The Untastic Four or What went wrong with Fant4stic (Part One)

Unless you live under a rock, you know that Fant4stic, the latest attempt for Fox to keep the rights to the Fantastic 4, is a giant bomb.

There's a lot of fairly universal complaints, and a lot of finger pointing in terms of who messed up what. Director Josh Trank is pointing at Fox, with some anonymous inside sources supporting this argument in part. The studio appears to be pointing at Josh Trank, since it's well publicized that they mandated a large amount of reshooting and the involvement of Mathew Vaughn (who made such amazing comic book films as X-Men: First Class, Kick-Ass, and Kingsman).

I think there's enough evidence on the table to lay some blame, and it creates a pretty clear image of why the movie is bad. So, lets get into it.

A FILM WITHOUT STRUCTURE

Most people who have done any sort of creative writing will tell you that one of the primary rules is the three act structure. It breaks a story into three main "acts" which equate to beginning, middle, and end. These acts can be broken further into sequences. As a rule of thumb, most movies have 8.

 

Now, not every movie will follow this structure. Some moves don't have to. If a movie is particularly artsy, or it's a film where we're supposed to be off balance about events, then it can pay to throw this out the window. Chris Nolan's film Memento ignored this type of structure to great affect, starting the movie at the beginning and the end and drawing us toward the middle. 

However, unless you are carefully crafting a story in which you are specifically ignoring this rule in favor of a greater pay off, it pays to keep your structure in mind. 

Fant4stic, however has one of two structure problems, and there's room for debate as to which it actually is. Either A) Fant4stic completely lacks a Second Act; or B) Fant4stic has an hour long First Act,  a 10 minute long Second Act, and a 20 minute long Third Act.

Let me explain for those who haven't seen the movie. 

The movie begins with 5th grade Reed Richards and Ben Grimm building a teleporter. Fast forward to 11th grade Reed and Ben demonstrating same at the high school science fair. Enter Dr. Storm who recruits Reed (but not Ben for some unknown reason) into his super science institute. We forget about Ben, while Reed, Johnny Storm and Victor Von Doom build a bigger teleporter. There's a tiny bit of Reed flirting with Sue, and a couple moments of Doom jealousy, but that's about it. Then Reed drunk dials Ben and asks him to come to another dimension, as they decide to test the machine themselves. A 5 minute CG sequence later and people have powers. 

That's fine. Sounds like a reasonable first act to a sci-fi superhero origin story (except the drunk dial part, but I'll get to that later). Except here's the problem: 

This takes an hour.

Yeah, that means for more or less 60 minutes, we're stuck in this room.

Reed installed the mirrors because he likes to watch himself while he's teleporting

Now, the question could be made "What if getting their powers isn't the end of act one?" And that's perfectly true, it's possible that them getting their powers isn't the end of Act One, except there's literally nothing else in the film which could be the end of Act One. Quite literally there is nothing before their trip to the other dimension which sets them on the path of the story. Nothing begins to drive them toward the end. It's literally just a collection of random moments of them talking and building the machine. No one makes any choices.

Even if the choice to go into the machine were the end of Act One, there's such a tremendous pause after it, that it feels like a conclusion instead of just an action beat.

The other reason that this is a problem is that there are no dynamic changes in the story which could indicate a shift marking the end of Act One between the characters. Other than Ben being forgotten for 40 or so minutes, everyone just sort of putters along without confrontation. They're not exactly friends, but they act like co-workers in an sort of office (or lab), and that's fine, but makes for problems later.

Now, once they get their powers (and Doom is forgotten in either the Negative Zone or Planet Zero, it can't make up it's mind if its a dimension or a planet... so lets just call it "Planet Zone" from here on out), they get captured by the military and taken to Area 57 (yeah, they went there) a top secret base that officially doesn't exist. We get what may be the only interesting section of the film, where Reed, Johnny, Sue and Ben are treated like they're forgotten threads from John Carpenters The Fly. It's creepy body horror that's more or less effective despite some laughable special effects. Anyway, Reed promptly breaks out and escapes.

Now, is the escape Act One, or Act Two?

Hold on. So, then we flash to One Year Later (black screen white letters), Ben is now a military weapon, Johnny is training to become one, and Sue is... sort of training... I guess.... she can hold her breath real good, anyway. For no reason, they finally decide to have Sue figure out where Reed is, through handwavium based pattern recognition. They capture him and convince him to help them rebuild the machine.

He does this and the guys who were supposed to use the teleporter the first time go Planet Zone and find Victor Von Doom, who now looks like a crash test dummy.

Buckle Up for Glowing Safety

End of Act Two. If it was Act Two.


Here's the problem.

