Headscratchers / Fantastic Four (2015)

Women are too wise for the plot?

• Why didn't they get Sue to go on the trip with them? Is it because women are supposed to be the "sensible" ones who don't do dumb things when drunk? Because that's still not a good reason.
  • Perhaps they were afraid she'd report them to her Dad.
    • Which, to be fair, she does immediately upon discovering their plan.

Destroy the earth? Of course!

• Why did Doom want to destroy the earth or whatever?
  • They do try and give Victor some vague, ill-defined, anti-establishment, anti-military industrial complex, anti-corporate motivations that tie into Franklin's vague, ill-defined environmental concerns. Doom's apparent leap in logic was "if the military/government/big business interests control the dimensional travel, they're going to use it to fuck the world up more than they have, and they're going to fuck up my new home. And they're the only ones who are going to control it, so I have to destroy them and everything else to stop that from happening." That is a very faulty leap in logic, it goes without saying. An argument could be made that a year in isolation and unknown alien energies have taken a toll on Victor's sanity, but while that can be inferred from the movie, it's never actually suggested and all the characters act like Victor should be in full, rational control of his mental faculties, so, who knows.

Pants.

• Why is the Thing not wearing pants? Was it too "unrealistic" for them to have made pants for a giant rock man?
  • I guess the mentality is that he doesn't really need pants. Even in the comics it's strongly suggested he doesn't have external genitals anymore; his pants/briefs mainly serve as his uniform to show team pride rather than serving any real function. Still, The Artifact endures for a reason.
  • Given his great strength, he may just tear through any pair he's given.
    • If that's the case, then shouldn't the Hulk, Thor, and Superman (who are all stronger than The Thing) not wear any clothes either. I mean I guess since Thor's clothes are Asgardian that they are designed for their strength it makes sense but the Hulk still wears pants, it's honestly just a courtesy thing.
    • There's a bigger chance that the Hulk has still has something we don't want to see, while the Thing doesn't. Superman is also civilized enough to keep wearing clothing, and in some continuities his supersuit is actually just as durable as him.
    • But it's still just a courtesy thing, the Thing's pants are there for the same reason the Hulk has pants, to cover whatever may be there.
    • In the comics, the Fantastic Four's suits are made to work with their powers. Thing's pants are made to be as durable as he is and are resistant to his strength, just as Johnny's uniform doesn't burn off, Sue's turns invisible and Reed's stretches as he does.
  • It's not that he's too strong for clothing, it's that this version's rocky protrusions are too sharp. Put anything short of an all-steel suit of armor on him, and it'll be shredded the first time he moves a few steps.

Why don't you just explode their heads?

• Why didn't Doom just make all of the cast's heads explode? He seemed pretty adept at killing in droves.
  • It seemed to me that he at least tried that with Sue and her powers could block his. Ben might have been too durable for it, as well. The rest, Villain Ball.
  • Maybe the amount of green energy (no matter how small compared to Doom) inside of the four makes them immune to Doom's head-exploding? Eh?
  • Doom didn't explode Franklin Storm's head. Maybe he got tired after killing most of the staff.
    • Maybe his powers run on a Vancian Magic system, and he can only explode a certain number of heads per day.

Unusually uninteresting science fair project.

• Why wasn't the teacher impressed by Reed's teleportation device.
  • The teacher was a hard-core skeptic, who, despite the light show and energy pulse, assumed it was a simple illusion. There might be some backstory there of resentment with the teacher being annoyed with Richards being smarter than him dating back before 5th grade, but if so the film doesn't touch on it, and to be fair that was a good decision as it already takes them too long to get their powers.
  • Though he also blames Reed for destroying the glass backboard with his 'illusion', making for some impressive cognitive dissonance.
  • The movie made it seem like the guy is just a dick. Giving characters a plausible motivation for their actions doesn't seem to have been a high priority when writing the script.
  • Because the it's a very illogical low quality movie.
  • And because Disastrous Demonstration is a trope.

