Fantastic Four (2015)
Certified: 12A
Duration: 100 minutes
Directed by: Josh Trank
Starring: Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, Jamie Bell, Toby Kebbell, Reg E. Cathey, Tim Blake Nelson
KRS Releasing Ltd

The Fantastic Four is one of Marvel’s flagship comic book titles created way back in 1961 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. In the transition to film the Fantastic Four has always had a spotty career.

In 1994 the comic book had been tackled by independent film-maker Roger Corman but the film ended up in never being released.

In 2005, Fox released the Tim Story­-directed Fantastic Four which, despite being placed under fire from critics, ended up gathering more than three times its budget to the tune of $300 million at the box office.

The sequel, Rise of the Silver Surfer, repeated that feat two years later as Fox continued to alienate critics and comic fans. Now along comes this reboot of the 2005 movie directed by Josh Trank.

In what is a huge mess of copyright ownership, Fantastic Four is one of those Marvel comic book titles whose rights are not owned by Marvel along with the likes of the X-Men (Fox) and Spider-Man (Sony).

It was always going to be costly for Marvel to get back the rights of its own characters. However, one legal loophole says that an intellectual property can revert back to its original owner if no films were produced within a certain time frame as stipulated in the original contract.

Well, Fox is not playing game and thus out comes this reboot of the 2005 movie, in a film that is separate from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

They end up getting powers beyond one’s imagination

Since the announcement of the reboot and the cast to play the members of the powerful cosmic-affected family, controversy ran amok on the internet, not the least over the fact that Susan and Johnny Storm are no longer siblings by blood and the fact that Johnny Storm is now played by an African American actor. The fan boy army was up in arms.

Trank, who had directed the unusual low-budget superhero movie Chronicle in 2012, has taken over the helm and the resulting film – for all those out there who were expecting a complete failure – is not as negative as the pre-release hype was making it out to be with the film being an overall improvement of the 2005 version.

The film has its good moments, is well produced, serious in its tone and comes with a great technical improvement over the other two movies.

With regard to the depiction of the suits, Fox here approaches this in the same utilitarian way it did with the X-Men movie adaptations.

Miles Teller plays Reed Richards, a super-brilliant young scientist who is having a hard time getting people to appreciate his teleportation science in a serious manner.

However, years later he ends up meeting Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) who takes him to the Baxter Institute. There he meets Sue (Kate Mara) who had been adopted by Dr Storm and also her brother Johnny (Michael B. Jordan) who is very impulsive.

The very tough Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), Reed’s long-term friend, is also brought into the scene when Reed wants to test his theories.

The group end up in an incident revolving around the use of the device which supposed to bring untold riches when they gothrough it.

They end up getting powers beyond one’s imagination: Johnny can turn into flames, Sue can become invisible and project force fields, Reed can stretch while Ben has been turned into a stone monster.

While the group will try to tackle the issue of their powers, there is also the danger of how the world will look at them and at the transformation of Victor von Doom (Toby Kebbell), a former prize student of Dr Storm, who has now been turned into something totally different.

The cast overall rises to the occasion well. Teller and Mara are well balanced and have strong chemistry between them. Kebbell brings pathos but, once the mask is on, it’s only his voice which is projecting any sort of emotional resonance.

Propelled forward by a strong musical score by Marco Beltrami and Philip Glass, Fantastic Four emerges to be a better movie than one expects it to be.

A conscious effort has to be made to dissociate this film from the original comic books on which it is based and, in doing so, one will find that Fox has delivered a movie that can be seen as an alternate take on the Fantastic Four we all know.

Like most first superhero films, the film has an overall feel that it is a movie in preparation for a sequel, reported to be released in 2017.