WES Anderson’s charming 2009 animation called “Fantastic Mr Fox” was a correct use of “fantastic”. Its current, seldom-correctly-used popular use is mindless spontaneous service in the vocabularies of people seeking to convey high praise, high satisfaction, high whatever else that the speaker wants the listener to know is beyond a normal level of worth. Lazy language. Forgive me for abhorring that usage. Fantastic really means unreal, incapable of being believed.

In the title of young Josh Trank’s resurrection of a filmic notion based on an American cartoon strip, “fantastic” is doing its proper job. In 2007, a 13-year-old kid builds a prototype teleportation machine. In 2014, at a high-school science exhibition, a developed version attracts the attention of Dr Storm who sees it as the hope of mankind’s future. Cut to a huge research and development institution where a test machine is built, involving Storm’s adopted children and a lemony, slightly older young bloke who has solved the problem of how to recover what has been teleported away. Kidz rule in the teleportation biz.

From that beginning develops a pot-boiler perversion of the notion of science that asks its audience to accept that its dramatic progress to planets unknown as a paradigm for humanity’s eventual future is exciting entertainment. More correctly, the film’s real purpose is to separate you from your admission money with a project of scant merit from every aspect. The acting is wooden. The plot lacks innovation. The images lack credibility.

At all cinemas