The second Act of a story is supposed to be about raising the stakes. We never get that here.

Reed escapes, claiming that he wants to cure their "mutations" (he never uses that word, only "fix us"), but there's no indication of him actually doing that. We have no established enemy, except maybe the military, and they while they seem to want to profit off Ben, Sue and Johnny, they at least provide the last 2 with a means to control their powers (something Reed similarly cobbles together, off screen, without science equipment).

It's also supposed to build out the characters introduced in Act One. But that doesn't happen here either. We get no more of Ben or Sue or Johnny than in Act One. They just sort of mill about.

Act Two is also supposed to end with the moment of "no return". That doesn't happen here either.

I'd argue that Act Two is Reeds escape and capture, merely because it's a tonal and narrative shift from the first section of the film. However, as it's only a 10 minute diversion, it's easy to argue that it's just a piece of Act One.

Part of why it's so hard to define is that we have no antagonist. The military is as much working for the team as they are keeping it prisoner. If anything, the antagonist, at this point, is Reed because he gets everyone into this mess and then runs away, abandoning his alleged Best Friend (who he forgot about for, probably, months while building the machine). But neither one learns anything in this section of the film, and ultimately nobody makes an end of Act Two decision.

Regardless, this is when the movie shifts to Act Three (whether or not we had an Act Two). The recovered Victor Von Doom and his disappearing/reappearing cape go all Scanners on Area 57, and turn on the teleporter to take him back to Planet Zone. Which apparently creates a Black Hole (which makes no goddamn sense because a black hole is not a wormhole) and Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben have to go stop him.

That's one big bug zapper. Somebody call Ant-Man.

 Which, they do. In 10ish minutes or so.

All told, this section takes up about 15 minutes of the film, and there's a 5 minute tag on the end. Where they outright refuse to say the words "Fantastic Four".

Okay, we may or may not have an Act Two, and Act One lasts at least an hour. And this is a hour and forty minute film.

See the problem?

This is a pretty typical Hollywood breakdown. You see how they have all the Act Breaks and Act lengths broken down by pages? In Hollywood, every script page equals about a minute of movie time.

If the Act One Turning Point in Fant4stic is Reed deciding to use the teleporter on himself, then it happened 20 pages after it should have. Meaning, it happened closer to what should have been the middle of the film. While there's definitely some elasticity in terms of where marks fall (for example the above demonstrates that Act One and Three should each be half as long as Act Two, but some filmmakers like Spielberg make each Act about the same length) that's a huge time difference.

Now, assuming that Josh Trank's original vision is more or less in tact for the first chunk of the movie (which many reviewers have suggested) then Trank's original screenplay was either extremely and unnecessarily front loaded, or he intended the movie to be a three hour epic. Either way, while many have cited this first as as the strongest part in the movie, it leaves you with a large chunk of the film without any progression in terms of conflict, character or theme.

Additionally the Third Act (which many believe to be pure Fox tampering) is extremely rushed. People make decisions that aren't earned at all, and our villain is defeated without much struggle in a climax that feels like a video game. Moreover, it's entirely disconnected from what we've seen before, and isn't built two by a strong Act Two.

This is a movie that seems to be about Team Work (capital letters), that never gives us a chance to see that happen. Everybody works together in Act One. Then everybody gets powers and Reed runs away. Once Reed comes back, everyone listens to him as soon as they have to do a thing.

But not once do these people feel like a team. We never see them bond. We never see them heal the wounds Reeds departure allegedly inflicted (Ben pointedly tells him they're no longer friends). Hell, we never even see Ben and Sue on screen together other than at the Science Fair scene, the very beginning, and the very end of the film. Some team building.

If the film had had a genuine Act Two that was more than ten minutes long and had some focus on doing the things Second Acts do (e.g. build character, raise the stakes, flesh out relationships) it could have done these things. Instead Act Two seems content to just split people up and have them focus on different things that don't impact the story in any way, before putting them back together with no more than a shrug from anybody.

Because the movie has no structure, it just meandered around. Sure, the Third Act could be blamed on Fox, but the fact that Act One is an hour and is the most cohesive part of the film clearly points back to a failure of Josh Trank to plot out his movie. No amount of rumors of Fox removing major action scenes can explain a movie where Act One is an hour long. Moreover, removing action beats shouldn't have stopped the movie from spending time focusing on its characters. If you only have enough money for one major action sequence, then use it wisely (look at Mission Impossible V, it's got one major action beat and it's a doozy, the rest of the action pieces are fairly minor).

So, the evidence that's on the screen from the screenplay indicates that both Trank and Fox are pretty much equally to blame for the movie...

But there's more to whats wrong than just structure...

To be continued in part two.