10 July 2005/3 Tammuz 5765: Review of The Fantastic Four

Greetings.

Today’s weird thing is a movie review sent to me by an old friend, included below (the review, not the friend). Enjoy.

Aaron

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Good evening.

I recently heard about what sounded like one, one wonderful film: The Fantastic Four. I have always loved numbers, and I thought to myself, What could be more fantastic than the number four? Four is one of my favorite numbers! I must see this film! So my bats and I went to the nearest movie theater and bought tickets on the day it was released. This movie was definitely not what I thought it would be. I admit I was a bit disappointed at first, since I had expected that the hero of the story would be a fantastic number four; instead the story was about four superheroes. This, however, is good, since four is a number of superheroes which has not appeared in any movie I have seen before. The number of supervillains was a bit boring: one, only one. Batman Returns, Batman and Robin, and Daredevil had two supervillains each, and Batman Forever had three!  But The Fantastic Four had just one.  One is a wonderful number, but as a number of supervillains, it’s been done to death. This supervillain didn’t even have an unusual feature worth counting, such as Dr. Octopus’s four mechanical arms in Spiderman 2 or Two-Face’s two faces in Batman Forever. Still, I found plenty of things to count, starting with Dr. Doom wanting a second opinion and thus making up for his unremarkable appearance. Since the central characters are superheroes and a supervillain, one can count their superpowers and how many times they use them. There are plenty of action sequences, where one can count how many bullets are fired, how many things explode, how many vehicles are totaled, and how many people have to run for their lives. The Thing alone was a numerical delight since he had zero ears and 189 scale-like formations on his skin. And those who feel romantically inclined will have the pleasure of counting the sparks that fly between Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman, and the number of times the Human Torch hits on women. All these opportunities for counting more than make up for my initial disappointment and the clichéd number of supervillains. And if one is feeling too mentally tired to count (if that is even possible), there are plenty of entertaining numbers on computer screens. I haven’t had this much fun since I saw 2001!

My rating: Four, four fantastic stars out of four! Ah, ah, ah, ah! (Who would expect anything less from my favorite studio, 20th Century Fox?)

Count von Count
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