Like many reboots, the latest edition of the Fantastic Four was met with hostility from both audiences and critics alike as it received some of the worst reviews of any superhero movie released since Catwoman (2004), the movie that nearly killed Halle Berry's career.
For anyone paying attention to the film over the past few months, this should come as no surprise. Fantastic Four had one of the most tumultuous productions of any in recent memory. Relations between sophomore director Josh Trank and 20th Century Fox became quite miserable during production, so much so that Trank eventually boxed himself off from the crew, became completely unresponsive and essentially went crazy on set, a chain of events stemming from the massive amount of oversight that Fox lumped onto the director, stripping him of his creative freedom. Or so the story goes.
Knowing all of that, there was no way I could resist buying a ticket to witness the mayhem that surely was to be the Fantastic Four reboot. Unfortunately, I wasn't disappointed.
This version of the Fantastic Four follows Reed Richards (Miles Teller), a boy genius, as he invents his way into a program for the gifted through the Baxter Foundation. The team to-be assembles here as Reed meets Johnny and Sue Storm (Michael B. Jordan and Kate Mara), along with Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell). This team of whiz kids then invents the impossible: a portal into another dimension. Using the level of common sense appropriate for geniuses, the team drunkenly uses the portal without supervision, dragging Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) along with them because the filmmakers had to squeeze him in somehow, and the body horror ensues.
If I'm being honest, I must admit that even though I had heard the terrible stories about the film's production, I still had hope. Trank's directorial debut, Chronicle (2012), was fantastic. It's gritty originality wasn't something often found in the superhero genre and I was hoping that would translate to Fantastic Four. Early interviews with Trank revealed that his approach to the film had similar grit to Chronicle's. He wanted to get away from the bubblegum style of Marvel's cinematic universe and really dig into the horror of being transformed into a man perpetually on fire or a man made of stone.
Given the fact that the Fantastic Four is traditionally the most ridiculous of any superhero team, with their matching bright blue suits, Fantasticar, and absurdist power sets – like being able to stretch one's body endlessly – this sounded like the perfect direction to take the team. Turn the concept on its head and instead of a bunch of circus clowns, you have a group of teenagers struggling with life-altering deformations. On paper, that's a killer concept. The trick is the translation.
Through the first half or so, it seemed as though that translation had worked fine. The film featured some pretty interesting ideas, a very talented cast and a reasonably well-plotted story. It didn't seem to have the capacity to be terrible. If anything, it was just boring. I just didn't get what all the fuss was about.
But all of that changed rather swiftly in the final act. What was a relatively decent movie revealed itself to be a disaster cataclysmic enough to rival Pompeii. In the last fourth of the movie's run time, every facet of Fantastic Four falls to pieces. The villain, a character so shamelessly terrible that I refuse to mention his name here, ushers in this bombastic drop in quality. It's as if the ending features dialogue, plotting and special effects from an entirely different movie, one without any budget, talent or soul.
However, this sudden turn for the worse wasn't planned, but was actually a result of the aforementioned clash between the director and the studio. Trank imploded before they had filmed the ending, so the conclusion was shot well after the rest of the film, and it was done so in an embarrassingly haphazard fashion. By that point in the production, Fox had dumped too much money into the film to simply abandon it, so instead of throwing it into the garbage like they should have, they finished the film. But I use the term "finish" very loosely.
Yes, technically the Fantastic Four has an ending. But it's done so quickly and with such little finesse or attention to anything resembling quality that instead of providing an actual conclusion to the story that had been told up until that point, we are left with a horribly warped, poorly scripted anti-conclusion, something so foul that it must've come from whatever dimension that disfigured our poor heroes in the first place.
So for those of you hoping that Fantastic Four in any way resembles director Trank's 2012 hit Chronicle, you will be heavily disappointed. This is a reboot that will haunt his career for a very long time.
For anyone paying attention to the film over the past few months, this should come as no surprise. Fantastic Four had one of the most tumultuous productions of any in recent memory. Relations between sophomore director Josh Trank and 20th Century Fox became quite miserable during production, so much so that Trank eventually boxed himself off from the crew, became completely unresponsive and essentially went crazy on set, a chain of events stemming from the massive amount of oversight that Fox lumped onto the director, stripping him of his creative freedom. Or so the story goes.
Knowing all of that, there was no way I could resist buying a ticket to witness the mayhem that surely was to be the Fantastic Four reboot. Unfortunately, I wasn't disappointed.
This version of the Fantastic Four follows Reed Richards (Miles Teller), a boy genius, as he invents his way into a program for the gifted through the Baxter Foundation. The team to-be assembles here as Reed meets Johnny and Sue Storm (Michael B. Jordan and Kate Mara), along with Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell). This team of whiz kids then invents the impossible: a portal into another dimension. Using the level of common sense appropriate for geniuses, the team drunkenly uses the portal without supervision, dragging Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) along with them because the filmmakers had to squeeze him in somehow, and the body horror ensues.
If I'm being honest, I must admit that even though I had heard the terrible stories about the film's production, I still had hope. Trank's directorial debut, Chronicle (2012), was fantastic. It's gritty originality wasn't something often found in the superhero genre and I was hoping that would translate to Fantastic Four. Early interviews with Trank revealed that his approach to the film had similar grit to Chronicle's. He wanted to get away from the bubblegum style of Marvel's cinematic universe and really dig into the horror of being transformed into a man perpetually on fire or a man made of stone.
Given the fact that the Fantastic Four is traditionally the most ridiculous of any superhero team, with their matching bright blue suits, Fantasticar, and absurdist power sets – like being able to stretch one's body endlessly – this sounded like the perfect direction to take the team. Turn the concept on its head and instead of a bunch of circus clowns, you have a group of teenagers struggling with life-altering deformations. On paper, that's a killer concept. The trick is the translation.
Through the first half or so, it seemed as though that translation had worked fine. The film featured some pretty interesting ideas, a very talented cast and a reasonably well-plotted story. It didn't seem to have the capacity to be terrible. If anything, it was just boring. I just didn't get what all the fuss was about.
But all of that changed rather swiftly in the final act. What was a relatively decent movie revealed itself to be a disaster cataclysmic enough to rival Pompeii. In the last fourth of the movie's run time, every facet of Fantastic Four falls to pieces. The villain, a character so shamelessly terrible that I refuse to mention his name here, ushers in this bombastic drop in quality. It's as if the ending features dialogue, plotting and special effects from an entirely different movie, one without any budget, talent or soul.
However, this sudden turn for the worse wasn't planned, but was actually a result of the aforementioned clash between the director and the studio. Trank imploded before they had filmed the ending, so the conclusion was shot well after the rest of the film, and it was done so in an embarrassingly haphazard fashion. By that point in the production, Fox had dumped too much money into the film to simply abandon it, so instead of throwing it into the garbage like they should have, they finished the film. But I use the term "finish" very loosely.
Yes, technically the Fantastic Four has an ending. But it's done so quickly and with such little finesse or attention to anything resembling quality that instead of providing an actual conclusion to the story that had been told up until that point, we are left with a horribly warped, poorly scripted anti-conclusion, something so foul that it must've come from whatever dimension that disfigured our poor heroes in the first place.
So for those of you hoping that Fantastic Four in any way resembles director Trank's 2012 hit Chronicle, you will be heavily disappointed. This is a reboot that will haunt his career for a very long time.