|  | Exiled director Roman Polanski feels honored by winning the Best Director Oscar for his Holocaust drama [i]The Pianist[/i], Reuters reports. "I am deeply touched to have received the Oscar for best director for a film which recounts events which are so close to my personal experience, events which helped me to understand that art can transcend pain," Polanski said Tuesday in a brief statement. "I thank the members of the Academy with all my heart for this magnificent reward."
The stories are true; Fantastic Four is by far one of the worst films ever made. We’re not talking Batman & Robin bad; we’re talking Cabin Boy bad. Roger Corman has done some really awful stuff in his career but nothing with characters I know aside from Vampirella. I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive him for ruining a vintage comic book story like this. TV director Oley Sassone helmed the disastrous journey of this movie and he should be ashamed. For Example: at one point Ben Grimm’s blind girlfriend has a camera angle view at an attacker. What the hell? She’s blind! Oh, but trust me, it gets a lot worse. Now I could sit here all day and talk about how bad this is, but...wait a sec, I think I’ll do just that.
The story is loosely based on the same one in the comic but with some horrifying differences. Student Reed Richards and close colleague Victor [Von Doom] start the movie off working hard on some kind of space light device called the Colossus at their local college. Reed also happens to live with his jock-head, yet also scientific, buddy Ben Grimm in a bed-and-breakfast-type house owned by, you guessed it, little Johnny and Sue Storm’s mother. Well, forgetting plot development at all, while trying to work the Colossus machine, Victor is horribly scarred when it malfunctions despite Reed’s warnings. At the hospital, two unknown goons grab Victor and for some reason turn him into “Dr. Doom”. This strikes me as very odd since throughout the whole movie, there is no agenda for these two guys to do this and after they plate him in his armor and green garb, he only becomes their boss. These guys fell right out of the stupid tree; I guess they wanted to be slaves.
Fast-forward ten years. Reed and his ever-faithful bud Ben decide to proceed with the same project, but this time from space (for some reason). Anyway, they build a spaceship, which changes shapes and sizes through the whole film and is protected by some big hunk of crystal. A mysterious company that is, I guess, allowed to shoot people into space anytime they want funds this whole project. The only thing Reed and Ben need now is a crew. Who better to turn to than the same two kids from their old pad in college, Sue and Johnny, whom they haven’t spoken to in ten years because when Reed sees how grown up Sue is now, he ogles like a retard. In one sequence Reed actually asks Ben why would Sue and Johnny be qualified to go into outer space with them, in which Ben replies, “They’ll be so angry that you didn’t take them with us.” These are just two regular people, what in the hell do they know about space travel? Absolutely terrible, but I digress.
Once again, the plot gets worse. On the way Ben bumps into a blind woman who turns out to be Alicia Masters, his girlfriend from the comic. He instantly falls in love; I mean he actually says he’s in love. But at the same time, a creepy old sewer-dweller named the Jeweler (clever, right?) is also in love with Masters. So to win her over, he decides to steal the large crystal from Reed’s ship. Surprisingly, it isn’t very hard to do; all he has to do is crawl through a window and hop over some green laser beams on the floor and voila, he takes the crystal and replaces it with an exact replica made by crafted underground outcasts. Nothing beats quality sewer-living crystal makers. Well, the nicknamed “Fantastic Four” shoot off into space and on-cue the ship malfunctions, shooting them back to earth. Then all of the sudden the screen captures them running around on a nice green field with one piece of shuttle on fire and a couple other big fragments of shuttle scattered around them. Shocked, that they are unscathed and alive, they start to apprehend extraordinary powers. If you don’t know the Fantastic Four’s powers, then go read the comic.
Back in Latveria (a big, evil, mountainous, scary-type place), Dr. Doom appears shaking his hands about like an infomercial host. Astonishingly, it turns out Doom was the one funding Reed’s project the whole time. Why you ask? To kill him because he’s really his old friend Victor! The plot thickens and gets worse. He picks up the four from their wreck site and takes them back to headquarters for observation. Once there, for some anomalous reason, they decide to escape. I’ve stopped asking questions by this point anyway. Then they meet up with Doom who does some more unintelligent hand gestures and pulls a Dr. Evil and leaves the Fantastic Four to die at the hands of his goons. The four easily trounce their armed attackers with simple parlor tricks using their newfound powers. Cutting through the chase a little, they escape and realize that Dr. Doom is really Reed’s old bud Victor and decide to stop him from using an evil “laser” to destroy some unknown city that looks like New York.
Now garbed in the classic FF blue and white outfits they travel to unknown whereabouts of Doom’s hideout in Latveria. There, they employ more cheap parlor tricks to overcome more of Doom’s goons. The fighting is actually worse than the “Batman” TV show believe it or not. Ben saves his girlfriend, Johnny uses his flaming powers to stop the laser some how by flying in front of it, Sue pledges her undying love for Reed, and Reed has a two-minute showdown with Doom which ends the same way Tim Burton’s Batman movie.
Thank God I didn’t buy this movie when I saw it on display at comic-con. It wasn’t meant to see the light of day. Hell, I don’t think I should’ve even downloaded this atrocity (Did he say download? I’m sure he meant “rent”... -Chris-). I think the very ending explains how bad it really is, when Reed and Sue for some reason get married and his stretched arm is hanging out of the limo like an antenna waving goodbye at everyone. I think that was the last kick in the groin for this movie. Marvel must have sat and wept when this was completed. Whatever little budget they had went into the Thing’s outfit and the cheesy animation of the Human Torch flying after the laser at the end. What’s even sadder is that I recognized some of the actors in the film. This should be locked away like that porn that Sly Stallone was in and never be seen again. At least there is some redemption in it all, Chris Columbus has actually thought about redoing the flick later in 2004 (Let’s hope to God that he can do it right this time. -Chris-).
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