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.
- 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!
