Here are the notes I made throughout the movie. I'm not going to spoiler the spoilers, because quite frankly, it's not worth it, this movie is shit and nobody should watch it- also I'm lazy.

- I'm going to ask you to imagine a movie made in the 80's where the main guy is a smart dude that gets no recognition. You probably imagined a really bad scene where the main guy, as a kid, does something REALLY smart that gets no recognition from his classmates, except for that one kid who's gonna be his friend. That is literally what happens, played straight all the way through.

- The teacher character is dumb. I'm not saying '80's movie dumb' because this movie tries to be a little bit realistic, which makes this guy full on idiotic. Here's kid Reed, probably around ten years old, talking about supercomputers and things that are real in 2007- not 1988, this is 2007, right before the iPhone- and the guy tells him "you were supposed to make a presentation about a real job from the real world". Okay, guy is forgiven, he's just dumb. But nope. Cut to seven years later, teenager Reed LITERALLY INVENTS TELEPORTATION and the guy says, no joke, no paraphrasing, this is an actual line spoken by a character, "this is a science fair, I'm not seeing any science here, this is magic".

- The kid actors are awful. The kid playing Reed has this monotone way of speaking and way of looking that makes him look like a lost fish. Miles Teller does that too.

- Tim Heidecker of Tim and Eric is Reed's dad. Appears for one scene and does nothing apart from coomplain that Reed's experiment.

- Reports that "it's clobberin' time" is Ben's bully brother's catchphrase are true. But the problem is that this is used once and never comes back around. There's no arc built around Ben having emotional abuse. In fact, Ben's brother is cut off before he can really start slapping around by Ben's mother. It's as out of place here as every other actual thing from the comic.

- It's at this point I realized something. The characters in this movie can speak two kinds of dialog. It's either a. painfully stating their or other character's characteristics ("Reed's the brains here" or "I thought you grew up Johnny") or b. spouting exposition to further the plot (I genuinely think that in the first fifteen minutes they only talk in exposition speak or to show just how nerdy Reed is).

- Let's get back to Miles Teller. His performance is awful. He speaks only in a single tone, barely registers above 'confused' and his eyes are always stuck in 'netural acting mode'. But, oh, he's not the worst. No, because this is when we're introduced to Kate Mara's Sue Storm. For starters, she gets her 'character establishing moment' on a library which stinks of a rom-com meet cute (it is) and if Teller is giving no fucks, Kate Mara is literally in another dimension, practically dead. Her face probably has two settings: "acting" and "strained look for the CGI".

- In her first section of dialog, she talks about how she identifies patterns. So you think "what an interesting quirk", right? Nope. It's for furthering the plot later on. None of the characters have things they do, they just have things the plot could use later on.

- Victor Von Doom is perhaps the WORST adaptation of a comic book character. For starters, its clear that wasn't his name when the movie was being shot. Everytime the characters say "Victor Von Doom" you can see the ADR changing the name. By the way, the ADR is awful. There is a part where they're wearing masks and the mask move to show they're talking. Victor's mask moves seventy times and he says two lines.

- How is Victor Von Doom, the Marvel Universe's greatest villain introduced? As a neckbeard. I shit you not, he has a neckbeard, long hair, is playing videogames and is in a dark house. By the way, let's talk about Doom's character: he's anti-government. That is it. I swear to God I wish there was something more, but like with all character arcs, they start by hinting out that there's a genius behind all that pain but give up and go back to one line descriptions of characters. Thankfully he washes up and goes to the lab.

- It's at this point, 20-25 minutes into the movie, that I realized two people in the front row were fast asleep, snoring loudly.

- Sue Storm, one of comics' most important women, is given nothing to do in this movie. I'm not joking here. She doesn't even go into the negative zone in the first place. Her main actions in this movie can be boiled down to three things. Actually, that's the same for all characters minus Reed. Until the final battle, pretty much everyone does absolutely nothing. Nothing happens. Nothing happens.

