In 1961 Stan Lee and Jack Kirby started Marvel Comics with Fantastic Four #1. They wanted something different from the traditional comic book superheroes. The characters wouldn't be in some Metropolis or Gotham City, they would be in New York. If they had super powers he'd want everyone to know it, so no secret identities. Their heroes would be real people, with real problems like paying the rent and family squabbles and even for a couple of issues, without costumes. FF comics combined adventure (with mundane super-villians and with earth-shattering cosmic ones) with everyday life and a little bit of Quasimodo-like self-pity. This movie, for better or worse, captures this pretty well, but without the earth-shattering cosmic villians.
The bulk of the movie is the obligatory origin story. Reed Richards and his buddy Ben Grimm want to study a space cloud which could unlock the origin of life. NASA turned them down so they turn to Reed's MIT classmate Victor von Doom who's the head of a huge company with its own space station. Sue Storm is a scientist who used to date Reed but now works for and dates Doom and her younger brother Johnny is a pilot who washed out of NASA where he worked with Ben. Doom agrees to help for 75% of any profits and off they all go. The storm hits early and they are subjected to special effects. They return to earth and while under observation at Doom's private medical facility in snow covered mountains find they have super-powers. Johnny can burst into flame (fire), Sue can turn invisible and generate force fields (air), Reed can stretch elastically (water), and Ben has turned into a super-strong rocky orange creature (earth). Doom is also affected and turns into metal and can conduct electricity or something. Reed vows to cure Ben, Johnny is enjoying the celebrity and Sue acts like mom keeping them all from fighting while falling for Reed again. Doom however lost his company somehow and wants revenge against not just Reed but all four of them.
I think the above captures some of the feel of the movie, meandering while trying to get details out that don't really fit together all that well. We see a few scenes were Sue gets mad at Reed for not taking action in their relationship, and that provides the impetus for the resolution but we get nothign to explain what attracted her to him and nothing on her relationship with Doom. Ben's story could be quite tragic, he's become a monster who's site scares children and causes his fiancee to leave him, but again it's treated superficially. Doom's character and company make no sense whatsoever. It's a pre-IPO company with enormous towers and its own space station. It's not clear if he's the CEO or smartest scientist, but for some reason the bankers give him a week to turn things around or they'll back out. Nothing is remotely realistic. And while the four undergo transformation they don't ask Doom if he is, he keeps them secret, and they don't want to examine him to find out why he wasn't affected by the same phenomenon.
There are some funny bits and it's pretty true to the comic. But in comparison with Batman Begins it misses all the details. It turns out the original comic, while ground breaking, isn't all that good by today's standards. Spider-man explores responsibility and the difficulty of having a secret life. The X-Men explores prejudice. The FF are left to explore normalcy and that's not all that interesting for superheroes. The Incredibles seemed to be mostly based on the Fantastic Four, but is so remarkably better it makes this film seem pointless.
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