Here's a repost of my review for "Fantastic Four" on MoviesWithButter.com:
I tend to skip reading reviews for films that I’m going to see, but I couldn’t help myself with “Fantastic Four.” I read both of the negative reviews from Hollywood Reporter and Variety. I also read on HitFix how Miles Teller, the star of the film, was expecting it to tank on Rotten Tomatoes. It did: a couple of days ago, the Tomatometer was in the low teens with a dozen reviews, even though there’s an embargo until the film opens.
Before the early reviews, there were also reports of erratic behavior from director Josh Trank during the shooting of the film, which eventually prompted Disney to yank him from directing the forthcoming Star Wars VIII.
On top of that, the screening I went to was media only, which is rare in Sacramento. Tentpoles like “Fantastic Four” are usually promotional screenings filled with fans the studios hope would later spread the word. Their absence is an indication that the studio wanted to curtail the potential bad word-of-mouth.
Before the film started, I tried to empty all of that from my mind and give it the benefit of the doubt.
And for the majority of the film, it works. I was engaged and invested in the characters, as they come together to build a teleportation device that can take them to another planet. I like the little touches. When these characters finally arrived at Planet Zero, the other planet in another dimension or alternate universe, one of them looks at the ground and picks up sand and small pebbles, which is like what we see from the images of Mars taken by the Curiosity rover; despite being a distant planet, it’s still made of the same materials we find here on Earth. Like Devin Faraci wrote on Birth.Movies.Death, it’s “a cracking good science fiction movie.”
