Fantastic Four (1994, 2005, 2007) Film Series Retrospective

We are currently in the golden age of superhero films and Marvel is right at the forefront of this comic book revolution. Thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe along with films produced by other studios like Fox and Sony, many of Marvel’s iconic characters have graced the big-screen to solid success, from Iron Man to Spider-Man to the X-Men to even lesser-known characters like the Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man. But not every superhero has had a successful run on the big screen and probably the most infamous example of this has been the Fantastic Four. Despite being arguably one of the most famous superhero groups in not just the Marvel Universe but of all-time, their track record on film has been fairly mediocre at best, especially when compared with their fellow Marvel heroes like Spider-Man or the Avengers. The upcoming ‘Fantastic Four’ film, directed by Josh Trank, will be the third major attempt at bringing Marvel’s ‘First Family’ to the big-screen after two previous attempts in the past failed to attract much success. One film in particular didn’t even make it to theaters and the two that did are generally considered to be some of the weakest superhero films of their era. And today we’ll be looking at all three of those films. Yes I will be looking at not only the 2005 ‘Fantastic Four’ and its 2007 sequel but also the 1994 low-budget version that was ultimately never released in theaters. Here’s hoping that the new ‘Fantastic Four’ film will finally break this curse of this unlucky superhero film franchise.

THE FANTASTIC FOUR (1994)

Before the two ‘Fantastic Four’ films that we are all familiar with ever came out, and before Marvel was even the film powerhouse that it is today, there was actually a different ‘Fantastic Four’ film that even predates the 2005 film. This particular film was produced in 1994 by B-movie king Roger Corman and directed by music video director Oley Sassone. Never heard of it? Well, there’s actually a rather legitimate reason for this. For you see, this film never got a theatrical release, despite it being promoted in theaters at the time and the announcement of a planned world premiere at the Mall of America on January 19, 1994. Apparently the reasoning behind this move was that the film was never actually intended to be shown in theaters and was just produced so that producer Bernd Eichinger (who would go on to produce the following two officially released ‘Fantastic Four’ films) could retain the rights to the characters, though Eichinger himself denied these claims and instead claimed that Marvel stepped in because they didn’t want the film to ‘ruin the franchise’. Regardless of which story is true, most of the cast and crew were left completely unaware of this and in that regard, I do feel bad for them in this situation, having to ‘learn the hard way’ that the film they had all worked so hard on would never get to see the light of day. Unlike the 1990 ‘Captain America’ film, which was also never released in theaters but was released on home video, this film has never seen an official release outside of bootleg recordings on the internet.

To the credit of the cast and crew, if anything it looks like they at least tried their best with the limited resources that they had. This film only had a budget of around $2 million, and just about half of that budget went solely into developing the costuming for ‘The Thing’. But with that said, yes you could definitely tell that this is a very low-budget flick as far as superhero films are concerned based on certain elements of the production design and the visuals, or lack thereof in some cases. There’s seriously a ‘fight scene’ (and I use that term loosely) between the Thing and some of Dr. Doom’s henchmen which just consists of the camera rapidly spinning around to ‘simulate’ the action before cutting to the ‘aftermath’. And I’m pretty sure that the one major action sequence in which Johnny Storm is in full Human Torch mode recycles the exact same visual cues of an old ‘Superman’ cartoon from the 1940’s. Also there apparently wasn’t any major ADR work done for Dr. Doom because whenever he talks, he’s more unintelligible than Bane from ‘The Dark Knight Rises’. And finally, speaking of this iteration of Dr. Doom, he is easily the weakest villain in superhero film history as he lacks any sort of intimidation factor and repeatedly gets his plans foiled and his butt kicked by the Fantastic Four. Sure he may have a solid connection to the Fantastic Four being Reed Richards’ old friend from college, Victor Von Doom, but that doesn’t change the fact that he is just a wuss of a villain. Seriously, even Malekith from ‘Thor 2’ wasn’t as bad as him.

Ultimately, this ‘Fantastic Four’ is very cheesy and even a bit overly melodramatic at times, which partially stems from the film’s rather over-bearing score. But despite all of that, for some strange reason, I actually recommend you checking this film out at least once in your life (heck, I’ll even provide a link to it below). Let me be clear, it is by no means ‘good’ but similar to the legendary stinker ‘Batman and Robin’, it actually turns out to be one of those ‘so bad it’s hilarious’ films, namely due to the aforementioned ‘oddities’ that I mentioned earlier. And for what it’s worth, the four main leads in the film who play the Fantastic Four (technically 5 if you count the fact that Thing is played by two different actors); Alex Hyde-White, Rebecca Staab, Jay Underwood, and Michael Bailey Smith (Carl Ciarfalio plays ‘the Thing’) are fine enough in their respective roles. But ultimately I’d only recommend this film if you’re really interested in checking out an odd little part of cinematic superhero history; a low-budget superhero film that never got released to theaters and can only be viewed through bootleg-quality copies on the internet. Seriously, they released that godawful ‘Captain America’ film from the 90’s on Blu-Ray recently (I’ll get to that one someday) so why hasn’t this ‘Fantastic Four’ film gotten the same treatment? I’m serious, I think the time has come to give this film a proper home video release instead of just having it be viewable only on the internet and in rather piss-poor quality. In fact, dare I say that there is more heart to this ‘Fantastic Four’ film than the films that actually got released in theaters? That folks… is saying something.

