Clobberin’ Flame On
Posted on | July 15, 2005 at 2:24 pm | 1 Comment
I saw Fantastic Four yesterday. I’ve seen worse comic book movies. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The best part was that they got the characters of the FF themselves down right, more or less. They did pretty good with the dysfunctional family dynamics. Ben Grimm’s story arc was interesting and rang true. Michael Chiklis was great, and I’m glad they went with the prosthetic suit instead of CGI for the Thing.
The effects were pretty cheesy. Since this was live action, I didn’t expect The Incredibles-level of effects, especially with Reed Richard’s stretching power. But geez louise, they could’ve done better than they did. They went to great lengths to not show him stretching. The Human Torch effects didn’t do much for me either – looked like a guy badly drawn inside some fake flames. Some actual fireball-throwing action was definitely called for. A lot of powers-using in general was shown “off screen” – I’m sure they’d like to say it was a story device to build suspense or whatever, but it really just looked like they ran out of money. And the cosmic storm that gave them their powers – yawn. My 3-year old niece could draw a better one.
But the worst parts were the characterization of villain Doctor Doom, and relatedly, the complete and utter lack of story/plot. From what I remember of the FF comics, they didn’t even get close to the real origin/powers of the bad Doc. They threw us a bone with the Latveria references, but it wasn’t enough. And he and Susan Storm being involved romantically? Ick. It’s like they were trying to cross him with the Sub-Mariner. In the movie, I could not figure out what Von Doom’s deal was (personality-wise) and just what he was trying to accomplish, other than messing up the FF and being pissed off at losing his company and his woman. And if I were someone living in NYC, I wouldn’t be so quick to hero-worship the FF after these events, since they pretty much caused every problem they solved, and it was because of them that the city got so messed up. Along those lines, the movie was too short and needed to have at least one other action scene (preferably not involving Doc Doom) of the FF doing something heroic. Why would anyone want them in their city?
But all in all, it was a decent introduction to the characters, and though a bit corny, it captured some of the flavor of the comics nicely enough. One hopes subsequent sequels (of which there are sure to be some, since the movie seems to be an audience hit if not a critical one) will have more of a story. I rate this a Entertaining on my new movie rating system.
Latre.
Comments
One Response to “Clobberin’ Flame On”
July 15th, 2005 @ 3:17 pm
“They went to great lengths to not show him stretching”: I haven’t seen the movie (and my sheltered existence means I’m not familiar with the mythos) but it occurs to me that one way to show the stretching, w/o using CGI, would be to combine forced perspective with that effect Hitchcock used in Psycho on the stairway – I believe it was a simultaneously zoom-in and forward motion of the actual camera, which had the effect of vertiginously changing the perspective among the elements in the frame. If you did something in close-up, you could create the impression of an arm (say) stretching w/o actually doing much in the way of stretching, literally. Oh well: this is why I was not a film major.