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This movie feels like marvel overcompensating on playing it too loose with other movies since Endgame. Everything about this movie is safe and restrained. Worth a watch. But whether or not you are familiar with the Fantastic 4 characters from comics/cartoons/past movies, don't expect to be wow-ed.

The story itself is great. They opted to not redo the origin story just like the new Spider-man movies. But there are a lot of exposition in the first 2 acts explaining the backstory anyway. However, they chose to tell the story in the most bland way possible. Everything in the movie happens strictly in chronological order. That makes the movie accessable to small children i guess. But to adults, you can easily imagine the movie to be much more gripping if certain acts happen in a different order.

Characters are just average. Not all 4 of the team members have visible chracter development throughout the movie. And 1 of them is given very noticeably less opportunities to show off their abilities throughout the entire movie for seemingly no particular reason. Thankfully main casts' acting are all pretty on point. One thing worth noting is that this is a period piece happenning in the 60s in an alternate universe. So i don't know if they intended to have a token black actor just like the 60s or not, but there is one and she does nothing other than being the token. That left a bad taste in my mouth. Either don't put that character in at all, or give them a more important role.

It's a marvel movie. So I was expecting a lot of "cameos". But after finishing the movie i'm kinda relieved that there aren't any cameos that are completely out of left field trying to force a connection to other marvel movies. The story is so grounded that they didn't put in characters that has nothing to do with the plot. Surprised to see marvel reigning in this particular aspect of their movies.

CGI is a bit all over the place. Macro shots are all pretty good. But details like a certain character walking is so jarringly bad that you will immediately notice it when the scene comes on. I don't understand how marvel can mess up something so basic and still nail the big CGI scenes.

Overall this iteration is probably mildly better than the Fantastic 4 movies from two decades ago, and definitely a lot better than the one from a decade ago. This movie stands on its own and doesn't feel like a throw-away world-building piece for the MCU like so many other marvel projects. But it's too safe, bland at times. I'd give it 6.5/10 but since IMDB doesn't allow half points i'll round it up to 7.

I'll keep if brief

9/10 visual. Very top gun.

7.5/10 racing accuracy. Overall good except the fact that sonny didn't see one black flag for any of the things he did, and, curbs don't launch f1 cars like that.

4/10 story. Same old individual heroism hollywood story that has been told 200 times.

6/10 characters. Only sonny's character motivation is established. Other characters have varying degrees of "why do they want to be here" syndrome, some worse than others. But the main characters have visible character development throughout the film nevertheless so overall not shockingly bad characters.

A lot of people complain about the runtime. Sure the story can comfortably be told within 90min. But they stretched the extra 40min to mostly show some gripping fictional f1 races. Not the worst usage of screen time.

6.5/10 my final score rounding up to 7.