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

Okay, so I've discussed the structural problems with Fant4stic, and they're pretty big. In fact, they're probably responsible for 60% of what's making this movie so reviled. However, structure's not the only problem.

CHARTERS IN THE LOOSEST SENSE OF THE WORD

As I said before, Act One of Fant4stic takes up about an hour (plus or minute depending on where you think it ends). During that hour, we are introduced to our main 4 protagonists (Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben), our eventual antagonist (Victor Von Doom), and our two main supporting players (Franklin Storm and Harvey Elder/Allen). We have a solid uninterrupted hour with these folks before super powers come into play. An hour in which to build these characters. That's an obscene amount of time for a movie that's not a character piece (I'm looking at you There Will Be Blood).

And yet, it means absolutely nothing. You can list on one hand the things you know about these characters before they get powers.

Reed: Smart. Socially awkward. Likes 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Ben: Abusive childhood. Kind of wishes he were as smart as Reed.
Sue: Good at patterns. Likes Portishead. Adopted.
Johnny: Doesn't like authority. Likes street racing. Supposedly good at building things.
Victor: Has a crush on Sue. Said to be lonely.

And, that's about it. We spend an hour with these people, and we end up knowing less about the than I might learn about someone by chatting with them in line at Chipotle.

Or at the counter of a Denny's in the Negative Zone

So where did all that time go?

It's really kind of a mystery. For example, we get a fairly long scene with Reed in a library with Sue where we learn both that she likes Portishead and that he likes 20,000 Leagues. But these aren't so much character moments as they are foreshadowing to a lazy sequence in Act Two where Sue tracks down Reed.

Similarly, we have a long scene of Dr. Richards trying to convince Von Doom to come back and work with him where we learn nothing other than that Von Doom likes Sue. Based on what we see of her, though, it's kind of hard to understand why. Moreover, Von Doom is pretty social with the rest of the team so the later statements about him being lonely and hating humanity clash pretty starkly with this fairly charismatic guy from Act One.

Moreover, Ben flat out disappears for about 40 minutes. He's with Reed in school, and then moves him into the Baxter Building, but then vanishes until it's time for them to go into the machine and get their powers. We don't ever see him bond with Reed, so when he later tells Reed that they're not friends, we can only shrug and say "okay".

Similarly, we're told that Johnny can build anything. Fine. But the only thing we actually see him build is a Toyota that breaks down in the middle of a street race. So, what can Johnny really build? Also, we get a glimpse of possible tension between Johnny and Sue, with her being an adopted genius, but then it's just gone... never to be mentioned again. So... was it actually there?

The fact that we only get pencil sketches in an hour of character building only serves to demonstrate how unfocused the movie is. Did we really need a Johnny Street racing scene? Did we really need the monkey scene? We get nothing from them. Not one thing.

They don't even serve to contrast the characters after they get powers. Nobody seems fazed by them. Then again, we cut away for a year, so we miss the entirety of them adjusting to their new lives. If we're not going to see a contrast, why focus on them so much before they get powers?

He even looks bored filming it...

This sort of leads me back to my theory from the last post. Did Josh Trank (above) intend this to be a 3 hour film? It's entirely possible. However, even if it were a 3 hour film, we don't have enough here to contrast against in portions that didn't make it into the final film. 

Reed is kind of a dick before he gets powers. He's kind of a dick afterward. Sue is kind of just there before, and again after. Johnny is kind of just angry before, and he's kind of just angry afterward. Doom is a decent guy before, and he's the maniac from Scanners afterward.... wait... what...

This brings us back to a major problem. As the movie stands now, Doom vanishes until Act Three. And when he does show up, he's gone completely off the rails. Moreover, he's gone off the rails for no reason. He claims he's lonely and that humanity is bad. 

But this all came from nowhere. 

He is literally just bad for the sake of the movie needing a bad guy (Like Nick Nolte in Hulk). It could be claimed that this boils down to Fox meddling, but there's no room for him to have shown up before hand. Unless Trank had planned a big Act Two piece in the Negative Zone, there was no bringing Doom back before the beginning of Act Three, and no other way of exploring his motives.

If he was evil before he went to the Negative Zone, we never saw it. If the dimension made him crazy, we never saw it. If he's... we never saw it. 

Similarly, there's no explanation as to why Reed runs away, abandoning his friends. He has no lab. No second teleporter. No place allies. There's literally nothing he can do to fix them outside of the military complex, but he runs and abandons his only friend. And then just sort of hangs out in a tool shed for a year. Why? We don't know, we never see it. We never get an answer. He does it because it allows for there to be a "fight" between him and Thing.

The characters are literally just place holders moving from scene to scene and doing things because they need to. When asked why Reed decided to run away from his friends, the answer Miles Teller could be forced to give would be "it said so in the script".

Apparently Fox jettisoned the 5th member of the team, Super Chicken

I'll touch on this a bit more in a bit, though

SUPERHERO IS NOT A DIRTY WORD

Fun fact 1: Marvel and DC Comics own a shared trademark on the word "superhero".

Fun fact 2: You'd never know that watching Fant4stic. 