Rating: 1.5/5

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHlBsLQ4BQs)

FANTASTIC FOUR (2005)

One whole decade after the 1994 ‘Fantastic Four’ film incident, producer Bernd Eichinger finally brought Marvel’s First Family to the big screen with 2005’s ‘Fantastic Four’, directed by Tim Story. The film was a solid hit at the box office, ultimately making about 3.3 times its original budget. However, the film itself fared poorly with critics and most audiences. As for me, I’ll admit that I don’t necessarily ‘hate’ this film compared to many others on the internet and while I hate using this term, I guess you can say this is sort of a ‘guilty pleasure’ for me. Still, this is definitely one of the weaker superhero films of the early 2000’s. It sort of shares a major similarity with the 2003 ‘Daredevil’ film in that it very much feels like a Hollywoodized superhero film in terms of execution, which seems to have been the major pattern for most of Fox’s Marvel flicks up until the X-Men series got itself back on track in 2011 with ‘X-Men: First Class’. In fact, for a superhero film, ‘Fantastic Four’ is actually rather light on superhero action. There are only about two to three major action sequences in the entire film and most of the run-time is instead focusing on scenes of the main characters talking and placing a lot of emphasis on humor that quite frankly comes off as being way too goofy. To anyone who complains about the Marvel Cinematic Universe films being way too focused on humor, trust me when I say that at least they’ve never gone ‘this far’.         

As far as casting is concerned, the film is about 50-50 in terms of its casting choices. The two biggest standouts are Chris Evans, before he took on another famous Marvel hero, Captain America, in, to be perfectly blunt, much better films, as the Human Torch and Michael Chiklis as Thing (also props to the filmmakers for sticking with practical make-up effects in order to bring Thing to life). Both do solid jobs in capturing their characters’ personalities and despite what I said earlier about the film’s over-reliance on humor, the back-and-forth camaraderie between them is actually one of the better aspects of the film. Heck, I’d also argue that Ioan Gruffudd was actually a solid choice for Mr. Fantastic even though he really could’ve benefitted more from a better script. But as for Jessica Alba as the Invisible Woman, this is definitely one of the biggest miscastings in superhero film history. In fact, this feels much more like stunt-casting given how much emphasis is placed on her sex appeal instead of any of the things that made the Invisible Woman such a great character in the comics. Julian McMahon is also majorly miscast as Dr. Doom. I may not have read much of the ‘Fantastic Four’ comics, but I definitely tell that the Doom of this film series shares little similarities with the Doom from the comics. All in all, though, I’ll admit that I still find this film to be fairly entertaining in parts and I don’t think that it’s the absolute worst superhero film of the era. But with that said, this is also by no means one of the genre’s best. Compared to other superhero films of the time like the first two ‘Spider-Man’ and ‘X-Men’ films, this is a much more ‘by-the-numbers’ superhero flick which definitely must have been majorly disappointing for fans of the franchise.

Rating: 3/5

FANTASTIC FOUR: RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER (2007)

So while the first ‘Fantastic Four’ film didn’t do so great with critics, it was successful enough to warrant a sequel in 2007 in ‘Rise of the Silver Surfer’. As the title suggests, this film, which surprisingly managed to warrant a PG rating after the first film was rated PG-13, introduces the iconic ‘Silver Surfer’, the herald of Galactus, the Devourer of Worlds. But like the previous film, this film also fared poorly with critics… but also like the previous film, I don’t think that this film is all that bad. In fact, I’d say it’s actually one of those rare sequels that actually manages to be better than the original, even if that’s not really saying much in the case of this franchise. It still carries quite a few of the same issues from the previous film, specifically the overly goofy attempts at humor and the hit or miss quality of the cast. Thankfully, though, this film does up the amount of action which was rather lacking in the first film. Because of that, this film also doesn’t drag as much at times like its predecessor did. And at the end of the day, the Silver Surfer (portrayed by Doug Jones but voiced by Laurence Fishburne) is definitely a major standout. But ultimately this film’s biggest downfall is how it portrays the character of Galactus. Instead of portraying him as the gigantic purple suit-wearing god-like character that comic book fans are all familiar with, he is instead turned into a giant cloud-like entity with a few fleeting visuals that resemble his look from the comics.

Now I’m not one to do many film comparisons but in the case of how Galactus is portrayed in this film, I feel that I must by comparing this infamous change to another infamous comic book film change; the ‘Mandarin’ fake-out from ‘Iron Man 3’. Obviously I’ve made it very clear in the past that I will always defend the ‘Mandarin’ twist because while it does go against how the character was portrayed in the comics, it actually worked well within the context of that film’s story. But the same cannot be said for Galactus in this film. There’s absolutely no reason story-wise for Galactus to look the way that he does in the film. Really, the only major reason I can figure as to why Galactus is portrayed like this is because the filmmakers couldn’t really come up with a way of having him look like he does in the comics without it being too silly. Though at the end of the day, I can’t really blame them that much for this because quite frankly even I can’t see how one can do this character justice on the big-screen without making some changes to his character design. So like with the first ‘Fantastic Four’, I’ll admit that I actually do like ‘Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer’. Again it is by no means the ‘best’ superhero film ever made. It makes one of the worst ‘character changes’ in superhero film history and it still carries some of its predecessor’s glaring issues. But at the same time I don’t think that it is ‘terrible’ and if I had to choose between this and the first film, ultimately I prefer this film as it does benefit from better pacing and more action.

Rating: 3.5/5