Sometimes Bigger IS Better:

Well, Saturday was indeed my last day at the toy store. I DID buy the gas-mask doll, sadly upon closer inspection, he does NOT have the skin tone to be a blond. He is cute though. I also bought, to celebrate my last day of employee discount, the extended cut DVD of Fantastic Four.

I've said before that I'm one of the only people who actually enjoyed the movie. It was cheesy fun which is all I was really looking for.

Anyway, I watched the extended cut and honestly, it's pretty good. In fact, I thought it was really good. Well. Decent. It's never going to be a great movie. It's never going to be any of the Spiderman movies for example. But I thought the extended scenes really did a good job of fixing my biggest problem with the film.

I thought, honestly, that the film hadn't adequately explained certain emotional elements for the characters. Why did Johnny suddenly go from "Gotta have fun and pick up chicks" to "Gotta be a hero?"

There was actually a scene in the novelization (which I'd read first) that I was really disappointed in not seeing in the movie. Where Johnny's recklessness and irresponsibility actually lead to a lovely verbal smackdown from a would-be conquest. This scene is actually in the extended edition. It's quick, but it's pretty important to his development in the movie. When she says (paraphrased) "If I had your powers, I'd be doing something, instead of hanging around doing tricks in bars," you can see it visibly hit a nerve. When he's there, alone, in the middle of the cooling crowd, it suddenly makes a lot more sense why he came back, even before seeing the strange light from the tower.

Another moment that kind of bothered me in the film was how Ben freaks out after Reed comes back from his one night away from his work. Admittedly, Ben's in a hellish position, but he's living in the same tower. He has to have seen that Reed was working himself into the ground to find a cure. But Victor talks to him once and that's enough to shake his faith so that on the one night his best friend actually takes for himself, he freaks out?! I just couldn't buy it. Their friendship is stronger than that, or at least it should be...

The extended scene though makes that whole sequence make a lot more sense. It's NOT Victor's paltry attempt at dark side seduction that causes Ben's explosion. The extended scene however shows Ben having a very nice evening of his own which very, VERY quickly turns horrible. The utter humiliation of the experience made his explosion of temper a lot more understandable. It was the last straw.

Reed and Sue's relationship benefitted a lot more from the new scenes too, I think. Little bits here and there were enough to make it a lot more clear that these were characters who might have split a while ago, but still had a past and a connection and strong feelings for each other.

I still don't understand why, considering Sue was also a scientist, Reed was working on that cure ALONE. But I'll let it go. :-P

I do think the extended cut of the film makes a big difference, I liked it a lot!