In this golden age of comic book movies, many wonder why we can’t seem to make a good Fantastic Four movie. I wonder why studios keep trying. Writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby, who together created many of the famous Marvel Comics characters now filling theaters, made Fantastic Four before all the others. I’m a comics reader myself, so I know that superhero super-fans count the early Fantastic Four run as a major landmark. Yet, the 1994 movie was so bad it was never released and the two movies from the 2000s are not remembered fondly by many. And still, here we go again.
The story follows a few young scientists who are working on an inter-dimensional transporter. They succeed in sending a monkey there and back, and then they make an unauthorized trip themselves so that NASA astronauts don’t steal their place in history by going first. But, something goes wrong. The primordial energy of the other dimension infects them and gives them superpowers. At the same time, the sentient energy traps one of the young scientists so that the others have to leave him, presumably dead. The survivors then try to return to the other dimension to find a cure and find that their left-behind colleague is now an energy-infused, god-like being who wants to destroy Earth to protect his new world. The ensuing fight to save the world forges the remaining scientists into the Fantastic Four team.
This Fantastic Four film suffers in comparison to the other superhero action movies on offer, including the Avengers and Ant-Man movies from earlier this summer. For one thing, Fantastic Four takes a long time setting up its heroes. Most of the movie focuses on the inter-dimensional “science” before anyone lights on fire or creates a flying force-field bubble. If you’re coming to Fantastic Four looking for big, superhero action, you might feel cheated.
Even worse, the film lacks creativity. Back in 1961, Fantastic Four was the original Marvel comic; in 2015, the movie feels like a cheap knock-off of The Avengers. A powerful super-villain wants to destroy all of humanity and start over with a new world? The team of heroes is outmatched individually, and they must learn the lesson that they are stronger together than they are apart? That sketch summarizes both Avengers: Age of Ultron and Fantastic Four, but Avengers tells the story much better.
At least the importance of teamwork is a positive message. Superheroes are supremely powerful, self-sufficient people, but even they need to lean on their friends sometimes. However, in the comics, the Fantastic Four are more than friends – they’re family. Two of the team are married, and two are brother and sister. Their interpersonal conflicts and struggles are a little weightier, because they are bound by family ties. In this origin-story, though, the romance just barely starts, and the siblings are somewhat distant from each other. There’s no sense of being stuck together. This is a missed opportunity: we’ve seen plenty of superhero team movies but no superhero family movies since The Incredibles. So, if a studio goes back to the well once again for another Fantastic Four movie, I suggest it begins with the wedding and explore how that changes the team dynamics.
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