There's been a teeter-totter trend in movies since Richard Donner's Superman. Do you embrace your superhero with all his vibrant glory, or do you reject it and try to ignore the 4-color history of your source material?

In terms of the Fantastic Four, clearly Roger Corman embraced this lineage, camp and all. Tim Story waved hello to it, though he clearly tried to shrug off the camp and more outlandish elements (which backfired terribly in the form of Galactus). Both resulted in movies that at least felt like a comic book film.

Trank's take on the Fantastic Four does everything in it's power to pretend this isn't based on a comic book, right down to avoiding saying the words "Fantastic Four". The movie skirts around them in it's final scene, and the name is never said. We never get blue costumes. We never get crazy super science gadgets. We never get a villain who is a dictator, a mad scientist AND a sorcerer. 

Or has a sweet hidden base like this

Instead we get a rather droll tale about some people who didn't see The Fly and decide to build a teleporter. They build it, it gives them powers and then they fight the guy they lost on their mission. That's it.

That's not to say that you can't do a dark Fantastic Four story. Certainly you can. Just like you can do Burton's Batman, Shumacher's Batman & Robin, and Nolan's Dark Knight all about the same character. Except, none of those movies completely cut out the core of what they were about in order to avoid being a "comic book movie". Every single one was about a guy who used his billions of dollars to make gadgets in order to parade around as a flying rodent and punch colorful psychopaths in the face. Camp varied. Style varied more. But they all winked a bit at the audience and said "this is our world".

Fant4stic refuses to wink. It would rather make no sense than wink. 

We've now had 7 years of Marvel films. Films where we no longer question costumes. Where we accept names like "Ant-Man". Where we accept flying aircraft carriers.We've also had The Dark Knight, where we had a Joker who required no chemical bath, and a Two-Face that didn't have MPD. 

Both of these worlds are okay. But both of these words understood they were building a story based on a comic book. 

Fant4stic tries it's hardest to ignore its history. Every single hint of the comics is gone, and when it hits a road bump that it can't explain without referring to a comic book sounding idea, it doesn't explain it at all. This is why Doom's powers seem arbitrary, and his motivation is entirely lacking. Well, we can't explain it without it seeming like a comic book film, so we won't try. 

How could the man who made Chronicle made a movie that's so anti-comic book?

Well, according to Chronicle's screenwriter Max Landis (yeah, big red flag, Trank didn't write the movie that got him the Fant4stic writing job), Chronicle wasn't even a superhero movie, it just used some of the tropes. (around the 7 minute mark)

So, you have a director who'd done a movie that most viewed as a Superhero movie, but during the production it wasn't viewed as a Superhero movie. And when he comes on board to write and direct this film, he immediately instructs his cast and crew not to read the source material (comic books) and that he intends to take this fantastic material and ground it. 

It's pretty clear that Josh Trank didn't have any interest in making a Superhero film, and probably shouldn't have come onto this project if that sort of thing didn't interest him, and it's pretty clear that it didn't. It takes an hour for anyone to get powers. They barely use their powers. And we never even get a superhero name. No Human Torch. No Mr. Fantastic. No Invisible Woman. No Thing. And worst of all, no Fantastic Four. 

This is sort of like the 1989 Punisher. Sure, he's Frank Castle. Sure organized crime kills his family. But there's no skull. There's no insane kills. It's just another Dolph Lundgren movie that happens to be loosely based on a comic book. 

If Trank didn't want to make a comic book film, then why not film an original idea similar to the Fantastic Four that fit more snugly into the genre's he actually wanted to dabble in, and let Fox hire the director of Sharknado 3 to make another low budget quickie in order to keep the rights. 

If the film had maintained any sense of the wonder and fun of the comics, it's possible it would have been salvageable to the audience. Even Green Lantern opened better and got stronger reviews than Fant4stic, and it's generally agreed upon rubbish. But for many people, it was fun rubbish. 

Remember the scene from Iron Man with Tony having fun in the suit, or Clark flying for the first time in Man of Steel? Remember Rocket Raccoon asking for the guys leg or Bruce saying he'd tell the world Batman was Alfred's idea? You will find none of that here. Because superhero movies are movies about people with powers who enjoy those powers and ultimately save the day.

Fant4stic isn't fun at all. It's angsty, and dour and boring. No one enjoys their powers. No one chooses to save the day. The entire film tries to take itself seriously in its first hour, but had nothing serious to say. In its last 40 minutes, it plows through bad effects and bad story with a serious expression. It simply won't let the audience have fun with it, because having fun would mean being a superhero film. 

This movie thinks its dark science fiction. Never mind that it's science makes no sense and is full of holes. Every superhero trope is gone. Replaced with bad science fiction horror tropes. And it simply doesn't work. It's also not the movie anybody asked for, or anybody wanted to see. 

There seems to be only one hope for getting the Fantastic Four movie people seem to want. And it means wearing the word Superhero on it's sleeve. It means jokes. It means action. And it means origins in 30 minutes or less. 

Frankly, it means Marvel.

Hey, it worked for Spidey