Movie Review: Fantastic Four

Courtesy of Marve/20th Century Fox

Story points and plot is divulged below...read at your own peril.

The Marvel universe has been taken in a lot of good directions over the past 15 or so years.   The X-Men franchise - though had some middling along the way - has overall been very strong thanks to some great directing work. The Avengers (including Hulk and Iron Man movies) has also had some issues but again the strength is still there making the franchise a billion dollar entity.

All of this was possible because Marvel stepped up and basically created their own production house - not satisfied with letting others take the lead on their own characters.   Which is what makes this film so surprisingly bad.

Actually, let me take that back...it's not bad; it's worse than bad - it's boring.

Fantastic Four is a reboot to the previously failed franchise staring Ioan Gruffudd (King Arthur), Michael Chiklis (The Shield) and Jessica Alba (Sin City) which held true to the original story of how the team got their powers. The first movie wasn't bad, a typical Origin Story to introduce an audience not all that familiar with superhero movies back in 2005.   Where the train went off the tracks was in the second film when they decided to follow the Silver Surfer/Galactus storyline (an utterly famous arc in the comics which has spawned hundreds of stories since) but apparently deciding that a giant pink and purple humanoid with amazing powers and gadgets they made Galactus some kind of cloud creature with tentacles...yeah.

So, is the new Fantastic Four worse than tentacle monster Galactus? Sadly, yes.

The film dives into the childhood of Reed Richards and Ben Grimm where, in fifth grade, the two collaborate on an amazing device that can transport matter into another dimension.   Fast Forward seven years (so that makes Reed like...17?) and one of the top minds in the world is trolling high school science fairs looking for talent? Yeup.

Courtesy of Marve/20th Century Fox

Richards gets brought on board at the Baxter institute where Franklin Storm (Sue and Johnny's father) runs a prestigious (although apparently secretly funded) institute for gifted youngsters.

Oh, and Von Doom is there.

Richards and the team, along with Doom who is apparently a badass with a past (that isn't gone into other than in random asides) and whom is in love with Sue (gotta keep that part of the continuity, right?) work to complete a large-scale version of Reed's original machine to travel to this new universe.

After testing it and confirming it works the team gets benched in lieu of professionals (a novel concept) but the boys get drunk and decide to use the device themselves.   Predictably that endeavor goes awry leaving Doom presumed dead in the other universe and the other three transformed. The trip back causes some sort of disruption field which affects Sue as she's wildly and RANDOMLY TYPING A MILE A MINUTE ON A KEYBOARD because we all know that the faster and more random you type into a scientific computer the more likely you are to be successful at what you're trying to do. Not blaming Mara for bad acting necessarily...though she seemed to do kind of the same thing in House of Cards a couple times...

So now they've got powers and are going to team up to save the world, right?!?!? Wrong.

Courtesy of Marve/20th Century Fox

To apparently create heightened and never actually fulfilled drama to this story Richards runs away from the complex the team is being held at. He disappears, naked, from a hidden and totally off-the-grid military installation in the middle of winter...just, why?

The story skips ahead a year. They've all gotten better control of their powers and a new device is ready to transport a team back to the other universe...where Doom is alive and has been busy cultivating world-altering powers!

In the end the movie culminates in an all-to-short fight between the Four and Doom where predictably and incredibly easily they are victorious. The world is saved!

I was genuinely excited for this reboot. The FF are one of my favorite teams as they are origin of my favorite Marvel character the Silver Surfer who has played a prominent role in their universe of the decades of comics. It seems really unlikely the studio will green-light a sequel given how much this movie has been panned; which is unfortunate. And if Twitter is to be believed even the Director thinks the final product is shite...intimating that there were outside influences at work that destroyed his better vision.

Courtesy of Marve/20th Century Fox

The cast had promise but the story was flawed. Buried in the minutia of character development. Why does there need to be a origin story movie for all superhero characters? Where is that written?   Jedi have the Force - it's explained (albeit briefly) and then it's understood and accepted. There's no damned origin movie explaining how Jedi's got their powers or why. Just make a movie that's entertaining and shows the characters in their element. If people don't understand why so and so has these powers and what's his name has those powers they can FUCKING GOOGLE IT.

It just feels that these movies more often than not fail due to the hindrance of having to spend screen time devoted to explaining things that don't really need explaining. Just tell us a fun, entertaining, action laden story!

Sadly FF is a big pass.   Don't waste your money. If you want to see it, wait for streaming of DVD.   The graphics and fight scenes don't even require the big screen like most action movies do - there's not enough of them to warrant it.

Tb

True Detective: Season 2

A word of warning - if you haven't watched the entire season yet or haven't watched the final (which aired last night) yet then I would not read this post...yet, come back once you have and comment on whether you agree or disagree with my assessment.  I always love a good back and forth.

As for the rest of you, come take a journey with me...

Courtesy of HBO

Season 2 of True Detective was one of the most highly anticipated television shows in recent memory.  There was so much speculation about who the cast would be as they would have a lot to live up to; McConaughey and Harrelson played the lead role so very well in Season 1.  The cast was announced: Vince Vaughn, Colin Farrell, Rachel McAdams on the marquee with Taylor Kitsch rounding out the main quartet (four detectives?).  Nope, three with Vaughn playing the role of a gangster.