- Doom's accent comes on and off.

- And now, a line from a movie made in 2015:
Doom: "Have you seen what the leaders of this world are doing to it?"
Sue: "Check out Doctor Doom here."

- More characters talking about how other characters are this or that.

- Johnny Storm is introduced in a street car race, which is screenwriting lingo for 'is a rebel'. Again, like exactly all of the other character arcs, this is made out to be a really big thing for the character and is promptly ignored before being solved with two lines of dialog. Nothing happens and everything is fixed in two lines.

- Michael B. Jordan is the only one giving a fuck and his performance warrants the two genuine laughs I had in this movie. Poor guy.

- I want you to picture two of the most important relationships in the Fantastic Four. I guess you must have said Reed and Doom's rivalry and Reed and Sue's love. So how do they set this up? Do they develop the characters in clever dialog or slowly introduce it in subtle ways? Nah. They do this in a montage. They do this in a montage.

- More talking for the sake of plot. More lack of chemistry between Teller and Mara.

- It's at this point that they manage to send a monkey to and back from the negative zone (it's called Planet Zero in the movie but FUCK THAT), and Reed, Johnny, Sue and Doom were expecting to go next. Government guy (because of course its the big bad military) says that they're going to send this to NASA. Doom says that this will lead to the CIA and the FBI getting their hands on this. First of all, what? Second of all, let me make this very clear: Doom says right to Government Guy's face that he hates the government. Keep that in your heads.

- The characters get drunk and decide to call Ben and go into the Negative Zone because of course. Sue gets a warning that something's going on. There's no security around what is perhaps the biggest invention of the twenty first century. This is as dumb as the coincidences of the Amazing Spider-Man franchise.

- They go into the Negative Zone, which is a gray Grand Canyon with green pools of lava. It's really fucking unimaginative, which is a shame because they had Jack Kirby's imagination to work off. Shit goes down, Doom falls into a pool of green lava and the others rush back into the pods. It's here they gain their powers. Remember in the original movies how their powers matched their personalities? Nope. In here, Ben becomes the Thing because his door won't close (????) and rocks get in the pod with him. Johnny turns into the Human Torch because fire gets into the pod (???????) and goes with him. Reed turns into Mr. Fantastic because... actually nothing happens to him when they get sent back. Sue gets turned invisible because she was near the explosion.

- It's here where Josh Trank tries to have a go at body horror. It starts off nicely with a shot of Johnny on fire that is really unsettling. But then it veers off into awful effects territory when Reed crawls all the way through the room, turns around and realizes HIS LEGS WERE STRETCHED! The entire theater laughed. Get used to that: the theater laughing at sad moments became a recurring theme as we witnessed the effects of varying quality. Whenever Reed stretches, it's like someone is animating a GMod ragdoll for the first time. The Thing goes from decent effect to dried up Muppet Baby. The Human Torch is the most decent effect. The only good one is Sue and even then it's just making her invisible.

- Right now, I should point out that although the movie has many, many flaws, it's still passable. It's not incredibly bad, it's just a really awful 80's explorer movie. Throughout this whole half, although the characters are shit, there is a feeling of exploring an unknown land that is quite like the one from the comics. It's bad, but there's glimmers of a good movie.

- And this is where everything goes to absolute shit.

- First, there's an one year time skip where it feels like 40% of the movie was cut out. We're told via Government Guy that Sue, Johnny and Ben (Reed escaped) have been working for the government on missions. Keep this in your heads. We later see that Ben only wants to find Reed, that Johnny enjoys going on these missions because it's the purpose his father said he was going to fill, and Sue complains about wanting to cure them despite clearly going on these missions. Also, that awful CGI from the trailer where the tank disappears? It's here, and they didn't change. It's as bad as it looks.

