A self-taught critic and genuine movie geek
I was ready to give up on ever finishing this review — frankly, I almost fell asleep in the theatre, which doesn’t exactly inspire me to write — but it occurred to me that this would be good practice for writing about the next Fantastic Four movie, so here I am.
They keep jamming more and more into these movies and making them harder and harder to summarize. Someday I’m going to give up on discussing the plot and just list all the things I thought about and discuss what the audience did, sort of a meta-review, but that day is not today. I’ll do my best to hit all the high points.
It’s a tricky thing, retelling a fairy tale, or at least it seems to be in the movies. The writers have to find a way to make the story fresh without making it unrecognizable, and I have a feeling such ideas often seem much better on the page than they turn out on the screen, for various reasons. Sometimes you’re pleasantly surprised by a Snow White and the Huntsman, and sometimes you end up with, well, a movie like this, which doesn’t surprise you pleasantly or otherwise.
I’m not sure if the dots are really necessary, but that’s how the title’s listed on imdb. Now, maybe some of you haven’t seen the first movie, 28 Days Later (not to be confused with the Sandra Bullock film, 28 Days, because except for the titles, they have no similarities whatsoever), but that really doesn’t matter. There are no characters returning from the first film, unless you count the poor beleaguered city of London, and all you really need to know is explained in the captions at the beginning.
For once, I feel absolutely qualified to review a movie, since I own all the Bourne movies and have watched them at least a few times each. I practically have the first one memorized. You should see the way I hang on every word when Chris Cooper and Brian Cox are sniping at each other. If that isn’t how the people who really run top secret black ops agencies talk, it should be.
You probably know the basics already: An impossibly powerful energy source, a Norse god or two, the original 1940’s superhero, a noted assassin, a narcissistic billionaire playboy inventor, and the world’s best archer. Okay, that last one ends up sounding a little lame summed up in so few words, but the effects of a well-placed exploding arrow should not be underestimated. Oh, and there’s an alien invasion. I almost forgot.