Vague Age

• How old are Ben and Reed in this? In 2007 they look young, about 11 or so, years later in around 2014/2015 they are found during a high school science fair, aging them to around 18 or so. Reed goes to the Baxter Institute and joins Sue, Johnny, and Victor, all older than high school? So how old are Reed and Ben supposed to be?
  • Reed mentions they were in fifth grade in 2007, which would put them at around 10 or eleven, so they'd be 17-18 when Reed first joins the Baxter program. It really says something about their school that Reed at least wasn't in advanced courses or even in college by that point. By all rights he should have been a recognized member of MENSA.
    • So he's 17 or 18 when he joins the Institute, but then that would make him and Ben the youngest members of the Fantastic Four since its assumed the Storms are done with school. But a viral video labels Ben and Reed both as 24, so is there another time skip between Reed joining the Institute and them getting their powers?
    • I mean, they'd have to be seventeen or eighteen because as far as this troper is aware, science fairs tend to be school events specifically for students. Are there science fairs that are going to allow entry into a couple random assholes who graduated from the place six years prior? Besides, the movie lists the prologue as 2007, and after that as "present day", which I assume means 2015.
  • If they are 11 in the prologue, that would make them 18 at the science fair. Considering the Baxter Building's teleporter took a lot of time to build, it's likely that almost a year passed (since it seem structured like a college, and treated like one, perhaps it's late in the "spring semester'). So it would be fair to say that Reed and Ben are 19, or at least very close to it.
    • OP here, if that is true, then how old are the others (Sue and Johnny namely). Johnny has to be at least 16 because he drives without an adult and the age to do that is 16 depending on the circumstances otherwise it's 18+. And if Reed is such a genius he should know better than to drink under age. Plus, a viral video (as mentioned above) lists their ages as follows: Victor- 28, Reed and Ben- 24, Sue- 23, Johnny- 20. So either the video is wrong about the ages of Fox's continuity is off, which doesn't surprise this troper.
    • Reed does say something about alcohol being harmful for brain cells, only to get drunk anyway, the implication being Victor and Johnny have talked him into it.
    • But that still doesn't answer the question of how old they are. And Victor should know better than to give a minor alcohol since he could have gotten into some serious trouble. Of course, something like that would never happen in real life. And Victor von Doom would be very concerned about underage drinking, even though he's from a part of the world where 16 is the (barely enforced) legal age.
  • There is also the vague "creeper" vibes I got from Victor, seeing as Sue, Reed and Ben are all roughly the same age, whereas Victor spend a "decade of his life" to the project before leaving it an not established but apparently good while before the movie present, meaning that Victor is a whole lot older than any of the team lets say 16-18 when he started, then 10 years plus say between 1-5 years after quitting puts him at about... between 27 at the lowest and 33 at the highest, that means whatever thing that happened with Sue was when she was probably still under 16. whole lota wrong if the numbers are right.

Victor and the Green Energy

• When they get to Planet Zero, Victor seems innately drawn to the green energy lava, with multiple shots of him closing his eyes in awe as if being pulled toward it. It seemed like more than just the alcohol or pride in getting the teleporter to work. Was that an Aborted Arc that never got fleshed out, or was the planet manipulating him or something?

Here's our superscience lab

• At the end of the film, the team gets a gigantic, already operating lab in the mountains, full of advanced, futuristic machines and gizmos. Where did that come from? It was suggested that the Baxter Foundation was housing most of the world's geniuses, who never had any achievements on the scale of the futuristic sci-fi tech seen in the ending.
• It could have been a predecessor to the Baxter Foundation as it is confirmed to have predated the Foundation. It could also be a subsidiary of Area 57.

Containment suits

• So, how exactly do the containment suits work? Is Johnny just constantly on fire without his? Is Sue still stuck flickering in and out of the visible spectrum without hers? Neither of them seem particularly torn up if this is the case.
  • Ostensibly this is the case. Reed has problems keeping himself together when suddenly deprived of his suit by Doom. Perhaps Sue and Johnny would have similarly unpleasant freakouts without 'em—which leads to questions of hygiene. The way Reed is only briefly inconvenienced by the loss of his suit is probably indicative of a cut subplot about trying to maintain control without it.

