{"id":200,"date":"2005-07-11T17:45:14","date_gmt":"2005-07-11T17:45:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ealasaid.com\/writing\/reviews\/2005\/07\/11\/fantastic-four\/"},"modified":"2022-06-11T11:33:54","modified_gmt":"2022-06-11T18:33:54","slug":"fantastic-four","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/2005\/07\/11\/fantastic-four\/","title":{"rendered":"Fantastic Four"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><b>Directed by:<\/b> Tim Story<br \/>\n<b>Starring:<\/b> Jessica Alba, Ioan Gruffud, Michael Chiklis, Chris Evans, Julian McMahon<br \/>\n<b>Rated:<\/b> PG-13 for sequences of intense action, and some suggestive content.<br \/>\n<b>Parental Notes:<\/b> This is a fairly standard comic-book movie. It&#8217;s not too gory, and there&#8217;s little in the way of sexually suggestive content. While the action scenes may be too intense for youngsters, it&#8217;s mostly harmless.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\nMovies made from comic books are a staple of the summer cinematic experience. This year we have &#8220;Batman Begins&#8221; and &#8220;The Fantastic Four,&#8221; and they offer remarkably different sorts of entertainment. Where &#8220;Batman Begins&#8221; makes an effort to be at least semi-realistic and examines the motivations and psychological states of its hero, &#8220;Fantastic Four&#8221; is clearly just out to entertain. For the most part, it succeeds, but like many first films about superheroes, it&#8217;s a bit bogged down with exposition. Hopefully, this potential franchise will follow in the footsteps of movies like &#8220;Spider-Man&#8221; and &#8220;The X-Men&#8221; and produce a superior sequel.<br \/>\nThe Fantastic Four of the title are Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd), Sue Storm (Jessica Alba), Johnny Storm (Chris Evans), and Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis). Reed is a world-famous scientist whose scientific successes have been dogged by financial failure. Reed used to be involved with Sue, but she&#8217;s now working for Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon). When Reed and Ben approach Doom with an idea for a series of experiments on one of Doom&#8217;s stations, Doom agrees &#8212; but insists on coming along and upon Sue and her hotshot pilot brother Johnny with them.<br \/>\nAs a result, all five of them are in the station during an accident involving a solar storm. This being a superhero movie, the storm gives them all unusual powers. After some time spent exploring these powers, they all master them to a great extent and our heroes wind up as the Fantastic Four: Reed is super-stretchy Mr. Fantastic, Johnny is the literally hotheaded Human Torch, Sue can vanish and throw force fields as The Invisible Girl, and Ben is now the super-strong rock-creature The Thing. I&#8217;m sure you can guess who turns out to be the villain of the piece; with a name like Victor Von Doom, he never had a chance at being a hero. At least he has an interesting mutation; his body slowly changes into metal and he develops the ability to control electricity.<br \/>\nOverall, the film is entertaining. There&#8217;s a fair bit of action and excitement, and plenty of humor. Johnny always has a quip at the ready, and although at times it is painfully obvious what he is about to say, more often than not he is good for a laugh. There&#8217;s a small measure of emotional weight as well; Ben&#8217;s mutation leaves him with a frightening outer form and he feels alienated not only from those he cares about (like his fianc<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Directed by: Tim Story Starring: Jessica Alba, Ioan Gruffud, Michael Chiklis, Chris Evans, Julian McMahon Rated: PG-13 for sequences of intense action, and some suggestive content. Parental Notes: This is a fairly standard comic-book movie. It&#8217;s not too gory, and there&#8217;s little in the way of sexually suggestive content. While the action scenes may be too intense for youngsters, it&#8217;s mostly harmless.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[57],"class_list":["post-200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-rated-pg-13"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2oSX4-3e","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1759,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions\/1759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}