- Second, at this point, if you have half a brain, you'll start to notice Kate Mara has two different hairpieces. When she has her normal hair, it's probably the parts Trank directed. When she has an obvious wig, it's a reshooot. She slowly starts appearing more and more with the wig, which shows just how much of this movie was butchered in the process of making it.

- Reed is escaping through the world via a thing where he uses his rubberyness to change faces. I don't know how, don't ask. He's building a transportation shuttle for one. This never comes up. This never comes up again. Nothing happens, and things get dropped in an instant after being introduced. The army sends Ben after him. They have the worst superhero fight of all time when Reed- who is shown rubbering his away around a super fast taser- is incapable of dodging the most telegraphed headbutt of all time.

- Reed and Ben have an one to one time on the way to the base. The CGI monster is incapable of delivering any emotion. The Thing doesn't have any emotion too. Heyooo. Sue and Reed talk, apparently fixing all the problems Sue had with Reed leaving them to stay a year on an army base and be treated as weapons. From this point on, Sue has literally two or three lines. It's awful.

- Johnny is implied to be angry at Reed yet hugs him when they meet up again. Character arc solved. Johnny has two or three lines after this. It's awful.

- They build another teletransporter and send a squad to the Negative Zone. They find Doom there. The suit has melded with his skin turning him into a gray mannequin. At first he seems completely harmless and is actually happy they came back. Then, Government Guy (who I remind you knows that Doom hates the government) happily walks over to Doom and proclaims that he's with the government and they're gonna go to the negative zone. Following the grand tradition of "I'm a villain now because plot" that started out with Electro, Doom is now a bad guy and will kill everyone.

- That scene you guys posted above happens. It's a bit effective, but everytime it shows mannequin Doom the effect is ruined. Doom kills Johnny and Sue's dad, even though he was a friend and heavily pushed for Victor to help. He goes back to the Negative Zone, starts a giant blue light thingy to destroy the Earth because he can build a new world in the Negative Zone. By the way, they never say what his powers are, but he's almost god-like.

- Let me talk about Franklin Storm for a moment. I had no problems with Johnny being black, I really didn't. What I had problems with is that they didn't do anything with the adoption angle. As a movie about family, having someone being adopted would be a good way to talk about what family is today, really show how times have changed. It's just... not used in any way. Sue's adopted and that's it. In any other movie, okay, fine, no problems, but this is a big change from the comics. If you're going to make a big change from the source material, use that to say something. Like how Tony Stark in Iron Man got injured in Afghanistan, making his critique of warmongering enterpreuners much more relevant. It just feels like Trank wanted to give Jordan a job.

- Doom is a shitty Malekith. He has three lines after this point. It is awful.

- The Fantastic Four go to the Negative Zone and fight with Doom. All problems are solved after this point. Reed shares no words with Ben and the two like each other again. Also, in what is perhaps the most infuriating moment, Doom traps Ben under a bunch of rocks, brings Johnny down, is slowly crushing Sue and somehow forces Reed to melt into bad CGI effects. Reed punches him and all characters break out of their prison. Yep. No stakes. No fucking stakes.

- The Fantastic Four come back. Army tells them "we still want to use you guys as weapons". They say no. We just assume the fucking US Army shrugged and went OK.

- In a cool nod to the comics, the FF are given Central City, their original base. There's an old guy there who I would have named Herbie on a nod to the cartoon but who the fuck cares.

- What follows is the worst exchange in comic book movies, and a reference that is only rivaled by the entirety of Gotham, the TV show, in its shittyness:
REED: We gotta have a name.
BEN: bla bla bla -looks at base- You gotta admit, it's kinda fantastic.
ME: Oh no.
REED: What was that?
BEN: What was what.
REED: Say it again.
BEN: It's fantastic.
ME: -makes audible urgh noise which causes audience to laugh-
REED: That's right guys, I've got it. You ready?
- movie cuts to title -

- Fuck this movie. Fuck this movie. Fuck this movie.