Doom's armor

• The suits worn for the trip to the other dimension are cloth, plastic, and glass. So how does Doom suddenly sport metallic armor and a metalized face at the end? As an attempt to answer my own question: metallic dust storms that somehow resulted in the accretion of metal over his skin?
• Being burned and fused with skin might have created a weird chemical reaction that metalized it.

It took you that long...?

• Ben and Reed were surprised to find out the rocks they got were from another dimension. If they knew they had sand from somewhere else, and Reed is a super-genius, how in the hell did he not think to get it tested before then?
  • Probably because that wasn't in the budget.
  • It was an achievement in ignorance to travel between dimensions. Reed says that he "suspects" the rocks are from the Gobi Desert, but can't say for sure, implying that something is off. Sue and Franklin add that they've studied their sample for some time, but ultimately realized it's unlike anything on Earth. So the implication there is that there's a rough similarity (likely to the Gobi), but distinct enough that they were able to tell it was distinct.

Why doesn't Ben get recruited as well?

• Reed first comes to Franklin Storm's attention when he and Ben build an anti-gravity engine, and Franklin gets him enrolled in the Baxter Foundation. Fine, all well and good, but what about Ben? Yes, the machine was Reed's idea, but he helped build it too, and he deserves at least some of the credit — but Reed and Franklin basically just leave him in the dust. What the hell?
  • Reed is the brains and Ben is the grease monkey. Yes, he's smart, but Baxter is a genius school and they're likely contracting out the actual construction. Ben himself fully recognizes it's not his kind of school.

Where did Doom get his cape?

• Really where did Doom get his cape from. It wasn't part of his suit, he didn't bring any fabric with him, and the flag is too small and too thin to be made into a cape with a hood.
  • It honestly appears to be the flag. It was a big enough flag, and seems to have the striped pattern. Perhaps the Negative Zone burned it and made it grow thicker?
  • This troper always figured it was his sweater/coat, grown tattered

Why does Sue have to be blonde?

• If Michael B. Jordan can be Johnny, why couldn't Kate Mara keep her natural hair color as Sue?
  • They had enough controversy on their hands as it was. Why give people more reason to be pissed at your movie when you can avoid it with simple hair dye? More broadly that's because Sue is one of the comics' most iconic blondes. As for Jordan being cast as Johnny — yeah, that really went well.
    • Don't blame the actor, blame the director.
    • Or the suits, or both.

Why not just make them real siblings?

• Josh Trank cast Michael B. Jordan as Human Torch before all others. So why not just have gone ahead and cast a black actress for Invisible Girl? Is it because Hollywood still isn't too accepting of interracial love (certain reactions to the movie Focus for example, released in the same year) or because it would be stretching it to much for an audience to accept such a change in one character let alone two? Or is it a mix of both
  • It's actually neither of those reasons. Trank in interviews revealed that he himself grew up in a family of people with different backgrounds and ethnicities and it was something he wanted to express on screen. He also intended to include backstory in which Johnny felt he was unwanted, as he was conceived while Sue was chosen, and this was to be the backbone of the dramatic tension between the family. Unfortunately this was cut from the movie.
    • Also, on a side note, it also plays up how all four of these kids are misfits as they're not biologically related, instead all coming together because fate brings them together.
    • As for interracial relationships being not accepted, generally speaking the only time it becomes an issue is with a black man and a white woman (like in Focus) not the other way around.
    • Not that Reed and Sue ended up having much of a love story anyway.

Why did the head of the Baxter Foundation decide to go to a school science fair?

• There's no indication he had any idea of what Reed was doing before hand, and Reed's later conversation about how his life would have been different if they hadn't been at the fair suggests they really weren't there just to find him. Is that really the most efficient way for Dr. Storm to find new talent?
• He may have been there to scout someone else or just had free time on his hands and likes to attend science fairs.

