BBC Review: Is Fantastic Four really a mess?1 min read

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How decadently bloated is our summer-movie culture? It’s so inflated that less, on occasion, really can feel like more. Josh Trank, who directs the new reboot of Fantastic Four, stages the film with the cheesy simplicity and plain, pre-digital visual language of a late 1960s B-movie ““ and, wouldn’t you know it, those very qualities allow it to come off as a light subversion of today’s blockbuster aesthetics. The material is conventional comic-book pulp, but the unfussy style of Fantastic Four doesn’t leave you feeling like you’re drowning in franchise tropes. The very squareness of it is refreshing.

Then again, let’s not overstate the virtues of that accomplishment. The new Fantastic Four is much better than the cutesy, cluttered version that came out 10 years ago, but it’s really just a slender wisp of an origin story. Miles Teller, so intense in last year’s Whiplash, dials down his charisma to a gentle hum to play Reed Richards, a smiley, whiz-kid science geek who leads a team of young geniuses in creating a teleportation machine. They’re working out of a New York think tank where even the mildest banter runs to deeply serious disquisitions on the quantum possibilities of movable matter. But let’s be clear: this stuff is no more plausible today than it was in the “Beam me up, Scotty!” era of the original Star Trek ““ it’s just magic dressed up to look like science.

Read the full article here>> Via BBC
Image Credit: IMDb