What Happened? A Fantastic Four Review

That new Fantastic Four film is in theaters and its quite ambitious. It toys with the source material in interesting ways and on paper has a great cast. It doesn’t “feel” like a superhero movie and truly takes a long form approach through its origin story. Every aspect of the film prior to release seemed special and different, but something went horribly wrong while bringing all that ambition to the big screen.

To say FF had a troubled journey in development, would be a gross understatement. With reports coming from everywhere that director Josh Trank had numerous disagreements with Fox and even reports that Trank wasn’t asked to participate in reshoots needed as recently as 3 months ago, things seemed quite grim (pun intended) for the production. Its not clear if Trank was booted, or if he left voluntarily but his name is still on the finished project and much like David Fincher and Alien 3, he has stated the movie that was released wasn’t the movie he finished a year ago.

After seeing the film, the behind the scenes fight between creator and businessman is visible in nearly every aspect of the movie. From the bad acting from good actors to the inexplicable 3rd act tone change, Fantastic Four feels like two worlds colliding (and for those of you that have seen the movie, I’m just gonna say pun-intended…again). We’ll probably never know exactly what happened in the production that made things go so sideways, but as the internet always does, let’s speculate. Trank, who’s best known for directorial debut film Chronicle was tasked with rebooting one of the most beloved comic franchises in history. Fine, he seems like a good choice. Chronicle was a found footage superhero movie that was good really good. It had a great mysterious indie feel and really took the genre in cool places. The problem comes in when Fox needs its Fantastic Four movie to be a major pillar in their Marvel/X-men universe. Here-in lies the conflict. The X-Men films have a tone and an expectation to them. With just enough whimsy, those movie work because they aren’t hyper serious and they seem self-aware. They are well made Hollywood movies, aimed at the widest possible audience.

The movie Trank seems to have been making was a more grounded than your typical X-Men film. The bleak outlook of the second act is a tone foreign to the X-Men films. The characters weren’t charicatures of super-heroes they were just kids and telling the story of how these kids messed up and became the Fantastic Four. The first act feels like an indie film for a reason. For what its worth, there’s sparks of great movie in that act when attempting to establish who these kids are.

Trank obviously wanted to make a slowly developing movie, with very deliberate plot shifts. The character powers are not a focus until deep into act two and even then they are used sparingly. Oldly enough, even with the focus on the origin, two of the four heroes are undeveloped blank slates. Ben Grimm, who’s character showed signs of potential at first is a one note emo-rockman the remainder of the movie. Sue Storm being adopted was a big change to the fiction that doesn’t pay off in anyway, it seems to have been done solely to make Johnny Storm black.

The four have zero bonding time before having to battle Dr. Doom, and jumping the timeline 1 year did little to establish a relationship, especially with the MIA nature of the leader of the group. Alot of these changes seem very odd, but if someone it trying to take a story and truly do something different with it, they succeed.

Unfortunately, the obvious edits and the shoehorning of the big hollywood ending, made it clear that Fox was not comfortable with where the movie was going. Much of the last act doesn’t make sense. Reed Richards ends up yell plot points directly at the audience, just incase they didn’t understand that Dr. Doom was doing bad things. Then, moments later, when it is not clear as to what Doom was doing, Reed is strangely silent. Doom’s motivation for the final scenes are thin, and combined with a grossly inconsistently representation of his powers, an actually frightening version of a great character turns laughable at times.

Of course I wasn’t there, I don’t know what movie Trank was trying to make, but I truly don’t believe this was it. Would the one he would have made been better? I don’t know. Maybe Fox panicked for good reason. We probably will never know, but I’m squarely going to place blame at the foot of Fox. Once you pick your guy with a vision, stick with it. If it fails, then you can say that the public didn’t like the vision and move on. By interfering with production so late in the process, what came out was a Trankenstein’s Monster of a movie (oh man, can we get Trankenstein trending?) that loses both its heart and its appeal. Regardless of weather Fantastic Four is a critical and financial failure, first and formost, its a failure of the film making process. The best thing that can come of this movie is a hard expensive lesson learned. I don’t know if the FF can survive this big of a structural collapse. The mind blowing part of the this is that it was actually released. It made it through writers, directors, producers, actors, executives, PR teams, etc and nobody made the decision to just pull the plug.

That says alot about the state of Hollywood business. They knew they had a clunker, its got a 9% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. 9%! The lowest rated Transformers movie is 18% and those movies are horrible, they are basically the Nickelback of movies. As always, its more important to salvage what money they can out of the project by releasing a busted-ass movie to theaters than it is shelve the entire thing. By releasing this, the FF brand that Marvel spent decades cultivating has been severely damaged. Now, when the rights inevitably revert back to Marvel and they have to figure out a way to get these wonderful characters into the MCU, their job will be extra hard.

Verdict: Fantasic Four is a disappointment, it fires on no cylinders, and leaves the team in a worse place than where it started.