Reed Richards, international teenage fugitive

• So up until the accident, Reed Richards has been established as book smart, but very naive and unworldly. For one, he's not savvy enough to get anyone with authority to pay attention to his working **interdimensional teleporter**. Now, does this seem like the sort of person who could escape a military base, flee the country, and successfully hide from the CIA for a full year? And did they not have any soldiers stationed outside the base who might notice the naked stretchy guy running away?

Give the kid his plane back, Reed

• After not having a toy car to teleport, Reed decides the next best thing is to take the model plane from the project next to him to send. The kid gets it back, but it's melted and covered in sand now. Why didn't he just he just send, say, a quarter or a pen — anything that doesn't involve ruining the centerpiece of a child's science fair exhibit? He's probably getting graded on this. That kid was right, Reed — you are a dick.
  • Not to mention that interfering with someone else's display and presentation is grounds for disqualification anyway.

Doom's Power Source

• Doom says that being immersed in Planet Zero's energies allowed it to sustain him without food, air or water. He also explicitly says that the planet gave him incredible power. So how come after a year of living on Planet Zero, Doom had a limp?
  • He doesn't — he's just faking it so that he can get back to Earth, and kill all the base personnel. Why he needs to do that, rather then just building his giant death beam, isn't explained. The limp vanishes in later scenes.

The answer to our own earth?

• Franklin Storm keeps talking about how interdimensional travel will save the earth. He only brings up possible other energy sources (which they have no reason to believe will be there), how exactly are these supposed to save the earth? Let alone the fact that the only reason we have to believe it's necessary is Franklin Storm bringing it up. When the dimension is shown at the first test, he believes it can explain the origin of our species...based on what? You have 4 cameras showing you a barren wasteland! Even if he did hear Sue talk about how much it presumably resembles ancient Earth, what kind of ground is that to go on?
  • For that matter, Franklin keeps mentioning how he wants to "save the Earth/save this planet/etc.", but he never specifies how the Earth is in danger, and how the actions he wants to take will save it. If we can't understand Franklin's motivations, how are we supposed to sympathize with him?
  • It's at least implied that they could use Planet Zero for a renewable energy solution.
    • But they have absolutely no reason to believe that. Until this point, they'd only been able to send things, not retrieve anything but dirt. Heck, using it as a garbage dump would have made more sense with the information they had.

The tech had practical uses already

• Doctor Storm's superiors told him they needed something with practical uses. But they already had they ability to send things into another dimension, which has lots of uses. Like getting rid of radioactive fuel.
  • It's implied the powers that be believe Earth —or more accurately humanity's existence on Earth— is in danger, and the environment has been screwed beyond the point of conventional repair. So, the original plan was "Planet Zero" as an opportunity to search for new resources.

Why not just let Victor go back?

• So, the Person of Mass Destruction who's trashed the place with a gesture or two and killed everyone who got in his way just by looking at them says all he wants is to go back to a LIFELESS PLANET IN ANOTHER DIMENSION. And Franklin Storm keeps trying to stop him, to talk him out of it, to do anything but say "Sure! Bye!" and let the problem walk away on its own? I've heard of Too Dumb to Live, but talk about literal. (Of course, it does turn out Victor can ex machina up a doomsday device, but at the time, there's no reason to think he can make good on the "if your world must die so that mine can live, so be it" thing, assuming Franklin even knew he'd said that.)

Why doesn't half of New York get superpowers?

Sue gets her powers from the shockwave as a result of the experiment going awry. Fair enough. But then the shockwave is shown to cover at least half of New York City, which is pretty populated. If the shock wave was enough to grant Sue her powers, why didn't everyone in New York City, or at least the Baxter Building, get superpowers as well?

From earplugs to goggles

The first two times we see Reed's setup in action, he warns anyone nearby to cover their ears, but says nothing about protecting their eyes. Yet when the same mechanism is employed for the chimpanzee test at the Baxter Building, they all put on dark glasses and no ear protection whatsoever. What, is there a One Sense Limit on which type of sensory organ is placed at risk of overload by inter-dimensional transits?

Reed's Teacher

Why is Dan Castellaneta still Reed and Ben's teacher in high school? Did he follow them or something?