Okay, so when I finally sat down in the theater to watch the 2015 reboot of Fantastic Four, directed by Josh Trank. You know the one, where four young misfits teleport to an alternate dimension, come back all mutated with wild powers, and have to team up to stop their former friend who’s now the big bad. Classic setup.

Now, I’d heard all the internet whispers and read the not-so-glowing reviews, but honestly? That just made me more curious. Call it cinematic masochism, I had to see the mess for myself.

And here’s the thing: it didn’t have to be a mess. The cast is actually stacked. Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Jamie Bell, Tobby Kebbell, and Michael B. Jordan are all solid, interesting actors. Were they my dream casting for the Fantastic Four? Not really, I don’t even have one. But they’re all capable, and I was open to seeing how they’d spin it.

What the film did do right, for a minute, was giving the characters this “outsiders with brains” vibe. They’re awkward, brilliant, kind of isolated in their own ways. I could roll with that. There’s even this creepy, body-horror-ish element that I didn’t expect but kind of liked. It made their transformations feel unsettling in a good way, like, “oh, wow, these powers are kind of monstrous.”

But then the whole thing just… flatlined. The pacing? Brutally slow for a huge chunk of the movie. And right when things finally pick up, bam, it’s over, just like that. You can feel the cuts, like entire scenes and dialogue were yanked out mid-edit. It’s disjointed. Jarring. And so frustrating because you can see the bones of a better movie hiding underneath.

Fox had all the right ingredients: a cool cast, a decent concept, and some solid ideas, but it managed to burn the recipe anyway. If nothing else, Fantastic Four 2015 is a great case study in how important editing and studio trust are when making a movie.

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