Fantastic FOOOOOOOOOOUR! Phase Six kicks off, although it’s tough to say what a phase means nowadays.
- Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards / Mister Fantastic
- Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm / Invisible Woman
- Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm / The Thing
- Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm / Human Torch
- Julia Garner as Shalla-Bal / Silver Surfer
Just got home, we caught the “Screen X” version which has a main fake Imax size screen, then projects additional footage on the left and right walls.
Hardly anyone went to the Screen X version so we had that going for us.
What it looks like going in:
What it looks like in practice:
It’s… interesting. It’s not 100% through the movie, just key scenes, and it does appear to be unique footage shot for the format, not stretched or copy/pasted.
Obviously the main screen is the real movie and everything extra is, well, extra. It also makes daylight scenes way brighter in the theater due to three projectors running.
If you like comic books and comic book movies, there’s a lot to like here. No spoilers. I was concerned about a run time coming in under 2 hours, but everyone did a great job.
My only real complaint is not enough Ben. Reed, Sue and Johnny all seem to have projects in the movie, oh, and Ben was there too. :( Feels like if they had wanted to add more run-time, fleshing out Ben would have been a good start.
That theater experience looks distracting. I would personally hate it.
I agree on Thing. He really didn’t have much to do based on the nature of being the brawn of the group and this movie was about solving problems intelligently. I’m not super familiar with the Fantastic 4 comics versions though, so I’m not sure if they could have/should have switched the language decoding from Johnny to Ben or not. Johnny had enough time to show off powers.
Ben never would have cracked the language thing, but they do have the bit with all the kids cheering him on at the school, and they had multiple opportunities to expand on that, especially when the public turns against them, but just… didn’t.
Weird that they set it up, didn’t follow through, and had a sub-2 hour movie. 10-20 minutes wouldn’t have made a difference for the movie as a whole, but would have added a bunch to Ben.
Re 2 hour runtime.
Both Fantastic Four and Superman clock in around the 2 hour mark, but both could have had an extra 30 minutes and it would have been well spent. Both are similar in that we’re being plopped into a thriving superhero world and need to get up to speed and then the main plot happens.
I expect Ben’s story was more closely tied with whatever story was supposed to exist with Natasha Lyonne’s character who has the setup scene with the kids, but then (mostly) nothing, except a quick reminder she exists before the big battle.
I find it interesting too that these are the first two superhero movies I can think of that actually make it a point to evacuate their cities before it gets serious. :)
Oh yeah, and surprised the teacher was just some random person and not Alicia Masters. :(