Fant4stic (2015)

I have mentioned countless times the amount of sequels, reboots, and remakes in modern cinema.  The majority of the movies that get wide release fall under one of those categories.  A couple weeks ago, I discussed them in the context of the Showgirls franchise.  This week’s movie it isn’t a sequel.  It’s the reboot of Fantastic Four, stylized as Fant4stic (which I will use), that is my point of interest.

Before I get into the movie itself, I want to give some background on how it came to be.  Some people who are reading this might not know all the information.  I don’t either.  I’m still going to detail the background as I know it anyway.

There is currently a Marvel Cinematic Universe that brings Marvel Comics to life in a live action, big screen way.  The different heroes interact and cross over with one another while still getting their own individual series.  Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and The Incredible Hulk share screen time and leave lasting effects upon each other’s film journeys.  That wasn’t always the case.  For some of the Marvel properties, that still isn’t the case.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Marvel was licensing the rights to their big name heroes in any attempt to make movies.  Sony took on Spider-Man, creating two franchises, with a third MCU connected franchise on the way.  Fox got a lot of the other properties.  They got Daredevil, X-Men, and The Fantastic Four.  These weren’t the only movies to come out of this licensing, but they’re all that we need to care about right now.

The important thing to remember about these licensing deals are that they are not permanent.  The properties will eventually revert back to Marvel and they will likely use them for their in house productions.  Look at Daredevil.  They got the Daredevil rights back and made a successful Netflix show with the character.  This almost happened with The Fantastic Four.

In 2005 and 2007, Fox released two Fantastic Four movies.  They were semi-successful, but nobody took them seriously or even really respected them.  The franchise died following the second movie.  But as per the licensing agreement, Fox has to produce a Fantastic Four movie every few years or else they will lose the rights.  The Josh Trank helmed Fant4stic is just the movie to hold the studio over and keep the rights.

Fant4stic was a full reboot of the movie franchise with a new cast and a new story.  Reed Richards (Miles Teller) was a science smart college student who figured out how to teleport things with his best friend Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell).  He was discovered by Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey) and his adopted daughter Susan Storm (Kate Mara), who brought him into their science school.  Reed was paired with Victor von Doom (Toby Kebbell) to build a teleporter that could send people to another dimension.  Also working on the machine was Franklin’s son and Susan’s brother Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan).  When a teleportation experiment went wrong, the team found out that they had new superpowers.

That sounds like a fairly simple story, and a slight variation on the origin that most people already know.  Instead of being astronauts who get radiated in space, they were modern scientists who got radiated in a teleportation experiment accident.  This was a decent enough update to not make it feel like the same origin being shown for the second time in a decade.

There were a few other changes that worked in the movie’s favour.  The computer generated effects for Ben Grimm once he became The Thing were well done.  This was the first time that the character wasn’t a prosthetic costume in a movie.  His design may not have been perfect, but for the grounded style of the movie, he looked realistic.  Reed’s stretchy body also looked good.  Minus the few instances where it looked cartoony, he never felt out of place in the world.  Susan and Johnny also had good effects present for their powers, though the character design of burning Johnny was pretty bad.  The effects throughout were solid.

The performances were also good.  Whatever you might think of the quality of Josh Trank’s two movies, it is hard to deny that he gets good performances out of his actors.  Chronicle was as good as it was because of the three lead performances.  Fant4stic had a good group of core actors turning in some solid performances, though not the best in any of their careers.  If there was one part of the movie that rose above the rest, it was the performances.

Yet none of this held Fant4stic together.  The movie was a mess.  Josh Trank admitted as much less than a day before the movie released when he went onto Twitter and said, “A year ago I had a fantastic version of this.  And it would've received great reviews.  You'll probably never see it.  That's reality though.”  He deleted the message soon after posting it, but the damage had been done.  People saw what he said.  We all knew he was disappointed in the final product.

Many reasons have been hypothesized over why Trank thought that Fant4stic wasn’t his vision and wasn’t good.  They all come down to his relationship with the studio and how the studio influenced movie.  I’ve looked into a few of these things, though not enough to be definitive.  What I found was that Josh Trank had a very large script that got substantially changed in rewrites.  The movie that came out wasn’t what Trank had written, but rather what Simon Kinberg had rewritten.