The people who argued initially that the series diverted too much from the first season as their reason for complaints early on failed to understand what creator and lead writer Nic Pizzolatto was going for and had said from the beginning: season 2 was not season 1.  And you wouldn't want it to be.  The premise wasn't that this entire series would take place in the Bayou with crazed hillbilly madmen killing people; that would get boring.

Courtesy of HBO

But there is a reality to the fact that this season was much more like a procedural cop show (Law & Order, NCIS, et al) than the inventive and catch you off guard show we'd seen before.

Southern California was a much more traditional setting - big-city life has its standard tropes, many of which were here.  There was definitely an interesting mystery involved.  In the first episode a major player within the seedy government of Vinci, CA is murdered by an unknown assailant.  His body is found by an off-duty highway patrolman (Taylor Kitsch) who happened to have been recently suspended pending allegations of propositioning a woman he had pulled over.  The state wants a special investigator appointed (McAdams) and the local cops want to make sure they're involved (since the town is as crooked as an Allan Wrench) and they assign their own detective (Farrell).  Vaughn is involved on two fronts: he had business dealings with the deceased wherein about five million dollars of his goes missing (embezzled most likely) and he has his hooks in Farrell due to a prior dealing years back.

So that's the set-up: three cops from different divisions all looking to solve a murder of a city employee from some tiny little town in California...so tiny that their only residents are businesses - there's no real population.

Along the way there's a number of twists and turns. Kitsch has homosexual undertones within his military history.  McAdams has a fucked up past where she was lured away from the hippie colony she was raised in by a creep who held her and molested her for four days before returning her.  Farrell's young wife was raped and through Vaughn he's given the name of the attacker, whom he murders.  And Vaughn is a self-made gangster who rose through the ranks to be the top of the food chain...but as is so common in that world the guy at the top of the hill is just the easiest to knock off because he has the least amount of ground to stand on.

Courtesy of HBO

There are definitely interesting parts of the story along the way.  But in a lot of ways there's too much.  There's side-stories that either never pay off or when they do payoff it feels like a letdown.  By the final episode the characters who tie everything together, the ones who actually killed the city worker which set all the other cogs in motion, were people who had been randomly mentioned a couple of times a few episodes back so instead of tying the story together it just left you thinking: wait, why did they kill this guy instead of any of the other people who were involved in what had happened to them?  It's akin to a scooby doo episode when all along you think the lighthouse keeper is the guy doing all the weird stuff and it turns out to be old Mr. Olsen who owns the hardware store in a rubber mask.

Then there's the dialogue...it's like watching a David Lynch movie.  People say things, they talk and I literally had no idea what was happening.  Several times, EACH EPISODE, I had a distinct and specific thought of, "who actually talks this way, is this a way people talk and I just don't know it?".

There's a part of me that thinks Pizzolatto felt the pressure of living up to Season 1 and didn't really know how to make it happen.  And there's another part of me that thinks that this is just what Pizzolatto was going for.  He wanted to move in a dramatically different direction but stay within the same general world of law enforcement.

Though the ratings definitely took a hit from the prior season it seems that Season 3 is most likely to occur.  I will be curious if HBO requires Pizzolatto to give up some of his writing power and let others take the reins for some or all of the episodes with him fading back into more of a Producer role.

In the end I had several major problems with how the season ended as the last two episodes played out.  First, Kitsch's character is murdered in a way that makes NO SENSE.  He's ushered into an underground tunnel and manages to escape from the five guys with guns but as he surfaces through a totally random doorway (not the door he went in) a Vinci officer is waiting and kills him as he walks away.  There is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY this makes sense.  First, it presumes that the guy knew he was going to escape from the other group AND it presumes that he knew exactly which of the dozens of doors Kitsch could have come out of.  This is one of those epic fail moments for the series.  It's like: we need this guy to die but we want him to have that hero moment and make you think he's going to make it only to kill him in the most annoying way possible.

Courtesy of HBO

Second, Vaughn's death in the desert...he probably would have made it, not easily and definitely could have died from exposure but at least he'd have had a chance...but he makes a really dumb fucking move and attacks one of the guys in the crew that dragged him out there after they'd decided to let him live.  And why does he attack?  Because the guy wants his suit.  WHAT?  Do they think that anything they've shown us of this character before would justify this act of idiocy?  It doesn't.  Not even close.

Third, Farrell's death.  He decides it's important that he see his son one more time before making the run to Venezuela...ok, I'm willing to admit that my thoughts here are a bit skewed by the fact that I fail to comprehend the desire and want of children who, in reality, are nothing but a parasite and then a leech on the existence of a family unit but the fact that he takes a side-trip to the one place they could actually spot him, the ONLY place that would be as stupid to go to as his own home...and he goes there.  DUDE YOU JUST STOLE MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS just send him a fucking plane ticket to come visit for fuck's sake.

If Season 3 happens I will watch it with cautious optimism but put away and true hope or expectation of quality.  For now, I sit in wait of Season 6 of Game of Thrones...

Tb