The worst Marvel Comics movie since Daredevil. Unevenly paced, too campy, one-dimensional, filled with plot holes, and just flat-out mediocre.

Rating: 1/10 (11 July 2005)

The movie fails to establish the setting as a futuristic one populated by the fantastic inventions of Reed Richards. Instead, the setting looks contemporary, with the few sci-fi elements, like holograms and artificial gravity, appearing to be anachronisms. Even worse, they're not Richards'. In the film, Richards is a milquetoast loser and wimp, whose inventions/devices in the comic (the station/ shuttle, the shielding, the unstable molecules) are all Victor's, as is his love interest. Reed is fascinated to see a uniform made of self-regulating molecules, commenting that he's been working on a formula for the stuff. Looks like someone beat you to it, Reed.
Sure, the comics have always portrayed Reed as a bit of a long-winded egghead, but not such a shortsighted dunce. The film Reed is utterly oblivious to any goings-on around him not pertaining to his calculations, be it the fact that Susan still wants him, or the fact that Victor is trying to give her an engagement ring. The Reed I read was always a decisive *leader*. Gruffudd's Reed is an obsequious cipher, and when the notion of his being the leader of the team was voiced during the bridge scene, I didn't buy it. Indeed, the characters in general are handled poorly. Their reaction to their transformation, for example, is dumb. Reed and Sue are desperate to reverse their condition. WHY? You've just got cool superhuman abilities, and all you can think about is how to get rid of them? There is no sense of sci-fi ponderousness or intellectual curiosity about this incredible transformation. They just conclude that their DNA has been altered, and decide that they have to reverse it. The only one for whom this makes sense is Ben Grimm, whose desire to revert to normal is understandable. But even this ruined by his eventual decision, following his successful reversion to normal, to recreate his rocky appearance in order to.well I don't know why he does this. Can't the others handle Doom? After spending the film depressed because his fiancée and others are frightened of him, this made no sense. Even Johnny, whose desire to parlay his new gift into celebrity was fairly believable, was portrayed as far more of an insensitive jerk than he was in the comics.
The rest of the movie is one-dimensional. Doom is not the scary megalomaniacal villain, but a disgraced businessman who kills a few people for revenge. Nothing that makes him an interesting or fearful villain in the comics the shrewd planning, the leadership of a country, armor and weapons, magical powersare present. The climax is merely adequate, with Reed's defeat of him coming not from a particularly brilliant plan, but by his own admission, basic elemental chemistry. Dialogue is campy ("MarcoPolo?"), secondary characters like Alicia are cardboard, the science and plot logic is unnecessarily lousy, and much of the movie just makes no sense. Why does it appear that the team going up to the space station suits up in Doom's executive building, rather than at the launch site? Are Sue, Doom, and Richards qualified astronauts? Why does Ben's fiancée go outside on a New York City street in her negligee? Why, when testing Johnny's powers, does Sue refer to "supernova" as a temperature, rather than an event? Why does Reed tell the others that their costumes were exposed to the same cosmic rays that they were, so they can change like us. EXCUSE me? What? What the hell kind of nonsense is this? They're UNIFORMS. They don't have any DNA to mutate. They should change because they're made of unstable molecules. Not because they should exhibit the same reaction to cosmic rays as a human body. How can electricity incinerate a hole through a human body, when everyone who's even been hit by lightning knows that even though it burns, it passes THROUGH the body? And why, after Victor has killed that board member thus, did Johnny not suffer a similar fate later when Doom blasted him with the same energy? Why is it that twice, characters get punched hard enough to be sent flying several yards (first Johnny by Ben, and then a cured Ben by Victor), without being instantly killed? Why did Reed show no permanent effects after testing the machine intended to cure Ben on himself, which resulted in him melting? And the sequence in which Doom fires a missile at the Baxter Building is confusing. Presumably it's a heat seeker, which is why Johnny decides to lure it away from the building, and set a small island on fire (hope no one was on that island) to detonate it. But how did Johnny know it was a heat seeker? For that matter, how could it have been? Victor had to lock onto Johnny and Sue's location on that balcony to fire it, which should not have presented a signature any hotter than anything else in the vicinity.
In watching this film, I kept wondering about how its basic approach and motif would work if upheld for a sequel featuring Galactus. Can you imagine these losers going up against the Planet Devourer? Instead of the ponderous awe and wonder of an immense extraterrestrial life form who consumes the energy of planets, the depth needed to make interacting with his herald seem interesting, the fear and hopelessness evoked by the impossible nature of stopping such a foe, and the moral and ethical discussions raised by Reed's desire to spare Galactus' life, we'd instead get stuff like "Cool, an alien!" "Okay, let's stop him by just doing this" or "Wow, why does that guy look like an Oscar statuette on a surfboard?"
Pass.