Fantastic Four is essentially a bad concept.

Over 60 years ago now, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby came up with the concept for this superteam. And there’s the problem: This was their first attempt at creating superheroes. Sure, there had been many before them (some of which, like Captain America, were later integrated into the Marvel Universe), but these were the first Marvel ones. So, they are like a first draft.

Stan Lee’s big idea was always that since Superman and his ilk were always very one-dimensional, Lee would come up with a second dimension for his characters, which basically meant that there was some other aspect to them besides being heroic (or villainous). However, as this was so early in their process, the group sucks. There is no actual team. It’s just Reed Richards and three extensions to him. I haven’t read many of the comics, but the ones I have, it was always Reed figuring out the situation and then guiding everyone else through his solution. As Reed himself is very boring as a character, this made the whole excuse for a team very boring as well.

And yet, this is the third attempt to make this team happen (not counting the Corman version, which is actually still the best against all odds).

So, they do try fix certain things, but the fixes don’t always work. They do give Sue more agency then she had in the comics, which is very good, but at the same time, she is now a both a internationally renonwed negotiator and the most powerful member of the “team” (I’m not going to stop putting that in quotes – unless I forget). Somehow Johnny is now a linguistic genius who can decipher a whole alien language from a few limited messages.

There’s five credited screenwriters and who knows how many uncredited ones. That’s what the movie feels like. There’s multiple movies here pushed into one and the pieces just don’t fit together. The family interactions are surprisingly good, but the thing all the viewers want, the space exploration and the arrival of Galactus, don’t happen until very late in the movie. Maybe this is because they had to change course suddenly a couple of years ago and thus the plan was not fully in place for this movie.

I’m not into the retrofuturistic look. There’s some good things about it, but there’s always going to be problems with 60s understanding of technology depicted in 2025, considering that things like personal computers didn’t yet exist.

Weirdly, I do like Ralph Ineson as the Galactus, even though he doesn’t get to do much. I do like the gender-switched Silver Surfer as it does play into Johnny’s player-side (which doesn’t really show much otherwise).

There is also one scene, where science is actually used interestingly, but otherwise it’s just technobabble.

All in all, this doesn’t feel like something that can actually save the franchise, as it’s supposed to. After all, this is their big summer blockbuster. It seems that it will have a great first weekend, but it’s hard to imagine that it will have very good legs, although I have been wrong about these things before.

I just didn’t find this interesting at all after a certain point and there’s some late developments I really hated.