Fantastic Four Review: 7 Stupid Blunders That Totally Ruin The Film

7. It Totally Ignores The Comics (And Replaces Them With Nothing)

You know how normally when an actor is cast in a big-budget superhero movie the first thing they do is get all of the old comics based on their character and binge through them? Yeah, that didn't happen on Fant4stic. In fact, Josh Trank explicitly told his stars to not look into the character's backgrounds, citing that he wasn't taking anything but minor inspiration from the panels and neither should they. Now that's not inherently a bad approach. Blindly adapting a comic's visual storytelling without addressing the medium shift can lead to pretty-but-empty films like Watchmen, and even Marvel, who have made a mega-franchise off of bringing print's winding continuity to the big screen, have made some major concessions in their adaptations. But in every case where a comic book movie has worked, any change from the source has been balanced by providing something new. Fantastic Four alters the comic lore on a fundamental level, to the point where intrinsic elements of the characters are destroyed, seemingly going for a hard sci-fi tone (that's what the producers keep telling us), but never commits to it. You have a movie that's stripped of all original personality, and nothing to make up for it. Worst of all? There's not even a Stan Lee cameo.