Fantastic Four
Dir: Tim Story
2005
**
Tim Story's 2005 Fantastic Four reboot looks great on paper but is, in reality, a blueprint on how not to make a modern day superhero movie. It's not the worst superhero/comic book adaptation ever made but by 2005 valuable lessons should have been learnt and this film suffers from all of the cliches that ruined many a superfilm before. Tim Story wasn't a comic/superhero/Fantastic Four fan going into production, which is not necessarily a problem but it did mean that he knew nothing about what makes them work. It's only now that film makers are starting to understand that the films have to follow the basics of the comic and build around their fundamentals. Never give the fans what they want (Joss Whedon school of film making) but instead, give them something they didn't even know they wanted, an origin story should be seen as an opportunity, not as a problem that needs solving and that is fundamentally what this film feels like, a problem. I was never sold on the cast, Chris Evans was okay and Michael Chiklis was quite good but no one was believable and even though it is pure fantasy, the key to making a good superhero film is it's believability. The source of the Four's powers is never really explored, we don't see the mission in Space or really see the full potential the story could give. The script is awful, with every attempt at humour bring the film down a notch until it really couldn't get any lower. There is a big difference between Comic and cartoon, Tim Story couldn't tell what it was in 2005.