So, my Labor Day weekend consisted of a thousand loads of laundry, creating a dry erase wall with whiteboard paint and watching THREE Fantastic Four movies.  Yes, THREE.  For some ridiculously low price, my eight year-old and I bought a DVD collection of Fantastic Four (2005), Fantastic 4:  Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007); Elektra (2005); and Daredevil (2003).  (The DVD irrationally contains the director's cut of the latter, making it rated R and unappealing for the family.  Sorry, Ben Affleck, we won't be needing you.)  So, we watched the first two and then decided we had to catch the 2015 version at the dollar movie.  Because it had a 9% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I was understandably skeptical.

So, none of the F4 movies are very good.  I guess no one knew how to make a good superhero movie until Iron Man in 2008.  The early versions are a little campy and silly, and even Chris Evans, who makes an darn good Captain America, grates on me as Johnny Storm/Human Torch.  The 2015 reboot reinterprets the four accidental superheroes as teenagers/young adults, but this doesn't improve upon the original story.  Reed Richards is an underappreciated genius being flunked out of science fairs by his ignorant teachers, and Ben Grimm is his grittier (grimmer?) best friend, whose abusive family conveniently runs a junkyard.  Reed is snapped up at the science fair (Meet the Robinsons, anyone?) by Dr. Storm, who wants Reed to be a scholarship student at his "institute," where he can perfect his teleportation machine.  Unbeknownst to Reed, his teleportation machine hasn't been teleporting objects to some unknown spot on Earth and back, but to a separate dimension.  And, although Dr. Storm and his scientists (including his daughter, Sue) hadn't been able to make the objects return from the other dimension, Reed has.  So, Reed joins Sue, her brother Johnny, and a recluse named Victor Von Doom (no foreshadowing there) to complete the project to send humans to the other dimension to learn of its powers.  Once the team successfully sends a monkey to the other dimension and back, they learn their project will be completed by NASA astronauts who will be the first humans in the other dimension.

This rubs Reed, Johnny and Victor the wrong way.  This bitterness seems illogical given the fact that none of these young guys have had any sort of astro-anything training.  In the original F4, all of the team worked for NASA at one time, and Johnny and Ben were pilots.  Sending these kids in space to a different world would seem fairly unbelievable and negligent.  But, the boys share a flask after hours and decide to take the teleportation machine for a spin before NASA can get "first steps" credit.  But, before they go, Reed calls Ben and invites him to tag along on the joyride.  Amazingly, there's no sort of security to get through to launch the teleportation machine, so the boys go.  Bad things happen, and when they are trying to come back, the new dimension "alters their DNA."  Sue, who ran to the control room when she (and she alone, apparently) received a notice on her phone that the machine had been launched, is also affected by the re-entry.  (As my 13 year-old put it, "she got some dimension on her.").  Voila, the Fantastic Four and Dr. Doom.

The movie suffers badly in comparison to the recent movie additions to the Marvel Cinematic Universe which combine really good special effects, a great cast and smart writing.  The science here is so sloppy and poorly presented that it makes it hard not to laugh.  The characters have very little witty banter or even intelligent dialogue.  The "action" takes up a small part of the movie, and the special effects seem decades old.  The difficulty in presenting the F4 story is that most of it is backstory (the five become a team, bad things happen, the team learns to use their powers, an ending showdown with Dr. Doom over a vague power conflict).  Both the 2005 and the 2015 version struggle with how to have an action movie that requires a great bit of wind-up and that does not have a concrete conflict.  But, Captain America had the same problem of a long backstory.  However, the wind-up there is told really well with a great script and about 20 more minutes of movie, and the conflict of WWII and Hydra provides enough action.  Another problem is that the comic book powers of the F4 characters don't translate well to a realistic superhero genre.  Reed Richards can stretch his body in a lot of directions?  That's really hard to depict in live-action without looking stupid.  Invisibility (Sue) is also hard to depict on film, though the 2015 version seems to do it better than the 2005/2007 films.  The Incredibles family makes all this look cool in Pixar animation, but it's tough to pull off in live-action.

Apparently, a sequel is already in the works.  We can only hope that the Avengers aren't in it.

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