Although it boasted the state of the art in product placement, collagen injection and tiresome Stan Lee cameos, I'm still going to have to give the new Fantastic Four movie a thumbs down. Emily says that it's silly to carp about the movie failing in ways that any reasonable person would expect it to fail. So while I was taken aback to find the writing well below even the "doomed TNT original sitcom" level of quality and closer to "decent fanfic", maybe it's not fair to complain about the ways this expected-to-be-bad movie resembled... a bad movie. I paid for a bad movie, and that's what I got.

But disrespect for the Marvel canon? That just won't stand. The guy playing Dr. Doom seems like he would be better cast as a brooding new doctor on Grey's Anatomy than as the fearsome and merciless ruler of Latveria. And where the hell was Galactus? Yeah, that was a voracious-looking space cloud. But it boggles my mind that a creative process that settled on "my bad" and (immediately before the deployment of a cyclone-based attack) "let's all go for a spin!" as mots justes somehow decided to forego an awesome CG version of the comic book Galactus, presumably over worries that it might come off as cheesy.

UPDATE: A proof that a giant dude with enormous metal sideburns can be made to look totally rad, I offer up this screencap from the Marvel Ultimate Alliance videogame, which I found on this webpage. Given that this is just from a videogame cutscene and that the FF movie seemed to have a pretty big SFX budget, I'm confident that the creators could have come up with something cool.