I also saw some people claim that the movie was supposed to be nearly two and a half hours long.  That’s an hour’s worth of movie that was cut from final version.  This tidbit makes more sense when you hear that the first two thirds of the movie were originally meant as the first act.  The characters should be getting their powers at the end of the first act, not two thirds of the way through the movie.  Messing with the timing like that is bad storytelling.  It makes most of the movie drag on, and the end of the movie feel rushed.  The pacing is thrown off.

The other major claim to why Josh Trank wasn’t happy with the final cut was the reshoots and re-editing that were done by the studio.  The re-editing moved some things around in the movie so that they were out of order.  It also removed key moments.  But the reshoots were even worse and more glaring.  As Josh Trank probably knew upon seeing the final cut, there were big inconsistencies between the original footage and the reshoot footage.  The most notable was the wig that Kate Mara wore when she came back to film extra scenes.  Her hair in the reshoots was more blonde, and thicker than in the other scenes.

However, Josh Trank can likely be as much to blame as the studio when it comes to the failure of Fant4stic.  There are many rumours about his behaviour during the production.  Though the problems outlined above might have been due to studio interference, they may have been consequences of the erratic behaviour of Josh Trank.

Off of the set, Josh Trank caused damage to the house in which he was staying.  He brought his small dogs with him when they were shooting.  The dogs would be left in the house while Trank was on set.  During the production of Fant4stic, over $100,000 damage was done to the property by the dogs.  This was a sign of the disrespect that Trank had for other people that would be furthered by reports of his behaviour on set.

There were no good relationships between the director and his cast or crew.  When it came to the crew and production staff working on Fant4stic, Trank remained isolated and never gave a clear, concise description of what he wanted.  The studio did not appreciate his lack of clarity, which led to the recutting and reshooting issues.  Trank had a vision that he wasn’t sharing, so the people surrounding him did not know how to translate it to the screen.  If he had been communicative in a better way, he might have been able to salvage what ended up being a mess.

The clashes that Josh Trank had with his cast are as much a bad sign as his problems with the crew.  It is no secret that Trank wanted another actress to play Susan Storm.  Kate Mara was the studio’s choice.  She was pushed on him.  He treated her poorly on set because she was not his choice.  He was acting like a child who had his toy taken away.  Not even his favourite toy.  Just one of the many.  Trank also has issues with Miles Teller, at one point coming to near fisticuffs.  Having disputes this heated between cast and director can cause major problems in the production of a movie.  It can lead to performances that are worse than they need to be.

The combination of director and studio brought Fant4stic down from within.  The movie isn’t bad because of our bandwagon society.  This isn’t a new Adam Sandler movie.  Fant4stic was a failure because the people involved in making it couldn’t work together and in trying to fix the other’s problems, they created a jumbled mess.

I’m not as set against Fant4stic as other people.  Though there are some major issues, there are still some interesting things within it.  Like I’ve said, the acting is solid and the effects tend to look good (though the designs are sometimes garbage).  They tried to take the characters in a different direction and it would have worked if not for the dysfunction behind the scenes.  There is promise in what’s there, but that’s not enough to salvage the bad movie.

Now it’s time for some notes to round out this whole thing:

• Fant4stic was suggested by @judgmentalnerd.
• John L. Armijo was in Fant4stic.  He was also in Freelancers, way back near the beginning of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.
• Fant4stic featured Dina Morrone, making a return to the Sunday “Bad” Movies after being in Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor.
• Marco St. John made a second Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance after already being in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning.
• Finally, Chet Hanks had a role in Fant4stic.  He was previously in Bratz: The Movie.
• You probably disagree with my opinion of Fant4stic, or you may already know all of the stuff I’ve written about.  You can use the comments to talk all about this post.
• The comments are also a good place to suggest movies for future Sunday “Bad” Movies installments.  If not there, you can try my Twitter timeline.
• I’ve been snapchatting clips from the movies I watch, many of them being bad movies.  If you would like to share in the clips, find me.  I’m jurassicgriffin on snapchat.
• Next week’s movie will be a trip to the 1990s with Cabin Boy.  The movie starred none other than Chris Elliott.  There are some interesting people in there, and I’m excited to either laugh or feel pain from how unfunny it is.  I don’t know what experience I will have, but I’ll let you know in a week.  Bye!