The Adequate Four

As if to make up for getting up early yesterday I got up a little bit later than usual today.
Not that it really mattered; I didn’t have anything scheduled for the morning.
Even so, I didn’t get back from my walk until 11:00, which meant that I didn’t have a lot of time for sitting around and doing more reading (or anything else), before I had to take a shower, get dressed, and head out to the theater.
It had actually been my intention to hit the mall or Wal-Mart or Bed, Bath & Beyond while I was in the area of the theater, but I couldn’t really find a compelling reason to go to any of those places.
Even so, I left early enough that I had a lot of time to kill before the movie started, so I killed most of it at Border’s before walking back to the theater.
So that brings us to the movie itself.
…
I drew this picture a couple of years ago. It’s not great, but I think it’s okay, and in the spirit of things I thought it’d be appropriate to post it with this entry.
As the title of today’s entry indicates, the movie wasn’t particularly “fantastic.”
(Yes, I do realize that I’m probably the 1,000th person to use that lame pun in reference to the movie)
However, it also wasn’t horrible.
Certainly it wasn’t the huge steaming pile that I’d expected it to be. In point of fact, my experience, like Scott’s, was very much like that of other people who’d seen the movie and written reviews of it.
Basically, they took way too many liberties with the source material, including some that were just downright baffling, the effects weren’t exactly spectacular, the plot was weak, as was much of the acting, and overall it just seemed to be lacking.
That being said, I actually sort of liked it.
I didn’t like it a lot, but it was adequate, and that seems to be the consensus of most of the comic fans who have seen it, even though there were, as mentioned, several very big problems with the movie.
But there were a lot of little things about it that, collectively, helped make up for some of the major flaws (much like my picture of the FF).
For the most part, as an example of a “little thing” that was done right, the personalities of the principal characters (particularly Michael Chiklis as Ben Grimm/The Thing) were spot-on.
Of course, most of Jessica Alba’s personality was located in her bra, but if they’d had a decent actress playing Sue Storm/Invisible Girl, it would have been an okay representation of her.
Despite her shortcomings as an actress, though, there’s just no disputing that Jessica Alba is hot. Hot enough, in fact, that you can find it in your heart (or somewhere else) to forgive her for yet another lackluster performance.
The guy who plays Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic (for the record, I’ve never understood why he didn’t call himself Dr. Fantastic, considering that he has several Ph.D.s), whose weird-ass Welsh name I can’t remember and don’t feel like looking up, did an adequate job, but really, the best performances were by Chris Evans as Johnny Storm/Human Torch, and the aforementioned Chiklis.
As for other little things, there were quite a few good visual gags, particularly with Reed’s stretching and Sue’s invisibility, which added humor without being too heavy-handed or – God forbid – campy about it (Thanks to Adam West and company, “campy” is one of the words comic book geeks hate most), and overall there was a very good chemistry between the four (if you count Jessica Alba’s boobs, collectively, as one of the four) main characters.
While he could definitely use some work, particularly by being made to look a little more shapeless and to have his brow expanded, Chiklis looked good as The Ever Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thing. Obviously it was a suit he was wearing, but for the most part it looked pretty natural, as if he really were a man mutated into a rocky-skinned monster.
The Torch effects were all pretty well done, too.
But like I said, while these little things, cumulatively, led me to be very forgiving of them, the movie had a considerable number of flaws.
The biggest problem was Reed’s IQ.
Essentially, Reed Richards' intelligence is so vast that he makes Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking look like total retards.
As presented in the movie, he was obviously a super-genius, he just wasn’t at the level he should have been.
This was most clearly manifest in the fact that Reed didn’t invent Unstable Molecules.
For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about (and probably don’t care), I’m not going to bother explaining what those are, but suffice to say that in the comics they’re one of Reed’s coolest inventions, so it bothered me that they occurred by accident, and that Reed had essentially no involvement in their creation whatsoever.
This leads me to the other big problem: Dr. Doom.
Never mind the baffling changes to his background. Never mind the fact his powers were based on mutation rather than the result of his technological genius, which should be second only to Reed’s. Never mind the fact that he was dating Sue.
What bothered me was that the guy in the movie was just NOT Victor Von Doom. That’s pretty much the easiest, and only, way to say it.
In any case, for as long as I can remember, “Fantastic Four” has been the self-proclaimed “World’s Greatest Comics Magazine.”
This clearly wasn’t the World’s Greatest Comics Movie, but it certainly wasn’t the worst.
In all honesty, I’ve never been a huge fan of the FF, but there are elements I enjoy, such as the family aspect, and most of them were present in the movie, which helped keep it from being the steaming pile I thought it would.
What it lacked, though, was, and there’s no way to avoid it, the fantastic.
Given the wealth of source material provided in the last 40+ years of the comics, the producers of the movie had a real opportunity to present an amazing, fantastic spectacle on the big screen, yet they chose not to take it.
Here’s hoping that with the inevitable sequel(s) they will explore some of these opportunities.
(For any fans of the comics, I’m talking about things like the Negative Zone, Galactus, and…well, you know what I’m talking about)
So that was the movie.
After the movie Scott and I headed to Olive Garden to eat. He didn’t want to have to head back to Manassas just to have to drive back up this way later to pick up Stacy (who was returning from visiting her father) at the airport, so I figured we could kill some time.
Scott had pointed out that we were in the vicinity of a comic book store, so we headed there after eating, only to find that it was out of business.
However, a store in the same little strip mall had apparently taken over the closed comic store’s inventory, so we went in there and checked it out.
While we were there Kathleen called in order to pass the time on her drive home. At Scott’s urging I told her that I was with my “other girlfriend.”
And that was my fantastic day (had to squeeze another one in).
Apparently because I haven’t been scheduling my days, I find myself writing these entries late at night, and not really managing to cover all the things I wanted to, as I really just want to go to bed.
I think the fact that I’ve been watching a lot more TV lately has something to do with it as well.
In any case, I suppose that being a bit less verbose here can’t be considered a bad thing, and that will do it for this entry.
Tomorrow I start my XML class, so I’ll be gone most of the day. Who knows when I’ll get around to writing an entry, but I’m sure I’ll crank something out.