Away From The Hype: FANTASTIC FOUR

Sometimes, a movie is released and the hype/controversy surrounding it are too much for the movie to get out from under. Sometimes this means we sit down in the cinema with expectations and preconceived notions that we can’t escape.

Away from the Hype is an ongoing series looking at some of these movies years away from their initial release to see if, without all of the window dressing of hype, expectation, and controversy, the movies are actually any good or not.

The Fantastic Four Fiasco

On paper, the Fantastic Four should be an instant home run movie idea. It has a well of stories that go back to 1961, main characters with cool powers that are both varied and visually appealing, and at its heart, it is a story about a dysfunctional family trying to save the world. For some reason though, any time it gets adapted it falls flat. First, there was the unreleased and unseen Roger Corman version, which was made so that Constantin Films could retain the rights to the property. Then Tim Story managed to get two lacklustre movies out of it before finally (until someone else tries) Josh Trank was given the characters.

Hot off the surprise success of found footage superhero movie, Chronicle, Josh Trank was given the reins to Fox’s Fantastic Four in an effort to give the characters their due. Again, on paper, this seemed like an instant winner: young hot indie talent fresh off a subversive, weird superhero movie tackling a superhero team during this Golden Age of the superhero movie. Early reports seemed promising. He cast up and comers Miles Teller and Kate Mara alongside solid character actor Jamie Bell and superstar in the making Michael B. Jordan, whose casting as the race-swapped Johnny Storm caused idiots to clog up the internet with complaints. And while pressure might have been high for the director getting his first big-budget feature, stakes were fairly low.

The previous Fantastic Four adaptations sucked and, realistically, superhero movies have proven to be a license to print money. Even critical stinkers like Batman vs Superman made nearly a billion dollars, and origin stories tend to be given a bit of an easy ride provided they can stick the landing once characters are established.

Cracks began to appear very quickly once going starting. Reports began to appear that Trank was exhibiting erratic behaviour on set and that he was aloof and withdrawn. Now, while this kind of stuff can be fairly regular and a lot of directors have reputations for not being great with people (e.g. James Cameron) what was weirder were reports that Trank had rented a house near the set and it had been trashed by his dogs to the tune of $100,000 worth of damage. Then there were reshoots, rumours of studio interference, and last minute rewrites.

By the time the first teaser came out, the internet was abuzz with schadenfreude stories and worries. However, the first teaser wasn’t bad. It showed some cool snippets of action, and it looked as though Trank wasn’t going to follow the patterns of other superhero movies. It wasn’t a bright primary colour infused whirlwind; it was something a bit darker and ominous. It didn’t completely allay people’s fears, but it looked promising. The problem was that when the full-length trailer was released a few months later, it was mostly the same footage with some extra bits.

With all this going against it, it was no real surprise that when it was released, it landed in theatres with a thud. By the time it left cinemas it had made £168 million from a $155 million budget, and its Rotten Tomatoes score stands at a risible 9 percent. To put that in perspective, it is tied with Halle Berry’s Catwoman, and the only two superhero movies with lower scores are 1990’s Captain America and 1984’s Supergirl. To put it in even more perspective that means that Fantastic Four has a lower RT score than Howard the Duck, Batman & Robin, and Stallone’s Judge Dredd.

By the time the movie was released in Australia (where I live), it had faced a drubbing with critics and viewers, while Josh Trank had criticised the studio in a hastily deleted tweet and been removed from the plum role as director of a Star Wars spin-off story (rumoured to be the never-announced Boba Fett film). Due to all this, I never saw it upon its initial release. Now, a few years later, the dust has settled, Michael B. Jordan continues to ascend to superstardom, and its time for me to watch this movie and see how it fares away from the hype.

Fantastic Four (2015)

Yikes.

The most grievous cardinal sin that a bad movie can commit, in my opinion, is to be boring. A bad movie that is laughable or ridiculous or even offensive is better than spending 100 minutes waiting for something to happen before being given nothing except end credits and a feeling that you’ve just wasted nearly two hours of your life.

It hurts even more considering that the cast is strong and the source material is ripe for something, dare I say it, fantastic to be made from it. However, Fantastic Four is not that.

The movie goes out of its way to not give us what we’re expecting from a superhero movie but not in a good way. The first hour has only a single action short beat when the team go to the new dimension, so, up until they get their powers, all we see of the main characters is them working. It’s a lot of shots of typing, making notes, reading library books, and none of it makes for compelling cinema. It isn’t really used as a method of delivering character work as each character is quickly sketched out when they’re first introduced with no other apparent depth to them, so it feels like a lengthy montage instead of scenes building upon each other.

Once they do get their powers, though, we get an interesting set of scenes where Trank gives us the body horror of their predicament. The intensity of these scenes and the pitch darkness of them feels like they come from a richer, better movie in which superpowers aren’t necessarily a gift.

However, this is quickly squandered when we’re given a one year time jump, and instead of the usual superhero movie scenes in which characters learn to use their powers in fun trial and error sequences, we’re given Tim Blake Nelson’s bureaucrat character delivering a presentation to a bunch of faceless military men accompanied by video of Ben, Johnny, and Sue happily using the powers that were a horrifying curse in the preceding scenes.

This is especially jarring considering that the best parts of Trank’s debut feature, Chronicle, is the three heroes learning the extent of their powers. In Chronicle, it is a fun set of sequences of clumsy teens learning how to be supermen. In Fantastic Four it all happens off-screen, as though it would be too much fun for us to actually see it.

And all this doesn’t happen until we’re well past the halfway mark of the movie. I applaud anything that subverts the bedrock clichés of the superhero genre, but superpowers and epic action sequences are not the clichés I was thinking of.

It does do some things right. I think it is cast perfectly from top to bottom. However, this just makes the wasting of talent sting a little more. A glaring example is Toby Kebbell as Victor von Doom. Kebbell played one of the best cinematic villains ever as Koba in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, so to see him only appear as Doom for the final ten or so minutes of the film looking like a crash test dummy full of Christmas lights was shatteringly disappointing.

Final Thoughts

Trying to watch this without thinking about the fraught shoot is hard because of how glaring the reshoots and edits are. Kate Mara’s wig, Doom’s character, Grimm’s arc, the whole middle section and the time jump, and finale. It all feels as though it isn’t right and what we’re seeing is unintentional. It all feels like a student’s homework that they’ve done on the way to school and handed in, seconds before a deadline.

The first hour (and this is only an hour and forty minute movie) is mostly filler. Characters have one-word descriptors attached to them as the only characterisation they need (Johnny is reckless, Grimm is surly, Reed is ambitious, etc.) and things just seem to happen for no reason. For example, why is Ben Grimm invited along for the dimension jump? After the opening scenes he essentially disappears from the movie until he’s needed for the plot, then he reappears, gets turned into The Thing, and then we’re expected as viewers to have empathy for Reed and Ben’s story even though it has essentially occupied fifty seconds of the movie’s runtime.

And, most glaringly, why is Doom the villain? Before he gets left on Planet Zero he’s a bit of a dick, but no more than Johnny Storm is. But then, suddenly, once he has powers he is a tyrant who needs to be destroyed. All of this stuff feels like there is another hour of this movie lying around somewhere that gives these characters motivations, peppers in a few more action beats, and gives us something more than scenes of people doing admin work instead of performing incredible acts of derring-do.

Away from the hype and the Twitter hubbub and the behind the scenes stories, this is still a very bad movie. Hopefully, it hasn’t put the final nail in the coffin of perspective Fantastic Four adaptations, but it’s going to be a long time before anyone has another crack at it after this.

What are your thoughts on 2015’s Fantastic Four?