I don't know how long we have left. I know we all harbour secret fantasies about living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland because according to the 80s, it's going to be some sort of glorious tech noir riot. It'll also give me an excuse to crack out the American Football shoulder pads again now I've retired and I might even go back to sporting a mohawk. Joking aside, with World War III imminent because Donald Trump and Kim Jong Under are apparently really desperate to compare cock length and piss stream strength, everything all seems sort of trivial at the moment. Despair not just yet though folks, even though we still have Brexit to look forward to and the economic shenanigans that's going to inevitably throw up, there will still always be awful movies to watch and rant about. It's the simple things, isn't it?
So I don't know whether I was feeling particularly nihilistic over the weekend or my natural resistance to horrible Sci-fi was just at an unusual ebb, but I found myself watching The Fantastic Four. 15 Internet Points awarded for most ironic movie title ever.
There was a massive fuss over this movie when it was released and not for any even remotely good reasons. It was trashed from the get-go for literally everything from concept to script to design to direction right down to the press embargo that meant no reviews were allowed until the movie hit theatres. I'm patently not part of the all-consuming Hollywood cash-generation machine, but even I smell a rat if you bar critics from reviewing the film before public screenings. It also doesn't help when your director disowns the whole thing and starts bad mouthing it to anyone who'll listen. There was also the small issue of casting which we'll come back to later. The burning question then; is it really as bad as everyone said it was?
Yes, yes it is.
Let's ignore the fact that this is the third pop at this franchise for the time being; the first two were relatively palatable hyper-technicolour attempts at Summer blockbusters which missed the mark considerably but were kitschy enough to be passable. Obviously the studio saw the success Marvel was having and probably had a sneaky glance at Christopher Nolan's Batman and decided dark, edgy and gritty was the was to go. I would probably go with bleak if I'm honest. Everybody in this movie is miserable from moment one. Nobody seems to be having any fun whatsoever, before or after their pivotal transformations. Reed Richards is a miserable bullied failure, Ben Grimm is just miserable, I assume because he hangs out with Reed and his own family are dicks, Sue Storm might be miserable but it's difficult to tell when the character has all the charm and emotional range of a plank and Johnny Storm is sad because he crashed his car and has to work for his Dad to pay for it. Victor Von Doom is a miserable conspiracy theorist type who gets a haircut to show he's a team player now. We get it; being asked to portray a teenager when you're already in your late twenties/early thirties is probably a touch demeaning and not as much fun as it sounds. This is nothing new though, scriptwriters have been confusing mid-level depression with gritty realism for years, it's almost not even a surprise any longer. The real issue with this movie is actually much more simple. For a good three quarters of the run time there is no bad guy, even if that might sound like a wise choice after the first attempt at Doom or the horribly off-mark gas cloud that was Galactus.
Now, obviously those of you even remotely familiar with either the comics or earlier movie attempts will know Dr. Doom is the bad guy here. Which will probably lead you into a bit of a double take when he's sucked into an energy beam, presumably vapourised and completely forgotten about about half an hour in. He doesn't resurface until there's about 20 minutes left and the ensuing mad rush to cram all that 'saving the world' stuff you've been waiting for feels like it ought to have the Benny Hill theme running on a loop till the end. Quite aside from the desperate panic you can sense from the editor to try and put a fork in it before his weekend starts, the resurgent Doom is a travesty. Comic book Doom is basically an evil cross between Iron Man and Doctor Strange. This Doom is effectively Tetsuo from Akira (which leads me to believe Josh Trank has a bit of a thing for Akira if you take into account Chronicles) who can pulp your skull with the power of his mind unless, inexplicably, you happen to be one of our fearless protagonists. Why make him this overpowered if you're just going to Nerf him in the final fight scenes? Nerf him so badly in fact, it takes about 5 on-screen minutes for the Fantastic Four to go from “we can't beat him, he's too strong" to devising and perfectly executing a team strategy and destroying the now de rigeur beam of light into the sky apocalypse scenario. It took Big Hero 6 an entire film to do that and that was a way better movie.
It's really obvious that the movie we saw was not the movie that was intended for us to see. Trank himself was talking about making a body horror movie that the studio obviously panicked over and stepped directly in. It felt like it was supposed to be over the 2 hour mark and got sliced to pieces, except they took out all the exciting cool bits and left us with nothing but exposition and effects shots.
Ironically, the much talked about casting choices made exactly no difference to the end result. Was there a good reason in the script to have Johnny Storm cast as a black actor when his sister Sue was white? Not really, no. Would it have been too much of a stretch to find a capable black actress to play Sue Storm and maintain the continuity that way? Apparently so, but it really shouldn't have been. Nerds are a notoriously fickle lot and they might even be inherently a bit sexist, a bit racist and a bit obnoxious when it comes to their favourites, but I think it's fair to say the studio could have handled that part of things way better. I'm not saying it was a pure diversity hire; he's a good actor and did a half decent job with a sub-par script. Just hire a black actress as well for Christ's sake, it isn't hard.
Sadly, we will never see what the director originally had planned, but mercifully it's really unlikely we'll have to go through the trauma of a sequel. Maybe it's time to let those rights revert to Marvel/Disney and they can start planning for an actual Fantastic Four in phase 3.
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