
Fantastic Four is the hub of Marvel Comics. Without it, it's questionable if other Marvel comics would have had the success that they've had. It had the quality that defined Marvel. As a matter of fact, Spiderman had his debut supported by the Fantastic Four in Spiderman #1, and from there Daredevil, X Men and other silver age Marvel superheros flourished. Fantstic Four's plot, the universe, the characters were always setting the trend to be mined by other Marvel superheros later.
In this movie, there was no respect payed to the original plot of the Fantastic Four or the characters which made the story work. Compared to works done by Bryan Singer in the X Men series where the story line was original but didn't conflict with the original ways characters were presented in the comic book, and plot and subplots were laid out carefully to maximize their characters, this movie just took a broad brush and painted over everything. Casting wasn't good and the actors didn't reflect the qualities of the characters of the Fantastic Four. When they made Doom an industrialist, they made the same mistake of making Talbot an industrialist in the Hulk. Then the only angle becomes about money and power. Doom is an interesting character. He's from a country that's a kin to Transilvania and his mother is a sorcerer, they could have presented him as he is and the story would have been interesting. Instead they just turned him into an one dimensional angry character.
This was a movie that could have been better than the Spiderman. Instead they've turned it into an amusement park ride.
1/10