Fantastic Four Movie Review

Hello fellow moviegoers!
Fantastic Four is directed by Josh Trank, and stars Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, Jamie Bell, and Toby Kebbell. It is the story of a small group of young scientists who create a machine that allows them to travel to another dimension. While there, they each gain unique and frightening new abilities. I was actually really excited for this movie. The trailers looked good. They had an amazing cast. The Thing looked really cool. But is it really as good as it looked like it could be?

I went into this movie not really knowing what to expect. I had seen a few other reviews for it, and they hadn't liked it. Plus it currently has a 9% on Rotten Tomatoes. But I was still genuinely excited. The movie started and it was actually pretty good, at least for the first half. The first half of the movie had me really immersed in the film. I was thinking I might actually be part of that 9% that liked it. Sure, there were a few lines here and there that were extremely cheesy, but those could be forgiven a little bit. I was connecting to these characters, and it was cool to see them working to build this machine that could literally teleport them to another dimension. When they went to this dimension it was really exciting, and when they got back and they were discovering these abilities, it felt a little bit like a horror film. Which was a good thing.
But everything after that went downhill fast. Probably the biggest mistake this movie made was skipping an entire year immediately when return from this other planet. The most interesting part of most superhero movies is when they are discovering how to use and control their powers. They completely skipped over that to show the team going on missions for the government. Speaking of which, the government in this film is perhaps the most clichéd movie government I've ever seen. It makes it look like the government is just a group of people you never see, whose goal in life is to make everybody's lives as miserable as possible. Because they're the government, and they can do that.
Even the main characters that I was really starting to like started to become jerks. Johnny Storm (Jordan)  turned into an annoying a**hole, Ben Grimm (Bell) turned into somebody who didn't care about his best friend that he had grown up with. Reed Richards (Teller) and Susan Storm (Mara) didn't change much, but it seemed like nobody on this team liked each other. At least until the script needed them to like each other at the very end. 
The people that they had brought in to portray these characters are all incredibly talented people. Which makes it even worse when none of them have any chemistry with each other. When they spoke to each other it felt like they were just reading lines from a script. It honestly made me sad, because they are all Oscar caliber actors, and it feels like they all just mailed it in.
Some of the exciting scenes they show in the trailers aren't even in the movie. Such as the scene where The Thing is being dropped out of an airplane, or when Reed Richards is talking to Dr. Doom in the lab, and he asks "What is coming?" to which Dr. Doom replies "Doom" or "Change is coming" depending on which commercial you saw.
But, any movie is only as good as it's villain, and this movie's villain is one of the worst movie villains I have seen in recent memory. Dr. Doom (from what I know) is one of the best villains Marvel has under their belt. In this movie, he literally is just there to be a jerk for the first half, and then he is gone until the last 15-20 minutes when he just shows up out of nowhere. His powers are literally just anything they needed him to do in the script. Some of the powers he uses right away when he shows up could defeat the Fantastic Four in seconds. But for some reason, he decides not to use those powers.
Plus, the design of this character is just ridiculous. They try and say that his spacesuit he was wearing earlier in the movie fused with his skin, but his design looks nothing like the suit he was wearing at the beginning of the movie. His motives (which I won't spoil for you) were some of the simplest motives for any villain to have. Motives that could easily be achieved without violence, but he decides to be evil and kill people just because this movie needs him to be the villain.
So in conclusion, the first half of this movie was actually pretty good. But everything that happens after that (which isn't much) is such a disappointment that it taints the rest of the film. The villain is terrible. The actors have almost no chemistry with each other. Fantastic Four had so much potential, but unfortunately I cannot recommend this film. If you really want a good action film to see this week, then I would say go see Ant-Man or Mission Impossible, films that are actually fun.
3.5/10

So if you ended up seeing this movie, what did you think? Are critics being a little too harsh on this movie, or do you agree with them? Let me know by commenting on this post.

Thanks for stopping by!